So our vacation was terrific! The only problem was that it was too short, but I think everyone says that don’t they?
Day 1
I guess I can begin from the start and see if I can remember everything. We left for San Francisco at 4:15 AM; traffic was good most of the way up except for a 15 minute stop of traffic as the California Highway Patrol cleared an accident on Interstate 5 right at the exit for Magic Mountain. We arrived in San Francisco crossing the Bay Bridge at around 11:30. The weather was great, it was around 70-75 with just a little breeze, but if you know anything about San Francisco the weather is very unpredictable in the Spring… Fortunately we had called the hotel earlier and verified that we could do early check in! We arrived at the Sir Francis Drake hotel and were in our room by 12:00 PM. Our hotel was in the downtown area of San Francisco, so we were in the perfect location to use as a staging area to get, go, or do anything we wanted. After we unpacked we headed out to find ourselves some lunch. As we exiting the hotel we saw there was a coffee shop by the name of Sears Fine Food. We crossed the street and had some sandwiches for lunch, if you take a look at the pictures previously posted you can see a couple pictures from our lunch. After lunch we went walking around downtown. Kelly saw that were close to stores so we did some window shopping and ended up at the Lucky Brand Jeans store where Kelly bought herself a pair of Classic Rider jeans, which she declared she would not wear to work! We then relaxed in the hotel room for an hour and headed towards Market Street to catch the F-line to go and explore the Pier 39 / Fisherman’s Wharf area. We walked around Pier 39 and took some pictures of the Seal Lions and then we decided to check out the USS Pampanito, a WWII submarine on display. The sub was cool; it’s amazing how small it really was inside there. After that we had dinner at the Boudin Café, which unfortunately wasn’t a great experience because the waiter completely sucked! Lastly we took the Powell – Market cable car back to our hotel. As the sun was getting close to setting the fog and wind rolled in…
Day 2
This was to be our busy day. We had early bird tickets for Alcatraz, so we woke up at around 7 AM, cleaned up and headed to Pier 33 to get some breakfast and wait for our boat. It was cold, windy, and foggy; probably somewhere around 50 with 30 MPH gusts that made it feel lower. We were the first ones there and discovered there wasn’t anywhere to eat around Pier 33, so we walked about a mile down to Pier 39 and nothing was open there except for the coffee shop, we ordered something to drink and a quick bite to hold us over till lunch, and then walked back to Pier 33. When we arrived at Pier 33 to wait for the boat there were about 15-20 other people waiting now, we lined up and waited. Boarding was supposed to start at 8:30 but didn’t start till 8:50, and for some reason even though we arrived long before them, a large group of high schoolers from Oregon were allowed to board the boat before all the other passengers that were already lined up and waiting. The trip out to Alcatraz via boat exponentially added to the wind and cold as it appears that the wind on the bay itself is about 10-15 MPH higher in the open water, but we survived and made it to Alcatraz Island! It was nice being the early bird group because you don’t have to deal with big crowds because you are the first group to get there for the day. We explored the island and the prison for about 2 ½ hours, and headed back to the mainland. Being that we were starving we went to the Fog City Diner, which was just down the street to eat lunch. We looked over the menu and realized it was a somewhat upscale diner and it really didn’t have the type of food we were looking for, so we left. I had suggested to Kelly that sometime during the trip I wanted to go to this burger joint that I saw on the Food Network’s, Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, called Joe’s Cable Car, so she suggested we go there. The only problem with this decision is that it was on the completely other side of San Francisco, the area most tourists never see, South of the I-280. We hopped on the F-Line to get back to downtown, and then we took the BART (subway), unfortunately we got off 1 exit early, so after we figured out where we were we went back on BART to the next exit. From there we had to take the bus about 1 mile. The only problem then was that since I didn’t have the exact directions with me we had to look around to find it, fortunately that didn’t take too long. At Joe’s Cable Car, Joe grinds his own meat, but he doesn’t fire his bad waitress who is a ditz and completely out of it, I have a hunkering suspicion that she is married to our waiter from Boudin Café, because they both were terrible at providing service. The burger was great though, but due to the circumstances of getting there and the bad service Kelly wasn’t that impressed with it. After lunch (@2:30) we hopped on the bus back to our hotel to relax before our next adventure. I told you this was our busy day; we also had tickets for the San Francisco Giants vs. Arizona Diamondbacks game. I bought awesome tickets online from a season ticket holder through Stubhub. We were just passed first base on the field in the 2nd row! The seats were some of the best I’ve ever had; I got some great pictures of players, which look like I was right next to them. I wore my Dodgers hat and shirt to support my home town team, and some of those around me asked where we were from. I talked a lot to this one guy that has both Giants and A’s season tickets, he was pretty cool even though he gave me a hard time for being a Dodger fan. We left the game in the 6th, because Kelly was getting cold and we had had a long day. Some people yelled at me that the Dodgers sucked while I was leaving so I tipped my hat to them to show my appreciation… We took the bus back to downtown and since we were still sort of hungry ate some food at Lori’s Diner.
