Tarkblog

Back in February, the wife and I snuck a little 4 day trip in to San Francisco, which I hadn’t blogged about until now.

Neither of us had been before, and it seemed like the perfect time and place to go. We stayed at the Courtyard in Fisherman’s Wharf.

A few random pics:

On our first day, we did a ferry ride over to Alcatraz:

Once there, the island tour is a self guided headphone based system. It is REALLY impressive - narrarated by people who actually had worked or were imprisoned there.

As part of a multiday entertainment pass thing we bought, we got admission into the aquarium. It was actually pretty neat - there was a underwater tunnel you walked/stood on a moving platform and watched all of the fish overhead (the pics didn’t turn out so well). Afterwards, they had a neat place where you could pet stingrays:

We admired the sea lions sunbathing out on pier 39:

We went and toured the Jeremiah O Brien war ship.

As a side note, we found the ship confusing. There were tons of people working there all over the place, painting, having meetings, etc. It seemed like maybe some of them actually lived aboard the ship? It was under repair in a lot of places, confusing to nagivate, and just not really well done for people trying to tour the thing. The shipyard in Charleston SC was much much cooler.

Later that day we rented bikes and did a ride over the the golden gate bridge

Finally, that night we hit Cioppino’s for dinner. I had the cioppino, obviously - which is a big bowl of tomato based soup completely filled with seafood, including this little baby octopus that made the wife squeamish:

After a good night’s sleep, the next morning we hit a cable car to get to the financial district:

We did some walking, but apparently it was still “early” (this was about 10:15) so nothing really much was happening. We hoofed it up a few blocks to Chinatown

Nothing much here was open yet either, but I did find a bakery:

Where I got a watermelon “donut”. It was only marginally wood.

We walked back downtown and checked out the big mall. Nothing much was open there yet either, but I did get a cool snapshot of the first circular escalator I’ve ever seen:

After that, we went BACK to Chinatown to get lunch. We just randomly picked a restaurant and walked in. Lunch was good. No pictures unfortuntately.

We hopped BACK on a cable car to get back downtown yet again. This is where we learned about the dangerous nature of cable cars. The car was full, so we had to stand on the railing and hold on to the bar. This isn’t a problem, except when you (ie, Annie) has a backpack on that stick out about 4-6 inches. This becomes an issue when the cable car comes from the other direction, as there is not much clearance room at all. Definitely a dangerous mode of transportation.

After all of this lunch stuff, we hopped on the bus and went to Haight Ashbury:

The place was definitely full of hippies.

After a brief walk through, we ended up at the golden gate park. The park was really beautiful. Amongst all of the random people doing random park things, there was also a homeless person convention going on - about 100 of them were hanging out together on a lawn.

We continued on to the “conservatory”:

Then went on to a museum, but they wanted 10 bucks to go in and didn’t have any information as to what really was inside (was it art? was it science? was it seafood? We didn’t know). I didn’t feel like paying to go in when we had no idea what we were paying to see. So we continued.

We ended up at the Japanese tea garden, which was very cool

After this, we walked for another approximately 425 miles to get to the nearest bus stop. We were both doggedly tired of walking by this point.

Catching the bus, we decided to just continue on west to the last stop, the coast. We decided to get some pics on the beach

We got a few pics of a nearby windmill before getting on the bus and heading back to the room.

The next morning we took a tour bus over to Muir Woods to see the redwood trees. This was a very awesome experience.

The bus did a quick stop in Sausalito on the way back from the woods, so we grabbed lunch by the bay

We did some more exploring of SF this day, including a trip over to the Palace of Fine Arts which has “The Exploratorium” inside. It’s basically a really neat kids based science museum. LOTS of fun experiments and stations inside. I had a blast. The place was pretty crowded (it was Saturday), but it certainly was a fun place and with kids I imagine they could stay busy for quite a few hours.

We decided to walk back as it was a manageable distance (less than a few miles) and we walked up Lombard street so we could go down the other side. Lombard street is the super crooked street that everyone wants to drive down.

After making it to the top (a very steep, heavy, tiring climb) we walked down

And set out to find some more sourdough bread.

Overall it was a really cool trip. It’s not a place I think I would want to live, but it was a fun place to visit. We saw a lot of interesting things, and have a lot of things we would try to do if we went back.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.