San Francisco - Part 1

I haven't forgotten to blog about the trip. It's just that I've been pretty busy since we got back, and today is the first day I've had to collect enough minutes together to give my few readers a decent account of our trip.

We left on Wednesday, July 15. Our flight was in the evening, and we got there pretty late. We had Super Shuttle take us to the hotel. THAT was an adventure. Our first experience on the streets of San Francisco was terrifying. The driver of that van only knew two speeds: stop, and fast. The streets of that city are very hilly and narrow for the most part. It was like being on a roller coaster, only we were really fearing for our lives. We were happy when the traffic lights were red, and feared when they would turn green. Yes, it was that bad... We survived the trip to the hotel with white knuckles and palpitations.

Thursday morning we hit the ground running. We ate breakfast at a nearby Starbuck's and bought San Francisco City Passes. The City Pass included our public transportation while we were there (including cable cars and the old F line train), de Young Museum, California Academy of Sciences, Legion of Honor, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and an aquarium (which we really didn't care about since we had just been to an aquarium in Albuquerque).

After breakfast, we hopped the bus over to Golden Gate Park, where we went through the de Young Museum and California Academy of Sciences. That was pretty cool. After those two places, we walked around a bit and wandered over to Haight Street and down to Haight Ashbury. We had lunch in a really good hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant over there, and then headed over to the Legion of Honor. Our de Young ticket included admission to Legion of Honor, but it had to be the same day. We were blown away by the Rodin collection at there. That was definitely our favorite museum of the whole trip. (In the Hitchcock movie, "Vertigo", Madeline, thinking she's Carlotta, goes to the Legion of Honor to look at a particular painting over and over, and Jimmy Stewart's character follows her there. It's a fictional painting, so it's not like we saw it, but we did very well see the room where they filmed that part of the movie.)

After going to the Legion of Honor, we went back to the hotel, and found a spot where we could buy groceries (mainly breakfast bars and Coke Zero) for the remainder of our trip.

That evening, we went to Ghirardelli Square, which was very close to our hotel. The Ghirardelli Chocolate company has bought and renovated several buildings all near where the first Ghirardelli chocolate was made. Now it's a bunch of condos, hotels, and restaurants. We ate dinner at a little 50's style diner, and then had dessert at the Ghirardelli ice cream spot. And that was our first real day there in San Francisco. (At some point in that day, we rode a cable car, standing on the outside step and hanging on for dear life, but I don't remember exactly when.)

Friday we went on the free bay tour cruise that came with our City Passes. That's something we wouldn't have done if we hadn't bought those passes. It was really quite neat to go all the way up to the Golden Gate Bridge, still not able to see it through the fog until we we were right under it, turn around, and come back via the far side of Alcatraz Island to the pier. I took lots of pictures of the bridge and Alcatraz from the boat.

This is a collage panorama of the backside of Alcatraz. I like it. I think it turned out pretty cool.

After the cruise, we went to Pier 39, the tourist trap of San Franciso's Fisherman's Wharf. We bought some cute T-shirts for the girls, and that was just about it. We had already seen the sea lions that live there from the boat we had just taken, and we've seen plenty of restaurants and shops in our day, so we didn't spend too much time there.

As I can see, this post is already very long, and I haven't been able to tell more than the first day and a half of our visit. To be continued in a future post...