San Francisco

It turns out that seven days is a bit too many to explore San Francisco, in my opinion. But that meant that our time there was very relaxed, and we got things covered at a very gentle pace. And we’re happy that we saw everything that we wanted to see, and that’s the main thing!

Michelle told us once that when she goes to new places, she likes to get to a vantage point as high as she can to get an overview of the city. We thought that was sound advice, so early on in the piece we ventured out to Coit Tower to take some happy snaps.

The view was good, but it was clear that the tower wasn’t meant to have plexiglass windows in it (obviously they had been installed to prevent people leaning/falling/jumping out). Also, we were hampered by fog which severely limited the visibility. As it turned out, the city was marred by that very same fog for the first 4 or so days that we were there – just our luck!

Anyway, San Fran is hilly. Very hilly. It’s no wonder that Sony chose San Fran for their bouncy balls bravia advert. On our first day, we bravely walked absolutely everywhere. I have no idea how far we actually walked, but I’m going to guess and say about 15km – and a lot of that was up and down some very steep hills. By our second day, we wisened up and bought a three day pass for the Muni, and then rode that as often as we could.

I especially enjoyed hanging out the side of the cable cars! That’s a photo of me doing precisely that, by the way – even though it just looks like a photo of me next to a pole. Anyway – one place that we used our tickets to visit was Alamo Square Park. Remember Full House? (Don’t pretend you don’t!) In the opening credits, there was a shot of the family enjoying a picnic in a park which overlooked some lovely houses, which in turn overlooked San Fran. Well, that’s Alamo Square Park.

The park was lovely! But no sign of DJ or Uncle Jesse, nor – more importantly – their golden retriever, Comet.

The other form of transport that we were quite keen on was the bicycles that we hired on Sunday. Unfortunately, it was a foggy, windy, cold day – not ideal riding conditions – but we were I was determined to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge, so we didn’t have much choice.

In the end it took us over 3.5 hours to ride from Fisherman’s Wharf, to – and across – the Golden Gate Bridge, and down into Sausalito on the other side where we stopped for lunch. The ride itself was very pleasant – excellent scenery, plus lots of different terrain (read: “nasty hills”) – but at the same time, rather unpleasant due to the fog, wind, and general cold. Overall I think I enjoyed it a little more than Kristy, and was also keen to make the return ride home, but instead we jumped onto a ferry which took us straight back to Fisherman’s Wharf. The bikes turned out to be a pretty expensive exercise ($79 for the two of us, but that included our ferry tickets) but in my opinion, well worth it. I think hiring a bike is my new favourite way to see a city.

Probably our favourite activity in San Fran – at least my favourite, anyway – was our night tour to Alcatraz.

The tour was very well organised, kicking off with an excellent audio guide, and followed up with some informative talks by volunteers about various escape attempts. It was all just so darned interesting! The only downer was we took the last tour of the day in the belief that the night tour was the best – and to its credit, being there at night added a certain ambience that would be lacking through the day time. However, since we didn’t land on the rock until 7PM, we felt that the two hours that we were there wasn’t quite enough to do the island justice, but by 9:10PM we had to be back on the boat heading for the mainland. (Unless we wanted to spend the night there, but that didn’t seem to be an option.)

Oh, my only other complaint was the amount of people that they crammed onto the boats, but I guess in the end it’s a business, and they’re just out to make money. But none of that really took anything away from the experience; I highly enjoyed it and would rush back if I was given the chance.

So overall, San Francisco is a beautiful city, and well worth a visit. However if you’re planning a trip, I’d say that four days would be more than enough to see pretty much everything – instead, spend at least two days visiting Yosemite National Park. But that’s a story for later!