The horns began to blare, and the blood rushed to my face.

A veritable sonnet of profanity came together in my mind, a litany of piquant phrases that would have delighted George Carlin or Richard Pryor in their comedic primes, or so I’d like to believe.

I drove 2,030 miles during our vacation in late July without drawing any great attention from my trio of passengers. Although I could feel the heavy weight of my wife’s eyes when the speedometer needle briefly pointed past the “80” hashmark while I was passing a semi on one of the vast straight stretches of Highway 395 between Lakeview, near the California border, and Susanville, California.

(The needle was in fact nearer the “100” line, if I am to be honest.)

Yet after hundreds of miles and many hours that passed without comment on my piloting skill, as soon as those horns began their annoying squawking, my wife, Lisa, and our kids, Olivia and Max, were as entranced as the crowds in the Roman Colosseum when the lion got the upper hand.

(Or, rather, paw.)

I suspect it’s that brief moment, when we weren’t even moving, that they’ll be talking about for decades rather than the eminently forgettable miles we accumulated before and after.

I’ll concede that I might have helped to elicit their reaction.

I had, earlier in our motorized tour of San Francisco, mentioned that, given the affinity drivers had for sounding their horns, I might feel neglected if I didn’t even once during our visit invoke another motorist’s wrath.

I was encumbered by several handicaps, any of which ought to have gotten me into at least a few awkward situations. I felt that I would earn an uncouth hand gesture at a minimum.

I am not accustomed either to the volume of traffic in the great city by the bay, or to the severe grade of the streets for which San Francisco is renowned. I suspect no American city has bent more shock absorbers during the making of movies.

Moreover, our Mazda has a manual transmission. And although the car is equipped with a clever function that briefly holds it in place when it’s on a steep upslope and the brake is released while the clutch is engaged — a feature that I have no doubt saved many San Franciscans’ front bumpers while we were in town — no electronic aid can eliminate the need for deft footwork between clutch and accelerator if a driver is to survive that city’s precipitous intersections unscathed.

I did not contribute to any collisions — not with pedestrians, not with any moving vehicles and not with immobile objects of which there was a veritable labyrinth.

The honking incident, it must be said, was not my fault, something even my family will attest to.

What happened is I was in heavy traffic on a one-way, two-lane street. The street, for some inexplicable reason but possibly involved a sadistic traffic engineer, made a 90-degree turn. I was in the outside lane. As I hit the apex of the corner, I was stymied by a white Tesla — a brand that is thick on the ground in the Bay Area, which happens to be, specifically in Fremont, where they’re assembled — that had stopped for a purpose obvious only to the driver. The Tesla was basically straddling the two lanes.

Being averse to interrupting our otherwise enjoyable vacation with an exchange of insurance information, I veered left. This put me in the bus-only lane, which seemed to me a minor matter considering there was no bus visible. But my little detour seemed to rouse a few other drivers to a state of high anxiety. Anyway they honked.

I thought this was both rude and, worse, unjustified, seeing as I had avoided a collision rather than made one more likely. Regardless, I reacted to the volley of honks by muttering a few lines of that profane sonnet I mentioned earlier. I also sped off when a space opened ahead, attaining a speed in first gear that I had not believed possible. Olivia, who got her learner’s permit a couple month ago, seemed particularly impressed. More so than her mother, at least.

Despite that harrowing incident, driving in San Francisco was more physically demanding for me than it was mentally taxing.

One day we covered about 12 miles on foot. We parked at the Presidio and then walked to the bayfront, taking in the typical tourist spots such as Pier 39, for which Max showed a fondness that struck me as peculiar considering he’d never seen the place except in the glossy photos of a brochure.

Then we strolled into a few other neighborhoods, marveling at a population density so much greater than Baker City’s that the comparison seems inane.

I had been to San Francisco only once before, a few decades ago, but I didn’t walk much of it then. Its reputation as one of the world’s great cities seems to me deserved. The sense of history, and its integral role in the story of the American West, is palpable. I had neither a detailed knowledge of the place nor an itinerary, so I was pleased by the happy coincidence of walking by Saints Peter and Paul church, the grandest house of worship I’ve been in since I spent part of the summer of 1986, between my sophomore and junior years in high school, living in Germany.

After our excursion I was anticipating a good dinner and a frosty beer. But instead we decided — we are nothing if not shameless in our status as predictable tourists — to drive through famous neighborhoods such as Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown and Pacific Heights.

My left leg — the clutch leg — objected to this plan. By the time we merged back onto one of the innumerable freeways — I think it was the 101, but possibly it was the 280 — my thigh felt about as solid as al dente spaghetti.

From San Francisco we drove north, swapping a metropolis for redwoods and remote coast range valleys and towns where it actually seemed possible to pass on the sidewalk the deck hand who had caught the fish from last night’s dinner.

There was no honking.