Most of our days are filled with routine and pass by in an indiscriminate blur. Just a few days in a lifetime are remembered by the date, minute-to-minute, from beginning to end. Weddings, the birth of children, the deaths of loved ones, major news events.

Add one very unusual day to my list: April 30, 2018. The day my Chronicle colleague Peter Hartlaub and I attempted to ride every Muni line — bus, train, streetcar and cable car — in one day. It was a day we remembered why we love San Francisco so much.

The idea we called Total Muni 2018 came about in December when I tweeted a photo of my 4-year-old son typing every Muni bus line into my husband’s computer. He’s obsessed with buses and numbers, and has memorized all the routes from the 1-California to the 91-Third Street/19th Avenue Owl.

Hartlaub, our pop culture critic and expert Chronicle archive diver, issued a challenge. He said I’d be a hero to my son if I re-created a 1980 stunt cooked up by Larry Baer, now president and CEO of the San Francisco Giants. Baer and his friend Andrew Coblentz rode every Muni line in one day. I agreed to give it a shot, but only if Hartlaub joined me.

Months of planning ensued. Too many meetings. Too many Excel spreadsheets. Too many anxiety dreams. Frankly, the monumental task — riding at least one stop on all 60 lines in a day — began to feel like taking the bar exam or undergoing surgery — something we were locked into and had to endure.

But it proved an incredible journey. We made new friends on buses, on a passing bicycle and in a trailing rickshaw. We logged 28,249 steps — walking or running nearly 13 miles. We were escorted by two celebrity chauffeurs. We met one unforgettable dog.

But mostly, we were shocked by how many people tracked our trip online and sent us messages of support throughout the day. There’s been so much bad news lately, it seemed like people were eager for a silly, lighthearted diversion, and the fun of watching two people tackle an absurd quest proved contagious.

“Total Muni was everything,” read one tweet at the end of the day. “It reminded us how amazing this city truly is.”

Small correction: San Francisco is great. It’s San Franciscans who are truly amazing.

Back to Gallery Total Muni 2018 a reminder of how amazing SF and San... 8 1 of 8 Photo: Map and illustrations by John Blanchard / The Chronicle 2 of 8 Photo: Map and illustrations by John Blanchard / The Chronicle 3 of 8 Photo: Map and illustrations by John Blanchard / The Chronicle 4 of 8 Photo: Map and illustrations by John Blanchard / The Chronicle 5 of 8 Photo: Map and illustrations by John Blanchard / The Chronicle 6 of 8 Photo: Map and illustrations by John Blanchard / The Chronicle 7 of 8 Photo: Map and illustrations by John Blanchard / The Chronicle 8 of 8 Photo: Map and illustrations by John Blanchard / The Chronicle















The day began when Hartlaub, ace photographer Jessica Christian and I drove from the Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission streets to Treasure Island, where we caught the 25-Treasure Island at the ungodly hour of 3:12 a.m., ensuring we beat Bay Bridge traffic.

We sailed back into the city for what quickly became the most depressing segment of our journey. You know how heart-wrenching downtown is during the day? Well 4 a.m. is far worse. It was like “Night of the Living Dead” on Market Street, with dazed people stumbling around, every block dotted with people sleeping under blankets and heaps of trash everywhere.

A crazed-looking man appeared from behind a bus stop and lunged at us. It wasn’t clear if he was trying to grab us or our backpacks, but we screamed at him and ran away. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

We knocked out a few buses on Market Street and around downtown and hit the 90-San Bruno and 91-Third Street/19th Avenue owls, which run only at night. For the first 2½ hours the city was dark, dirty and a little scary, and I was fully regretting taking on this daunting chore.

But our spirits rose with the sun at 6 a.m., when we arrived at the cable car turnaround at Powell and Market streets. Jeremy Whiteman, an information technology consultant in San Bruno, helps decorate cable cars for Christmas and other events. He’d kindly arranged for car 24, decked out in Giants paraphernalia for the team’s 60th anniversary of arriving in the city, to await us like a chariot.

Cable car gripman Val Lupiz, 53, gave me a Muni cap and patches for my 4-year-old and said he was just as transit-obsessed when he was a kid. He’d ride the L-Taraval to the zoo with his mom, but decline to go into the zoo because the point of the journey was the train ride.

“I was your son,” he said as we rode the clanging cable car up Nob Hill. “You can see where it ends up. This was the only thing I ever really wanted to do in my life.”

Add riding the first cable car of the morning to your bucket list. The pink sky behind the Transamerica Pyramid was a stunning site I’ll never forget.

