Charlie Foxtrot
A friend and I foolishly decided we wanted to visit the newly reopened California Academy of Sciences yesterday. We drove up to the city and found an enormous traffic clusterfuck at Golden Gate Park. A museum parking attendant told us they were expecting thirty to forty thousand visitors, and that we should park down at the ocean and take a shuttle back.
We found a parking place only about a mile away, and after a brisk walk we were at the museum right at opening time. We were expecting a long line, and were willing to wait an hour at most, but what we found was beyond belief. It took us almost 15 minutes to walk to the end of the line, which had stretched all the way around the very large block back to the museum itself. We decided we had better things to do than wait all day in line, so we visited the very cool (in both senses of the word) and uncrowded Arboretum instead.
The way I'd explain the insanity here to my friends in Vermont is to note that the population of San Francisco is about the same as all of Vermont, and the number of people trying to get into the museum was about the same as the population of Vermont's largest city, Burlington.