Good God, October Was A Bad Month (New Rolls)

Hello! Sorry for the delayed posting. October 2025 takes the new record for the worst month of my life, and I am deeply thankful it has ended. I was plagued with health issues (most of which seem to be resolving, thank heavens, because I was genuinely pretty disabled for a good chunk of the month), my mom died and I went home for the first time in years to attend her funeral, I moved apartments, I failed to fix a car that I was relying on getting fixed, I kept getting strep throat, etc. I might write about it more extensively at some point, but truthfully, it was just too painful and too overwhelming to figure out what narrative could possibly be drawn from it just yet.

Anyway, it's over. I'm still here. Score one for me over the cruel whims of Fate.

To make up for my prolonged absence, here are some Fujica GW690i-shot rolls from my trip to San Francisco roughly two months ago. I went for four days to ride the vintage SF Muni equipment during their special historic streetcars/buses event, but I got insanely, incredibly sick about halfway through the trip and never took the rolls in for development.

Despite getting sick and cutting my fun short, there's a lot of good shots, helped largely by the fact that vintage streetcars are one of the prettiest objects in the world.

Ironically, a lot of the best stuff are photos of PCC cars, which you can see basically any time in the city... but they are so gorgeous in the uniquely perfect light of the Bay that I couldn't really help myself from shooting them.

We didn't get a chance to ride everything, as I got sick on the second day of riding. But the orange car parked third in line here, a Milanese "Peter Witt" streetcar...

with its charmingly retro wood-finished interior (and Italian signage - spot the "uscita" for "exit" over the center door!)...

had incredible views out the rear (as seen here - that's a passenger poking out the back!) and was our ride for the put-in at the end of the day all the way up the F line, through the Castro, to the car barn.

This is the final intersection of the put-in route, which we caught with absolutely magical evening light...

and this is the barn itself. I shot these (plus the featured image at the top of the post) through the chain-link fence (with the rangefinder totally obstructed!) but they came out basically perfectly, with the last sun of the day proving to be just enough for Portra 160.

In addition to the streetcar fleet, SF Muni also has an extensive fleet of vintage buses. I deeply enjoyed riding the vintage Mack in the foreground here, as the slide-up windows and cushy seats provided one of the most viscerally pleasant rides I've ever had.

This shot is extra enjoyable as a transit nerd, not just because the New Look bus is so striking, but because you can spot the "Boat Tram" behind it.

This fun shot was taken aboard the recently-restored Faegol-Twin Coach as we drove down Embarcadero and passed by a (modern) Muni streetcar. The bus itself was fascinating - it is a twin-engined monocoque bus that was intended to replace the SF cable cars, but extensive operational issues (caused by having two engines to sync up continuously!) kept them from widespread usage.

Shooting a moving vehicle out of a moving vehicle with a medium format rangefinder is also kind of a flex, which is part of why I did this.

Other highlights of the trip included a rare tour of the 16th St Station, once one of the largest hubs of rail traffic on the West Coast (seen in the background of this image)...

that of course now sits entirely empty. (There are at least plans to save the building and use it as something; it is a national historic landmark).

No Bay Area trip is complete without extensively riding BART, of course.

Or a ferry.

I will hopefully have my Flickr fully updated soon, and I'm still trying to get some videos made which I'll share here ASAP. I appreciate all of your patience immensely; it has been a very long past month and I'm really glad things are settling down a little bit. I hope this signals a new era of my life where everything sucks less, lmao.

Thanks so much! Vicki <3