So I'm sitting here in Heathrow airport with lots of time to kill and fond memories of a great trip to the western USA. One of those memories, that few others would understand so I felt I'd post about it on GFSA where peeps would understand, was the singular joy of browsing through a Guitar Center in San Francisco, a truly massive shop. They had every Fender Strat that I was interested in trying out, bar for the Eric Johnson signature strat, and as I went through them I reached levels of stimulation that would not be appropriate to describe on this forum.
Here is a wall full of mostly American Standards. They had a similar wall full of American Deluxes.
And here is a section of one wall in their "special" room with the higher end guitars.
Here's another wall with a bunch of custom shop Les Pauls. I played a few of these as well, just for the fun of it. They were very accommodating even though I must have numbed their skulls with my limited repertoire.
Here is a section of the shop that I managed to capture by stitching a few pictures together.
And I had to spend some time in the acoustic department as well. Yes, "department" would be the appropriate word as it wasn't just a room or an isle. Here's a picture taken in one of the rooms where they had a bunch of Martins, Taylors, Larivees and Gibsons.
Of course, I walked out of there the very proud new owner of a strat. I left it there for two weeks though while we headed off on a road trip around California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona and picked it up the day before we flew out again. If you look closely you might find my guitar in the crowd above. Here's a hint, it wasn't this vintage '56 strat. I just didn't quite feel that I could afford the $38,000 price tag.
Yummy. I could have taken a few more days to hang around the shop if the wife didn't insist that we had to see the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Street Cars and Alcatraz as well.
Arriving back in SA tomorrow and will then try to get a few nice pics of the new family member and put them up for your perusal.
