Our time in San Francisco was too little to do all that we wanted to in addition to what we needed to do, but was good despite that fact. I had lots of stuff going on in relation to my good friend’s wedding (congrats Isaac and Maggie!) and we had to schedule our time to get the most out of it that we could.
Thursday evening’s drive to our hotel in the Richmond-Berkeley area was a great introduction to SF traffic. This and nearly every other encounter with driving or traffic in general reminded me why big cities are not for me. We had to cross the Richmond bridge from US 101 in the west and this took almost 45 minutes. This should not be a 45-minute affair. This was only the beginning, but I’ll spare you the rest of the detail. [end of traffic-related rants for this post]
Friday morning Amber and I went walking around the downtown area of SF proper and we saw (not really more than “saw” as in “looked at” due to time constraints) Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf and then we rode a cable car back to Market Street where we parked for $20. [read with some bitterness; official end of traffic-related rants]
Friday evening was for bachelor party shenanigans which were quite fun, though ran late into the night. Amber looked around at some specific things to do in the city and made a good plan for Saturday.
On Saturday, we again drove into the city, risking life and limb. [not quite done with the traffic comments yet, I guess] We started out at Fisherman’s Wharf since that was a big recommendation that everyone had for us. We saw (again, “looked at”) a couple of old (1880’s and 90’s) restored ships along with the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, a WWII Liberty Ship at the SF Maritime National Historical Park and walked from there over to Pier 39 to see the sea lions, shops and other stuff.
Continuing to walk around the Embarcadero led us to the landing for Alcatraz cruises. We weren’t able to get tickets on the days we were going to be in SF, but the exhibits at the landing were pretty interesting. We also got some long views of the island itself from Pier 39, including this one in which I was apparently photo-bombed by a seagull. I always knew these guys were mischievous.
We were going to see a few things downtown, but the building we wanted to see that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright was closed (seemingly permanently) and the block around City Hall which included the main Public Library was taped off with police tape because of the crazy guy at City Hall that day. We got plenty of walking in, but that wasn’t really the end goal. We rode another cable car back to Fisherman’s Wharf where we had dinner at Pier 45. Once again, crab was on the menu for me. 🙂
Sunday was pretty much filled with wedding stuff. The ceremony was really nice and the reception was fun too. The Rockefeller Lodge did a really nice job with the food and it was a really nice venue all around.
On Monday, we looked around some more in the city: saw some parts of Golden Gate Park, saw the Golden Gate Bridge and went to the visitor center there then saw the “Painted Ladies” and the extremely steep and curvy parts of Lombard Street. In the Golden Gate Park, we saw the Dutch Windmill, took a walk around one of the lakes and lucked into a guided tour of the Japanese Tea Garden.
Aside from the traffic, it was a good time, however we could have easily spent at least a day more there. On to more big trees!
p.s. The traffic is awful. 🙂