My date with the Prince!

I'm the guy who took the picture!

Prince Charles and Camilla were in town speaking at the SF Ferry Building so I hopped on the bus and made my way down there...it's one of the few perks of being unemployed.
There was a crowd of about 100 people hanging out, talking on their cell phones, waiting for the royal couple to exit the building and walk past us. It was a mix of office dwellers on extended lunch breaks, and tourists who wandered by. You either knew exactly what was going on, or started asking questions. Every conversation went like this:

"Hey, what's going on here?"
"Prince Charles and Camilla are inside and we're waiting for them to come out."
"What?! Prince Charles?!?!?!? You're kidding? Honeyyyy, Prince Charles is in there!!!!"

And they would join the crowd.
We waited about 2 hours, but there was always some kind of commotion going on to pass the time.
Secret service guys would move us around, various people would leave the reception and we'd all ask, "who's that???" and nobody would know. The press camera guys would start to get antsy and we'd all perk up thinking this was the moment.
Then the limos moved, the streets were blocked off, motorcylce cops were everywhere, the press were manning their cameras...and Gavin Newsome walked out. He waved, made a joke about being surprised at the crowd and shook some hands. His ex was with him.

Then the royal couple appeared. They walked down the steps of the building, waved at the crowd, posed for some pictures, and started to make their way past everyone to the waiting car. Then they split apart and moved toward the crowd and shook hands and chatted with us. It was a nice moment. I couldn't imagine our Bubble Boy president doing something like that, at least not without his hand-picked crowd, saying only government-approved fawning comments.

And then they got into the limo and sped off.

It was pretty cool.