This is the story of my second trip to San Francisco, and my fiancee Nat's first time there. There's a lot of pictures, so please be patient while the page loads.
Day One
We arrived in San Francisco tired from getting up so early, but still looking forward to exploring the city together. I had planned on taking a shuttle bus to the downtown area for about $11 a person. For some reason we ended up talking to this guy at the information booth, who suggested we take the "Sam Trans" for $1.10. $1.10 sounded a lot better than $11 plus tip to me, so we bought a shot glass (to get $1.10 in exact change) and followed his directions downstairs to the public transit area. We ran to catch a bus that we saw just arriving, and tried to get the driver to answer some basic questions like "Is this bus going anywhere near the Embarcadero area?" but alas, his grasp of the english language and his awareness of his surroundings was not sufficient to answer our questions. We decided to take the bus anyways for the princely sum of $3.00, more than we were previously informed, and grabbed an irrelevant bus schedule from the front to try to figure out where the heck we were headed.
As luck would have it, the end of the bus's route was 3 blocks from our hotel! We passed buildings so tall, their tops were in the clouds:
OK, technically it was just foggy. We walked down an interesting sidewalk
and finally arrived at our hotel, the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. We felt a little underdressed as we passed the tuxedoed valets parking limousines, but we were just awed when we rode the escalator up into the atrium:
No picture could do this place justice. It's a 15-story atrium, with plants hanging around the edges and a giant bronze ball sculpture in the center. It was just amazing. We got some advice from the concierge on what busses to take to get to various attractions we had decided on, then they let us check in early, so we dropped off our bags before heading out sightseeing.
First, we took a cable car to Chinatown. I don't have any digital pictures of that, but it was pretty cool. We basically spent all afternoon wandering around little shops full of stuff "made in china." We tried to find the restaurant I went to last time I was there, but I neglected to write down the name of the place so it was a bit difficult to pick it out amongst the dozens of restaurants in the area. We picked a random restaurant and were pretty pleased with what we ended up with. That whole day just ended up being pretty lucky as far as random choices turning out well. The soups were just great, nat got hot and sour and i had some egg flour soup. Vewy tasty!
When we got tired of shopping, we headed up a steep hill for 2 blocks to catch another cable car down to Fisherman's Wharf. We rode the trolley all the way to the end of the famous Powell-Hyde line (what a nice view!
)
and then walked around the pier for a while. Then we walked BACK up the hill, what a workout! Look at how steep that monster was!
We finally got to the top of the hill and got to check out the section of Lombard Street known as the crookedest street in the world:
After that we walked back to the wharf and checked out the "Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum." Even though I honestly don't think it was particularly unique to San Francisco, it was still a fun museum and we found an artifact in there that came from Horseheads, New York, a infinitesimally small town one of her friends grew up in. We ate dinner at the Rainforest Cafe,
which again wasn't particularly San-Fran-Esque but was pretty good nonetheless, though the service was exceedingly slow. Around 11 we finally headed back to the hotel in a renovated, historic streetcar, and went straight to bed for some much needed rest.
Day Two
I had gotten tickets in advance for Alcatraz, so that was going to be the main part of our day. First we rode the cable car back into Chinatown to replace some tea cups I dropped and broke the night before. We avoided spending all day shopping this time, and just got the teacups and a couple soup spoons with a pretty design. We again walked up Clay Street to catch a cable car down to the wharf, where the ferries to Alcatraz depart from. We ate lunch at Johnny Rocket's, "The Original Hamburger" restaurant - founded in 1988. Yeah, that's a classic all right. Ironically I ate at a Johnny Rocket's last time I was in town, and Nat wanted to eat there without even knowing that. Nat had a kosher chili dog, which I would think is pretty rare. Then we headed off to Pier 41 to wait for the ferry. Right at the next pier over, we saw the famous sea lions of pier 39, which one website touted as the only sight worth visiting in the entire tourist trap of the Fisherman's Wharf area.
