1. San Francisco: Wild Side WestSan Francisco Wild Side West Just because you can rent a scooter doesn''t mean you should rent a scooter. I had been seeing them in the Mission all morning--electric blue mopeds zipping past, two young people giggling on them, the person on the back holding a frantically sloshing iced coffee in one hand. "I think those are rentals," I said, pointing at another one going by up the hill, this time ridden by twinks in matching checkered Vans slip-ons. "No," Davin said. "They can''t be." "I''m gonna look it up, maybe they''re not stupid expensive?" We sat down on the steps of a pink-and-lavender house and checked on our phones. They were rental scooters, you could totally rent them; there was one parked right in front of us, and.

wow, they were a lot cheaper than Uber or Lyft. Cheap was important; Davin and I were just coming off breakfast at Tartine (which is a famous bakery and which I''d of course never heard of, because I have a cold-shoulder dress I still think is kind of cute in the year of our lord 2023) and this bakery breakfast had been forty-three dollars!! For food you eat out of waxed paper! Davin and I were quickly remembering that that''s how everything is in San Francisco: whatever it is, it''s just going to cost so much more than you think it will. After studying the glass case at Tartine, we''d ordered two croissants, one bite-size caramelized Bundt cake, one little tart with glossy lemon cream, and one small cold brew. At the register, Davin had been so startled by the price that he had coughed into his mask while handing over his credit card. "Here you go," he croaked at the barista, turning to bug his eyes at me. Forty-three dollars will buy you a ten-acre farm in Minnesota. The barista passed me our cold brew over the counter. It was in a clear, biodegradable plastic cup, with a kind of mouth opening I had never seen before.

It was like a sippy cup that you flipped back the top on. It felt incredible when you put your mouth on it to drink--so smooth, much better than a straw. It was what I imagine sucking on a dolphin''s dorsal fin would feel like. Davin and I were both impressed. We kept taking tiny sips as we walked, just to feel the mouth of the cup. "Ooh," we said each time, smacking our lips. "Wow." And honestly? That''s one of the nicest things about having moved to the middle of nowhere.

Everything in big cities impresses me so much now. It''s impossible to be jaded. In my real life, I live in a cornfield, but that weekend, I was standing on a busy street, holding cold brew trapped in a container designed to melt into the earth . We were decades behind this shit at home! I don''t really live in a cornfield. I just live surrounded by them. Northfield, Minnesota, where Davin and I now live, is a town of twenty thousand people that''s forty-five minutes south of Minneapolis and St. Paul. It''s home to the headquarters of Malt-O-Meal, the makers of those giant bags of off-brand cereal you see piled in wire bins at the grocery store.

You know--Toasty O''s instead of Cheerios; Marshmallow Mateys instead of Lucky Charms--knockoff cereal that tastes exactly like the name-brand kind but is half the price and comes in "body pillow size" instead of "family size." Northfield is also home to two private liberal colleges, Carleton and St. Olaf, which means that the town is a little progressive bubble encircled by Trump country for at least twenty miles in every direction. The colleges also mean that, for nine months of the year, there are slouches of spoiled teenage girls in ripped jeans perpetually standing in front of the register at my favorite coffee shop downtown. They all want a matcha latte with oat milk, even though there is clearly only one person making drinks and that shit needs to be hand-whisked for several minutes per drink. Sometimes the line backs out the door. Only the most unflappable baristas are scheduled for Saturday mornings. Northfield''s motto is "Cows, Colleges, and Contentment," and we live there because Davin tricked me.

I didn''t know it, but he was playing a long game, years in the making. Davin grew up in both Northfield and Faribault, the next-nearest town, and when we both lived in Minneapolis and were dating, he used to take me to visit Northfield on the weekends. "Just to get out of town," he''d say. "Have a little trip." Northfield is cute. Aggressively, in-your-face cute. It is the real-life version of Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls . All the parking is free.

