Our Trip To San Francisco - January 26-28, 2007

Friday, January 26, 2007
We set out for San Fran in the wee early hours of the morning. We had something happen that I'd never seen happen before. There weren't enough people on our southwest flight to fill an "A" boarding group. Not only did we have our own row, there was no one in front of us, behind us or even in the row across the aisle. It was great! I snapped this shot as we were getting ready to make our descent into Oakland and the nasty pea soup weather that was waiting for us on the ground.















Once on the ground, we got on the BART and made our way into San Francisco. Sadly, the weather wasn't much better once we arrived. Here's the view from our hotel window. You should be able to see the water and the Bay Bridge behind the port building.















We had lunch with some of the people that work at Tango Diva, the web site that gave me my trip to Cancun several years ago. Then we took a short nap and it was off to the ferry for our night tour of Alcatraz.

Alcatraz Island




A cell with some of the actual items an inmate left behind.


Click here to see video of the doors being closed. The sound just echoes thru the whole place. At the end you'll hear our goofy guide starting to receipt some poem she had from a newspaper about what it's like to be in jail. She was really annoying, but the other guide was really awesome.

After Alcatraz it was time for dinner. Even though I'm allergic, we had to have some crab legs. We wandered over to Pier 39 and ate at The Crab House. It was so yummy! We sat along the water and enjoyed a fantastic meal. Here's the pic from their web site.













After dinner we wandered around looking for a place to have something sweet to end the night but because it's kind of the off season, we ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe. It was yummy but we knew that the next time it would be something from somewhere a little more local. It was off to bed for dreams of the next day's adventures.

Saturday, January 27, 2007
We got a rather rude awakening Saturday morning when the hotel's fire alarms went off at around 7 a.m. After that we hoped we'd throw open our curtains and see a beautiful, sun-shining kind of day. Well, that wasn't the case. It was an improvement over the day before, but it still wasn't an umbrella-free sort-of morning. Here's the same shot of the Ferry building. We're getting better - at least you can see the bridge and the water!















I decided to make the best of our foggy windows too!

We went and got some breakfast and realized it was finally starting to clear up. So we went back to the hotel to ditch our coats and decided to rent bikes to take a trip across the Golden Gate Bride and into Sausalito, where we'd catch a ferry back across the Bay. Here's a shot of the Ferry building at about 12:30 on Saturday - much better!

So now it was biking time. I had not been on a bike since I was about 12 years old, and I had no idea how unstable I'd be on a bike until I actually sat down on it. So this picture shows the highly optimistic me, unaware of what was in store for us.

The brochure said the trip would take about one to one and a half hours to go 8 miles, and it was easy to moderate. Whatever! The hills were hell. There was awful traffic, pedestrians everywhere and I cried as I went down the hill into Sausalito (yes, I admit it - I cried. I was so scared! There was barely any space on the side of the road and the traffic was awful!) As we left the wharf, I kept hollering to people "unstable biker, please get out of my way!" because I didn't think I'd be able to stop without hurting myself, them or both.





Two smiling (but very tired) faces on the ferry ride back.

A very welcome sign - this is the other side of that building I have included several photos of up to this point.

But the thing is, bruises and aches aside, the trip was great. It took us a little closer to four hours due to my many photo and ouch stops, but it was so wonderful. We thought for about a half a second about getting a tandem bike, but looking back we're so glad we didn't. We even got to see a few sea lions swimming in the bay while we were waiting for the ferry for the return trip. Of course, we were so tired by the end of the day we got Subway and went to our room and crashed. Talk about one extreme to the other for dinner. One night it's Crab legs overlooking the bay and the next it's subway in our room barely able to finish the meal without falling asleep.

Sunday, January 28, 2007
The last day here and of course today's the day we throw open the curtains and are greeted by a beautiful sky.
Unfortunately we didn't get back in enough time the night before to return the bikes so we wheeled them into our hotel room and we had to get back on them to ride them back to the Wharf. I was so not looking forward to it. But I sucked it up, got back on and just pushed thru. I was so happy to see the bike stand. I think I was off the bike before it stopped moving! We got some lunch (clam chowder in a bread bowl for Brian, fish and chips for me) and then set off to do some exploring.


The Sea Lions at Fisherman's Wharf


Ghiradelli Square
What you can not see in the photo below is the sheer nausea (at least for me) at totally stuffing ourselves silly with not one but two gigantic sundaes at the ice cream shop behind us.
Chinatown
See Brian at the very bottom of the picture? It's kind of dark.

See Brian in this one? He's under the arch on the right.


Coit Tower
Union Square
Posing by the pretty stuff in the hotel lobby

Closing thoughts
Here are a few things we observed in great quantities that I thought I'd share as my parting thoughts.

1) Snow boots: I would say three out of every five girls were in snow boots even though it was not nearly cold enough nor was it snowing. I know that Uggs are still popular, but those damn shoes were everywhere!
2) Starbucks: At one point, I was standing on a corner and we could see three of them from that one spot. Literally you were never more than a one to two minute walk from one at any given time.
3) Rudeness: It was everywhere. People shove you out of the way. The real cyclists were truly awful to me when I was slowly moving down the hill (and part of the time when I felt the need to walk the bike) because I was slowing them down.