Juliette:
I am sorry to tell you, dear SFØers, that I have no photographic evidence of my participation WAIT NO, I can take pictures of my ribbon and manifest!, so I shallBut I will still be painfully thorough in describing my Journey adventures. I do, however, have a well-creased, slightly dirty Manifest with seven marks of approval. That's right, I made it all the way to the Shakespeare Garden (where, concidentaly, I was earlier today!) as a Player. Other members of my group were not so fortunate, but let me begin at the beginning.
From 0 to 1b
I arrived at this year's Journey with my lovely male companion, Mitchell, and his equally devastating sister. (Man, something about that family! Good genes.) She, Hazel, played the night with a group of her friends, while Mitchell and I met up with some of his: Harry, Jia, and Eugene. We five played a few rounds of Contact (a word game, for those who might not know) before the start and decided to head for Checkpoint 1b on foot. We headed north throuth the Embarcadero Center and up to Jackson and Davis. We used that lovely little skyway next to the Safeway to overshoot Jackson in our eagerness to avoid chasers, and walked/jogged up through what Google Maps tells me is called Sydney G. Walton Square. Then up Pacific to Columbus, where we turned south and walked down Columbus into the safe zone. From there it was mostly a matter of following the crowd of players up to Portsmouth Square. (This really bothered me: On the Manifest, Checkpoint 1b is called "Chinatown Park at Clay and Kearney." Well, yes, it is a park in Chinatown at those cross-streets, but it's called Portsmouth Square! It has a proper name!)
From 1b to 2
Getting out of 1b was a lot easier than we expected. After my fiasco last year with chasers surrounding the area after Checkpoint 1, I was expecting to have to really stick to the shadows, but we reached the bus stop at Stockton and Sacramento with only a false alarm or two. My group hopped a 30 down to 4th and Mission, only having to walk one block into the safe zone. (We didn't know we could have waited a stop and gotten off into safe territory. Oh well. No harm done.) By this point, I was starting to get nervous. We hadn't had nearly enough trouble, I felt, and was worried that it would soon come our way in droves.
Alright, I can't keep detailing every little thing.
We went through Checkpoints 2-5 without very much trouble. We talked to some nice chasers on a bus, then had to wait for them to give up on us to get to checkpoint 3, I believe. Some other stuff happened. We did clothing-swapping at checkpoint 3, although we switched back after because mine ended up a little bit too sexy (read: revealing) for the cold night despite all the running about. Playing through checkpoint 4 was neat. We drank the kool-aid at checkpoint 5, and I had a small fangirl-moment at recognizing Lincøln. And so on. It was fun, then scary stuff happened!

Supine:
The Battle of Buena Vista:
Coming out of checkpoint 5 in Duboce Park, we knew that we would have a problem. Though the distance between Duboce and the Panhandle was negligible compared to that between any other checkpoints, this meant the greatest density of Chasers. We also found ourselves coming up against the hilly, twisted backbone of San Francisco. An initial plan to dart from bus stop to bus stop along Haight was quickly scrapped for this reason. Instead, we decided to sneak as far up the hill as possible and use the force of gravity to propel us down the hill, straight into the safezone. We slipped across the tracks and into Davies' Medical Center's abandoned parking lot. Through this conduit, we traveled a block or two out of the direct path between checkpoints, in keeping with our previous strategy. Walking up 14th, we five felt reasonably confident that we had evaded the Chasers, and even guaranteed ourselves a leisurely walk up the hill, which we could follow with a mad downhill dash right into the heart of Checkpoint 6. Complacency is dangerous. Crossing a street, we found ourselves nearly face to face with some other night walkers. I even raised a hand in greeting before spying the three yellow ribbons tied around their arms. The Chasers seemed equally surprised, but the wild smile that broke out on the middle chaser's face assured us that no mercy would be found.
Everyone moved at once. I darted around the Chasers, and high-tailed it up the hill behind them, not daring to slow even enough to throw a glance over my shoulder. I have no idea what happened to the others. Perhaps Juliette can fill you in, as she ran nearly the opposite direction. What I do know is that when I came back to myself, I had run five blocks along Buena Vista Terrace and Roosevelt way and found myself in the shadow of the Randall Museum. I hunkered down behind some convenient shrubbery and attempted to reestablish contact with my party. I ticked them off a mental list. Eugene, down. Harry, down. Jia, down. Three more chasers wandering about. Harry helpfully offered that Juliette had escaped, and was now at the 24 Divis bus stop at 14th. Sensing a trap, I told him I had run the opposite direction and said I would be down momentarily. Thankfully, my friends were not as unscrupulous in their pursuit of runners as I assumed, and after waiting for them run off, I rejoined Juliette.

Juliette again:
More Buena Vista, my perspective
My greatest strength in running Journey is that I know San Francisco really, really well, especially MUNI. So I knew that there was a bus stop with a shelter at 14th and Castro, that it was two blocks straight downhill to there from where we ran into the chasers, and that I was absolutely terrified and disarmed by the massive grin the right-hand chaser threw at me. But these things passed so rapidly through my mind that I could hardly even register them, so mostly I just ran downhill. I was hoping that our group would scatter in all directions and that the chasers would follow any pair or group instead of a lone girl with the edge of downhill momentum. I don't know what happened to the other four, but my guess from reading Mitchell's account is that he went uphill, I went downhill, and Harry, Jia, and Eugene took the flatter cross-street at the intersection where this went down, and the chasers figured they had the best chances at us on more even ground. Anyway, I essentially crashed down the hill into the safety of the bus stop, waited five minutes until I figured everyone would have been tagged or gotten away, and went to call my running-mates. I discovered the same thing as Mitchell: he and I were the only to survive. Harry, now a chaser, waved to me from across the street. Mitchell eventually came to find me at the bus stop. Our group decimated, Mitchell and I discussed with the others by phone what to do, and eventually decided that Mitchell and I would keep running as chasers without them.
And then, after that...
More stuff happened. We went over to Checkpoint 6, and soon after ran into ananas, an old schoolmate! We took the bus together to the party in the Shakespeare Garden. We made it! We won!
And then other things happened.
We listened to Corpus Callosum tell us that we were all going to get sick and die (one of these days), then we went with some other people and got some doughnuts, then we went back to Mitchell and Hazel's neck of the woods, and I slept over 'cause it was like 4am and I didn't want to wait alone for an hour for a bus or call a cab. And we had french toast the next morning, and it was really good.

OKAY GUYS, NOW LET'S DO IT AGAIN.