We then ticked off the other two cable car lines, the “Dreaded 88” (a far-off, limited-hours shuttle to Balboa Park BART Station) and some tricky commuter buses downtown that operate for just small windows of time. We were punchy and a little delirious — an accurate description of our mood pretty much all day — and Hartlaub at one point tried to use a glue stick as ChapStick.

And then, another big bright spot: meeting Baer and Lou Seal, the Giants mascot, in front of the Ferry Building just after 8:30 a.m. My husband, sons and some friends joined the fun. We all rode the F-car west down Market, bid farewell to Baer and Lou Seal, and continued on our way.

My boys, Muni experts, helped Hartlaub with our route through Potrero Hill and Bayview-Hunters Point before continuing on the 23-Monterey to school. A man asked us to autograph the map he’d printed of our journey. A woman and her son chased us to offer a sandwich and bottle of water.

On the T-Third, we met an adorable older couple named Roz and Tom Jeong who live near the Cow Palace, have long subscribed to the Chronicle and said they were hoping to spot us.

“We have senior passes!” said Roz, who did 100 percent of the talking for the pair. (Note to the Jeongs: I couldn’t find you on social media, but you became #TotalMuni2018 favorites after I posted your photo and called you the cutest couple in San Francisco.)

We met another Total Muni Twitter sensation along the T-Third route: a dark brown dog without tags and with dirt and twigs in her fur. She ran full-throttle at us as we waited on the platform. She followed us onto the train, and we just couldn’t shake her. Christian, the photographer, peeled off to take Felton — so named by us after the 54-Felton — to Animal Care and Control. (We kept calling the dog a boy on Twitter. Animal Care and Control, which knows more about these things than we do, corrected us.)

The Hartlaub family offered to adopt her if no owner claimed her. But Judy Choy, a supervisor at the shelter, said Saturday that a man had come forward as the dog’s owner and was planning to return Sunday to take her home. The man, who lives in supportive housing in the Tenderloin, told Choy he’d been with the dog at a public event near where we encountered the pup Monday, and they’d gotten separated.

Choy said the man had already visited the dog, whose real name is Felicia, and the two had an obvious rapport. The shelter was spaying the dog for free on Saturday, but charged the man $190 for Felicia’s release. The organization that runs the man’s supportive housing complex paid 20 percent for the dog’s release, and Hartlaub has offered to cover the rest. Showing, yet again, how Total Muni brought out the best in everybody.

Soon after photographer Santiago Mejia joined us to take Christian’s place, and we met up with our first celebrity chauffeur: former Mayor Art Agnos, who drove us from the Bayview to the Excelsior to help us bypass some of the long 29-Sunset route. Savvy as ever, Agnos sported a Mark Leno for Mayor button and played Greek folk music.

He said his 3-year-old grandson, Daniel, loves Muni. I asked how many buses they’ve ridden together in one day. Just two, he replied.

“That’s about enough for me,” Agnos quipped.

After a couple of buses in the Excelsior, we rode the 43-Masonic to Monterey Boulevard and Foerster Street. Who should be waiting for us on the sidewalk but Burrito Justice — armed with a bag of burritos! We were so hungry and tired by that point, it was like seeing a mirage in the desert.

“I have to play the role San Francisco has given me,” he explained.

The Twitter celebrity — in real life, he’s a 47-year-old dad named John Oram — earned his nickname during his crusade a decade ago to allow the El Tonayense taco truck to park near John O’Connell High in the Mission, despite a city ordinance keeping food trucks 1,500 feet from schools. He also coined the newish name for his neighborhood, La Lengua, in the southern tip of the Mission.

Oram works for a mapping company and said he found the logistics of planning Total Muni 2018 fascinating. He told me the day after our journey that he calculated we’d traveled more than 68 miles.

We rode some more buses in Glen Park, Bernal Heights and Potrero Hill before hitching a ride with our second celebrity chauffeur: stand-up comic Will Durst. The guy drives like a New York City cabbie, and we got to West Portal in no time, bypassing part of the long and winding 48-Quintara route.

Then onto Stonestown Mall, the Sunset and the Haight, where Hartlaub’s parents joined us for a few rides. Fun fact: Jeanne Hartlaub is the sister of former Supervisor Susan Leal. Leal joined us later for a ride on the 39-Coit.