Day 3
Vacation is all about doing things you don’t normally do while you are not on vacation, so we treated ourselves to breakfast in bed with room service this morning! Kelly said it was probably the most expensive breakfast she had ever ate, but we didn’t care we were enjoying vacation. Today was our drive around do, so we called down for our car and drove North over the Golden Gate Bridge to Muir Woods National Monument to check out the tall redwood trees. It was pretty amazing that there is such a lush forest only minutes from San Francisco. After finishing our hike through the forest we went to Sausalito to eat at Fred’s Café, another burger joint. Another place with great burgers! After lunch we drove around Golden Gate Park. Kelly got scared at one point because on one of the roads out of the park there is a one lane tunnel, while we were waiting for the light to turn green for us to use the tunnel there was a couple standing near the light that asked us for a ride through the tunnel because pedestrian traffic is prohibited. We of course did not let them go with us, but Kelly was weirded out by the experience. We went back to the hotel and then back out adventuring San Fran via foot. I wanted to get a new camera bag so we went to the Wharf area to see what type of deal I could haggle at the camera stores there. I got my bag and then we took the bus up the hill to Coit Tower, if you looked at our pictures it’s the round tower that I took some pictures from. From Coit Tower you can get a fantastic view of the entire city. Then we went back to our hotel, via two busses. We cleaned up a bit and headed back out on the town. We took a bus to Little Italy to find an Italian restaurant that I read about in my Frommer’s book; unfortunately I didn’t realize that they were closed on Wed. so we went to another one that ended up being closed down! We were having really bad luck in Little Italy, but there was one more place that sounded good, Sodini’s Green Valley Restaurant. I’m glad the other places weren’t open because the food was fabulous, and there was a cool little record shop across the street we checked out afterwards. The record shop was filled with tons of stereo equipment and there were no records to be found, until we got to the back of the shop and realized there was a stairway leading underground to a basement that was filled with well over 50,000 records. The only problem was that the records appeared to be in no actual organization! This however did not stop me from finding a record for my dad that I knew he didn’t have, not bad for only the third record I flipped to. We then went back to the hotel and walked around the shops again. Kelly found a jacket she liked at the Ben Sherman store but she didn’t end up buying it, most of the other stores were already closed since it was getting close to 8:00 PM. We then walked over to this bar that someone on a message board told me about, called the Gold Dust Lounge, it was a great little place that were were able to sit down and order a ½ liter of Paulaner Hefe for myself and an Irish Coffee for Kelly, for only 8 bucks! After the Gold Dust we did my traditional pilgrimage to the Wharf to have a late night crab sandwich, which again wasn’t as good as the first one I ever had back in 2004, Kelly got some fried shrimp which were real good. We then went back to the hotel and called it a night.
Day 4
We slept in yet still ended up heading out to breakfast by 9:00 AM. We decided to end our San Francisco portion of the trip the same way were started it, going across the street and having breakfast at Sears Fine Food, where I ate 18 pancakes, but they were small silver dollar size Swedish pancakes, not huge ones… After that we went back to the hotel and packed up our things to head to our second vacation destination, Monterey.
(to be continued)