We rode the ferry to Alcatraz and spent a few hours exploring it. I had thought the last ferry back was at 6 or so, but it turned out it was at 4:30. Doh! Nat and i speed-explored the place, not that most people can't do it in 3 hours, but nat and I like to eek every bit of fun out of places that we can, like that time we got to the Boston Science Museum 10 minutes after it opened and closed the place 12 hours later. It was a lot of fun seeing the cells of famous inmates like Al Capone and hearing about all the escape attempts. Nat got to try one of the cells on for size:
Doesn't she look cozy in there? We also walked around the limited areas of the 12 acre island that we were allowed on. Here's a picture of Nat in front of the remains of some houses the guards' families lived in:
After we got back to the mainland, we headed off to Little Italy for dinner. Our guidebook recommended a place called "Little Joe's." I wasn't sure where on Broadway St. it was, so we ended up walking a bit of a distance, even passing the edge of Chinatown at one point. Eventually we found it, but neither of our meals were very good. It was right accross the street from the first strip club I ever went to, so I got to show it to nat, and also point out the nice view of the Coit Tower. After dinner we walked another block to the Caffe Trieste, which was a cute little coffeeshop full of locals and/or artsy types. We tried not to look like tourists but i'm sure we failed miserably. The "Cocoa Fantasia" (hot chocolate with almond extract) was good though. We caught another lucky bus that dropped us off right next to our hotel. We were looking at a giant, misshapen sculpture when some guy asked us where the driving range was. Huh? Right in the middle of downtown? We tried to use the pile of maps the concierge had given us to help him, but to no avail. After that we were planning on getting a drink at the "13 Views Bar" at our hotel, which we thought was part of the revolving restaurant on the roof, but it was just a bar at the bottom of the atrium so we skipped it and went to bed relatively early.
Day Three
And on the third day, God said "Let There Be Walking!" And so it came to be. We walked from the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, along the coast to the Golden Gate National Park, and through the park to the other side. A total of about 5 tiring miles.
Before we did all this walking, we needed some good fuel. I insisted on patronizing a Noah's Bagels at least once while we were in town, and as luck would have it there was one at the bottom of our hotel, just about directly below our hotel room. In somewhat of a reversal of roles, nat had a cheese quiche and I had the bagel with lox. (shut up, I happen to find it ironic.) Then we took a bus past a ton of cute San Francisco houses to the Palace. We didn't actually go in the museum, but we did get to see the statue of The Thinker. Then we started our walking in earnest.
Our first destination was Land's End, billed as a great view of the Golden Gate bridge. I couldn't agree more:
That view was so great, I've gotta show it again:
That outcropping of rock in line with the bridge is where we were in the previous picture. To the left is the pacific ocean. We stopped for a few minutes to eat an apple and relax a bit before continuing on our journey.
Our next stop was the Cliff House area. We saw where the sea lions used to live before they all moved to pier 39:
We spent some time in the Mechanical Marvel Museum, which was free to enter but 25 cents or so a pop to get stuff to move. There was some cool stuff, and not everyone was as stingy as us, so we did get to see machines moving. They were quite marvelous indeed.
In case you can't read it, my sex appeal is "Ice Man."
Next on our agenda was
We wandered through the park, seeing lots of goose-filled lakes and trees and other things you might expect to find in a park. There were also a large number of team sports fields. Eventually we made it to the Japanse Tea Garden:
Admission was $3.50 each. We arrived at 3:55 and paid our 7 bones. Later on the way out we saw a sign on the toll booth: "Admission free after 4 P.M." Why couldn't you have told us that at 3:55, you bozos! It was still tranquil and full of interesting paths. For instance, this bridge, which is twice as tall as it is long!
You literally have to climb up this bridge and then down the other side. After that we stopped in the Shakespeare Garden, which features some of every kind of flower and tree mentioned in his plays. It's less impressive than it sounds though. :)
We had dinner at The Submarine Center. It sounds generic but the sandwiches were really, really good. I had something called "The Atomic Sub," I guess the atomic part is the hot peppers but even without them it hit the spot. Nat had a gyro which was just as good.
Getting back to the airport was a bit of an "adventure," due to bus drivers taking their brakes and blissfully ignoring irate riders wondering why the bus is still sitting there 15 minutes after it was scheduled to leave. Lucky for us, we left plenty of extra time before our flight for the transportation. Of course when we got there there were exactly zero people waiting in the security line. We had to check one bag because we needed somewhere to put the contraband item neither I nor security found on the flight down. We were the second and third people who started waiting for the flight, which ended up being our downfall. As the gate agent helped an old lady down the jetway, he looked at us and said "You're next, I know you've been waiting here a while." We gladly got up and waited for our turn to get on, since the sooner we boarded the sooner we could start napping. However while we were still waiting there a First Class passenger came up and started browbeating the other gate agent. "What does that mean, 'I know you've been waiting here a while?' What happened to first class boarding first? Which of these two is disabled and needs assistance to board? I have expensive projection equipment in my carry on, and I don't want to have to check it!!" Luckily we only had to endure a minute or 2 of this moron before we were pre-boarded, but we heard from another passenger later that the guy was still out there arguing 20 minutes later, and we think he ended up arguing so long it made the flight depart late. Man what a jerk he was.
We were totally passed out for the whole flight home, and that was it. All we had left of our trip was pictures, memories, and a huge pile of cheap trinkets from Chinatown. We both had a really great time.
The End