A classic, “what the …?” moment.

Four of us in the rented Kia Sportage, rolling slowly through the streets of San Francisco. Just a bit north of where you enter the 101 southbound, where it resumes there in the south part of the city. Not sure what neighborhood that is, exactly, but we’d seen a few guys wearing leather suspenders without any shirts under them … and then one of the kids in the back seat said, “That guy is naked.”

Just sort of conversationally. Like, “this is certainly worth mentioning” but not “holy, mackerel.”

And there he was. Striding down the street, heading towards Van Ness … buck naked. First thing I could think to say was, “I’m pretty sure that’s not legal, even in San Francisco.”

So, the naked guy. Big anglo guy, maybe 6-2, 200. Maybe 40. An all-over tan of the sort that said, “been naked before, but perhaps at a beach …”

Not a body builder. But in decent shape. Mind you, I was driving so it’s not like I got a good, longl ook.

Striding unselfconsciously down the street at a decent pace, with absolutely nothing on except a pair of flip-flops and a bandana/do-rag thing. And perhaps a little bit excited to be out and about, if you get my drift. Not totally … but a bit.

I’m fairly sure I’ve never seen a naked guy walking down the street of a major city. Probably not a minor city, either. It absolutely is a moment of disbelief. Not sure I’ve seen one even on a beach in Europe.

Someone may have said, “Yep. Naked.” No one, however, thought to immortalize the moment via photo — he was across two lanes of traffic from us, maybe 40-50 feet.

The light turned green, and I made a left, and left the naked guy behind, and by then I probably was thinking, “Mental patient, got loose?” “Making a political statement?”

It already had been a semi-weird day in San Francisco, but so many of them are.

We were still in the area, the day after a wedding in San Carlos, and we decided to drive up and have lunch and look around, giving Leah some time to meet with an old friend.

The city was fairly empty, in part because of all the road closures earlier in the day — for the annual marathon.  The elite guys were long gone, but the John Q Publics were wandering around from the start-finish line on the Embarcadero, dazed and plodding and wrapped in tin foil so they wouldn’t catch cold from a not-sunny San Francisco day in late July.

We got as close to the Ferry Building as the coned-off roads would allow, and had lunch there on the patio. Some bizarre, Northern Cal stuff. Leah had a roasted nectarine sandwich. Drew had a very curious salad with plums and ricotta. I went for the pulled pork because I can’t eat pork in a public setting for about 340 days a year.

Five of us decided to walk up to Fisherman’s Wharf. I mean, how far could it be?

Turns out, it’s quite far. Took us an hour to get there. Gotta be three miles, and perhaps closer to four. Thick with tourists once we got to the wharf, which we just went past because it was teeming with visitors — many of them speaking foreign tongues, btw.

We decided we would head for Ghirardelli Square. Just as somewhere to go … just because of the chocolate. But that’s another stretch over that road that skirts the coast … more street performers painted silver like robots, more guys playing pan flutes and clarinets … and it struck me that being a “tourist destination” often is not a good thing.

Had milk shakes at Ghirardelli Square, where I sat heavily to rest. But two of the kids had a plane to catch, so we needed to get back over to the parking garage where the Sportage had been left — with their luggage in the back.

I didn’t have a real map of the city with me, but I thought that a cable car there on Powell would be a good idea … get us up and over some hills, reduce the time and effort. But the cars were packed, and hundreds of people were lined up to catch the next three or four or five …so we took off walking.

We soon saw Corso Cristoforo Colombo angling southeast, which was the direction we wanted to go … and that took us through North Beach, but we had some hills, both up and down. We went through a couple of non-tourist neighborhoods and thought, “This is where there real people live” … this time passing the Coit Tower on the west.

I wasn’t sure I could find the parking garage while approaching it from the north, so we decided to cut over to Embarcadero again, find the Ferry Building, get reoriented. So we turned left (east) on the first major street we came to that seemed to carry all the way over to the bay … which was Broadway. And interesting.

This apparently was not the Tenderloin, SF’s Red Light district, but it was seedy. It had strip clubs on both sides of the street, some dive bars, and even a little Working Girl/Pimp drama right there on the street, with some makeup-drenched, hard-looking woman of maybe 20 shouting obscenities at the guy. Which no self-respecting pimp would allow, so maybe it was a John?

One of the kids said to the other, “I think you just walked through urine.”

It was charming. I said, “Well, we’re getting a good sampling of San Fran neighborhoods.”

We finally got back to the Ferry Building, some 7-8 miles and 2.5 hours after we had left, got two of the young people over to the Bart station on Market … and then headed for our rendezvous with the naked guy.