Spending most of the day in the neighborhoods was a delight. Heading back downtown certainly wasn’t. It was crowded, and it was crunch time. We rode the J-Church underground to the Embarcadero, knocked off the sometimes elusive E-Embarcadero and then hitched a ride in a pedicab to Pier 39 just after 6 p.m. Just, you know, to make the day even more bizarre.

A longtime Chronicle reader named Joanie Juster had been trying to catch up with us for hours, but kept missing us. She’d bought us a bunch of pastries, but ate most of them in frustration.

She finally reached us in front of the Ferry Building as we were hopping into the pedicab. She grabbed one herself and hollered to her cyclist the quote of the day: “Follow that rickshaw!”

As we rode up the Embarcadero, a bicyclist named Dave Guarino, 32, who’d been following us on Twitter, whizzed past, asking, “Are you Total Muni?” He tossed us two containers of Blue Bottle coffee, and just like that, he was gone.

We continued along on the 39-Coit and other buses in the northern part of the city before heading south on the 47-Van Ness. Our Twitter notifications were impossible to keep up with, but I noticed one from Brian Darr wondering how we’d complete our last 10 buses if we hadn’t yet ridden the 2-Clement.

While we’d been over the route many times, we hadn’t realized the 2-Clement leaves downtown for its final run at 7:15 p.m. We dashed in a mad panic to the nearest 2 bus stop, saw the sign was flashing no information about the 2, called 311 (at 7:57 p.m., according to my phone log) to ensure it was still coming, waited what seemed like a zillion years for the 311 call-taker to confirm it was on its way, and managed to catch the second-to-last bus of the night.

I reached out to Darr the next day to thank him. The 44-year-old was born at Kaiser on Geary Boulevard and grew up in the Richmond, both of which, he explained, are “2 territory.”

I asked how it felt to save Total Muni.

“I was mostly gratified, but couldn’t help but wonder, ‘What if I hadn’t done it? Would nobody else have done it?’” Thankfully, we’ll never know.

Our other savior was Juster of “Follow that rickshaw!” fame. She’d been with us since the 39-Coit, her purse decorated in Muni fast passes. In our 2-Clement panic, Juster, 65, figured out where to catch that bus and how to remake the rest of our entire route.

“You were both so tired and kind of disoriented,” she explained later, putting it politely. We were flat-out losing it.

We said goodbye to our Muni guardian angel and finished the route — saving the N-Judah for last. A risky proposition, we knew. The idea was to ride it to AT&T Park, where Baer had reserved a suite for us and some of our relatives and co-workers. But the N being the N, the minutes to arrival kept changing on the notification board.

A parody Twitter account in the spirit of Karl the Fog professes to be the words of the N-Judah itself. The train was weighing in on Twitter, claiming to be wringing its hands menacingly.

We finally caught that rascal, and Total Muni 2018 was complete. Sixty lines in just over 18 hours.

We hugged our family waiting for us in a ballpark suite. Shout-out to my dad, John Knight, who has been reading The Chronicle and cheering on the Giants since he was a little kid. We drank some beer, sat with Baer in fantastic seats behind the dugout, and watched the Giants pull out a 6-5 win over the Padres in a come-from-behind, bottom-of-the-ninth victory. The nearly perfect day couldn’t have ended any better.

My husband drove me home to Glen Park. Hartlaub and his wife took the ferry to Alameda. There was no way we were getting on another Muni bus. Hartlaub retrieved his car — left on Treasure Island what felt like a year before — the next day.

Some takeaways from our crazy adventure? San Francisco needs a lot more public restrooms. It’s really defeating to walk into a bank or a dentist’s office in desperation and be told with a scowl, “It’s for customers only.”

And the city needs a lot more street cleaning and a lot less littering. Just about every neighborhood was filthy.

But on the plus side, San Francisco is drop-dead beautiful. While downtown may be all about the new and the innovative, many of the city’s neighborhoods remain old-school and oozing with charm. Muni may cause riders angst and despair, but overall it works well, and this city would be even more screwed up without it. Its drivers aren’t the most friendly people in the world, but they almost always get you where you need to go — eventually.

But our biggest takeaway from Total Muni 2018 was that there are many really wonderful people who live here, work here and ride buses here. Dozens of people chatted with us in person, offering us everything from kind words to stuffed animals to beef jerky. Many more rallied around us online.

As Guarino tweeted, “I love how SF Twitter is all up in this like some family BBQ.”

This city may have gotten more corporate and far more expensive in recent years, but at its heart, it remains a beacon for weird and whimsical people who love supporting wacky ventures.

So I say the next time you have an offbeat idea, go with it. You never know where it might take you.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

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