Peace, love and LSD

As Dinah Hatch and family continue their US tour, they get a bit spaced out in San Fran as the city celebrates 50 years since the Summer of Love.

""What’s Acid, mum?" Well, I suppose we are in San Francisco and this is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. We’re in the de Young Fine Arts Museum inside the city’s enormous Golden Gate Park and the lower ground floor is devoted to rooms and rooms explaining how peace, love and large amounts of LSD took centre stage in the city all those decades ago.

Pyschedelic posters for The Grateful Dead, beat poetry readings and ‘all-night happenings’ led by Alan Ginsberg papers the walls and ceilings while mannequin hippies sporting more tassles than a 1970s sofa loom out of every corner. The kids are unimpressed until they get to an all-white room furnished just with beanbags, projections of garish rainbow patterns on the wall clearly meant to induce a drugged state. They sit dazed and captivated and I make a mental note to have a ‘chat’ about substances later on.

Still slightly spaced, we emerge into the sharp bright blue day, cyclists whirring through the Eucalyptus groves as we make our way to the California Academy of Science next door. Inside an extraordinarily helpful volunteer grabs tickets to the astonishing brilliant planetarium show we’ll see later that day and points us to the earthquake simulator. It’s fun to stand on a violently-shaking floor in a little fake kitchen for 30 seconds and imagine being in the real thing, but on the way out a woman remarks to her husband: "Remember how scary it was back in ’89, Pete." He nods silently. Sadly, 69 people died, 3,000 were injured and $5 billion worth of damage was done when the city suffered a 6.9 quake.

Ben’s got the hippie bug, though, and once we finish in the CAS, he wants to go cruising in the car to Haight, the epicentre of the Summer of Love. The kids want to know what we will see when we get there. "Maybe nothing, we just want to go there," he explains to two small, uncomprehending faces. Minutes later we park up (careful to turn the wheel into the curb, a must in hilly San Fran) and find ourselves in possibly the loveliest part of the city. We wander past huge multi-storied townhouses in cobalts and magentas which line leafy avenues until we reach the Haight Ashbury junction. We expect to be disappointed but, in fact, the opportunist hippy clothes shops aside, there is still a sense of something having happened here. Well, that’s what I think, although Ben says it was just because there was a lot of pot smoke in the air and a few possibly-homeless people shooting the breeze outside the Haight Medical Centre, once famous for treating addiction in those who took up the Movement a little too enthusiastically.

We nose the Sonata back to Bernal Heights and our apartment, grab a tub of ice cream and hike up to the top of the hill where someone has strung a swing from which you can see across the whole of the city, its arcing streets, green spaces and tagliatelle of freeways all hemmed by vast sparkling blue waters. Tomorrow we leave this iconic city and head south to Monterey, made famous by Steinbeck (and his sardine story of Cannery Row) and its world-famous aquarium. More on the fish later…"

Dinah Hatch travelled with Hertz, www.hertz.co.uk