My husband Bill and I have been friends with Sandra and Larry for several years.

Bill and Larry are avid fishermen, and each year they spend a week in the spring at a fishing resort in Michigan. Sandra and I don’t mind. While our men are trolling for lake trout and swatting mosquitoes, we take ourselves to places like New York or Chicago, where we do all the things the guys don’t care to do. We go to the opera, visit museums, browse at boutiques or antique shops, dine in bistros, soak up local culture and shop to our hearts’ content. It’s an arrangement made in heaven.

This spring we opted for San Francisco. To save money, we agreed to share a room at the hotel in the Haight-Ashbury district where we would be staying.

On our first afternoon we went bar-hopping. We wandered from one watering hole to... Read More