San Francisco

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Arriving in San Francisco was a different experience to our last visit 5 years ago. Instead of being surrounded in fog we arrived in a massive heatwave and blue skies. So our first day of exploring saw us hire bikes (as the tourists do) and bike over the Golden Gate Bridge. Views of the bridge were unbelievable! The bike ride was good fun too, especially once we got over the bridge and it was all downhill to Sausalito. On our way to the bike rental place we stumbled across the part of Lombard Street that has the famous zig-zags on it. Later on, we rewarded our aching legs (mainly due to me wanting to cycle an extra few miles to see the baseball ground which ended up being pointless as we couldn’t really see any of it) with a trip to Chinatown for tea where the Moon Festival was in full swing.

The next morning we got a pleasant surprise as our AirBnB host cooked us breakfast which was awesome and found out that her husband raced paragliders. I would definitely recommend staying in the East Bay area rather than Downtown – better views and a lot kinder on the wallet! We took the train back Downtown (along with a load of Oakland Raiders fans) for what we planned to be a lot more relaxing amble around San Fran. We ended up walking pretty massive distances (in blistering heat!) to Pier 1 and Fisherman’s Wharf. Pier 1 had an awesome market and Fisherman’s Wharf had loads of tourists and some sea lions. We spent a while in an uber trendy sports bar watching the Raiders game and drinking local beer.

We followed this up with a trip to Union Square. Nearby was a Macy’s with a Cheesecake Factory on the top floor. On Ebba’s instructions, it was decided we had to try the only GF friendly cheesecake that it had to offer – if anyone can eat a slice on their own I would be dead impressed (subsequent research found that the slice was well over 1,100 calories…) but Vicks was the happiest girl in the world after demolishing more than her fair share.

We ended up going to Berkeley, a famous university town, in the evening and headed towards the Telegraph Area (reliving our student days). There were loads of cool places to eat and dead cheap too. We found an awesome Thai place which (again) marked GF on the menu! A good day for food.

It was a little bit gutting to leave the next morning as this is by far our favourite US city so far (maybe on a par with New York…)!

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