All the buildings downtown are historic. Everything is walking distance from everything else, and nothing costs very much when you get to where you''re walking to. The Malt-O-Meal factory makes the air smell like Coco Roos (Coco Puffs) or Fruity Dyno-Bites (Fruity Pebbles), all of the time. I had never been to a town that looked like Northfield that was not devoted to cutesy twee tourism, but Northfield was dead serious. This was a real, working town, and as someone who had lived her entire adult life in big cities, I was fascinated. On our weekend visits, Davin would show me around, smiling a serene cult-member smile. This is the town square, he''d explain, gesturing to a tiny park with a working old-fashioned popcorn wagon staffed by cheerful, thick-suspendered senior citizens. This is the dam, where generations of families fish off the bridge.

Here''s the café that looks and feels like 1995, down to the last detail (they just started taking credit cards!); there''s the impressive independent bookstore, stocked with the kind of books you''d never expect to find in a small town. Hey, did I know we could go tubing down Northfield''s river? Had I seen all the gay flags on people''s houses? Look, there''s another one! I sensed what Davin was up to. I loved Northfield, but I wasn''t having any part of it. "We are never moving here," I''d warn him, licking a two-dollar maple ice cream cone and crunching my way through the red and yellow leaves drifting across the town square. "OK." "I mean it. Never," I''d insist, drinking an excellent eight-dollar cocktail at Loon Liquors, a distillery bizarrely located inside an industrial office park. "Has anyone ever asked you to move here?" "No," I said, watching the light filter through green leaves swaying overhead in the Big Woods, a lush, waterfalled state park ten minutes from Northfield.

"But we''re not going to." Four years after I first saw it, we moved to Northfield. Davin has never once said "I told you so," but I can tell he thinks it daily. BREAKFAST AT TARTINE WAS ABSOLUTELY worth forty-three dollars (the lemon tart alone was), but Davin and I had arrived in San Francisco only the day before, and we''d already burned through the bulk of our budgeted funds for this trip. So when we saw the cheap rental scooter, it looked like a good option for us. It would be a fun way to get around, and we could afford it. All I had to do to rent it was watch a seven-minute video on my phone and take a quiz. And that was it: I was putting on the included helmet and trying to be OK with the fact that the inside of it smelled strangely sweet and fatty, like honey and dirty hair.

Now, I drive a scooter at home, so I was feeling confident, even if the streets of San Francisco are steep and crisscrossed with tram tracks that look like you shouldn''t drive on them. Straddling the scooter, I switched it on and turned to Davin. "I''m going to take this around the block to make sure I feel comfortable before I have you hop on the back." He nodded, silent with admiration at how butch I was. I twisted the scooter''s handle to give it some juice and crept up the street toward the Castro. Cars flowed behind me and around me. Careful, careful . oh, OK, this was easy.

A baby could drive this , I thought, revving the scooter up to its maximum 30 mph and cruising through a green light. This was great! The wind in your face, a cloudless blue sky, the perfect pastel houses terracing up and up! No more Ubers for us--we were scooter people, now! At a red light, I looked left. And there it was: The steepest street I''d seen all morning. A street that was practically vertical. I turned the scooter onto it. "Let''s see what this thing can do," I muttered under my breath, narrowing my eyes at the hill, suddenly the lesbian main character in a private The Fast and the Furious spin-off. I gunned the engine. OK.

Before we go any further, I need to explain that I''m clumsy. Not ha-ha-isn''t-that-cute-she''s-always-adorably-tripping clumsy. No. I am life-threateningly clumsy. Accident-prone, in a someone-call-an-ambulance kind of way. I have dislocated my shoulder falling out of a hammock. I have dislocated my shoulders three other unrelated times . I have broken my toes, my ribs, and both my arms twice.

I have broken my nose by turning and hitting it against a doorframe. My tailbone is ruined from when I ran down a wooden staircase in new socks, slipped, and landed on my ass on the floor with my feet straight out in front of me. (Did you know your chiropractor can adjust your coccyx by sticking her fingers into your asshole? Did you know she can delicately suggest this procedure so that you''ll agree to it by calling it "an internal manipulation"? It''s true.) Two years ago, at a work dinner in an upscale San Antonio restaurant, I pulled a heavy bathroom stall door closed against my foot while wearing sandals, and my.