I've been to the Bay Area, of course, but never really did any serious exploring. It was usually to visit family/friends on the way to somewhere else. It was always a pleasant stop-off on the way from Germany to Hawaii or some such.
Ironically, we also have a dormant sauna in our house here. Neither my wife nor I were ever big fans, and when we saw the antiquated electronics, we just said let sleeping dogs lie. The guy who built our house came over as a young refugee from East Germany, was successful, and wanted a "hey, look at me" house he could show his relatives from the East when they got their rare permission to visit him in the big bad capitalist west.
Unfortunately, his ambition to have a fancy dwelling exceeded his finances at the time, and while the exterior of the house was solid enough, he did a lot of the inner guts himself. This may have been adequate in 1973, when he built the house, but it was Pleistocene by the time we bought it, and the inner guts of it turned out to be more something the three stooges would have left behind. One day, shortly after we moved in, we had a short circuit and called an electrician. We thought he would be done in an hour or two. He was here for a week. Some of the electrical sockets were putting out 400 volts or more (220 is normal), and he said the only surprise left was that the house hadn't burned down long ago.
Moral of the story--we never even dared try the sauna. There are some buttons and dials, but we don't know what they are for, and burning down the house is not an acceptable price for satisfying our curiosity.
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