Advertisement
Published: November 24th 2010
Edit Blog Post
and so with flowers in ones hair....we stepped off the plane and onto the tarmac in San Francisco! My heart just skipped a beat, again! Oh how I love/loved San Francisco....twice in fact, and now that i'm reliving it, i'm loving it for a third. It really does have everything, wind, water (I was going to go somewhere along the lines of Captain Planet but...anyway) sand, city, hippies, shopping, music...the list is endless, oh and street cars. Every city needs street cars, and San Francisco has just that, and very comical street car operators....a big shout out to our driver (insert name here) who was every bit the entertainer. Oh San Francisco also has hills, and not just your average hills. More like your average 25% gradient hills and I'm sure Cynthia will be happy to vouch that one hill in particular, that HUUUUUUGEEEE hill on the way up to Lombard Street isnt one you'll forget any time soon....its a winner!
So here we were, four young Aussie (actually 3 young, one older, sorry mands!) girls in the big city of San Francisco...greeted by glorious weather, the smell of the ocean and the Green Tortoise Hostel in all of its
glory!
Now this is a must, take note all you future travellers....if you ever find yourself in the greater city of San Francisco, book yourself a couple of nights at the Green Tortoise Hostel, Broadway Street, it's in the red light district but thats no biggy, it all but makes up for its noisy location with....and i'm not telling fibs....free dinner Monday, Wednesday and Friday, free keg of beer Tuesdays, Free Breakfast, Free computers and wi-fi, free pub crawls, and free entertainment...sometimes you might be lucky to catch an all naked gypsy anarchist punk rock band!!
The staff are awesome, very helpful, there are resturaunts around every corner and the place has an awesome vibe....ohhh but dont go there if you dont like smoking, of any kind, unfortunately its free for all after 9pm, but it's definitely worth checking out!
We had quite a big posse of people there at one time, kt and her girls joined us on the second night, so here we were 10 aussies sitting around a table playing very loud and boisterous drinking games!
Wow, this isnt condensed by any means, but i'll keep going.
So after consuming our free dinner
in the ballroom we retired to bed early, a sight seeing tourist needs to be rested. Tuesday we woke up, devoured our free breakfast bagels and wandered down to Fishermans wharf....I'd woken up rather unwell and so took it easy. We stared in amazement at the seals down by the wharf, basked in the sun and then made our way to Union Square on the street car to window shop. Downtown is really nice, busy, but nice. Amazing shops....now I know why mum loved this place so much, and some pretty talented buskers.
A big night playing and drinking with the gang from Banff before retiring to our cosy/smelly/noise dorm room.
Alcatraz was on the agenda for Wednesday. It was really cool. Touristy but cool. The ferry ride alone was fun, but the whole history behind Alcatraz was really interesting; listening to an ex prison guard tell the stories of the many failed escape attempts was definitely up there!
Hmm what next, oh of course would you believe it?! we got another free dinner on Wednesday night and then just because we could, decided to join in on the pub crawl. I mean why not, we might just run
into another celebrity!
The girls retired to bed rather early, whilst I stayed out talking travel with some Sydney boys and one very interesting and extremely hard to understand Frenchman! Can people be interesting if your cant understand them?!
Thursday was our favourite day, almost of the whole trip. It was our lets get fit day. We hired bikes in the morning and pretty much rode around the entire city...donning our roadie t-shirts of course!
We were lucky enough to have absolutely, couldn't ask for better weather on this particular day, which made riding around a little hot and sweaty but made our photos turn out wonderfully!
We rode over the big red bridge, I can't remember the name of it?! haha the Golden Gate of course and down to Sausalito a gorgeous little sea side town, where we enjoyed lunch and some 'rest time' before returning to the city via ferry. Surely they couldn't ride any further I hear you ask?! Of course....we rode from the wharf to haight street in peak hour traffic, over to Alamo square where we took the essential photos of Mrs Doubtfire's House and the Full House strip before attempting to cruise back down
to Lombard Street! Still about 8-10 blocks from home, we did some serious leg work and intense cruising up and down hill after hill after hill until finally we returned home. The end.
Exhausted, we decided to eat out and so enjoyed another delicious meal at Sam Woe's (thanks to sandy for the tip) before hanging out in the ballroom (I just made that up, I can't remember what we did...but it sounds good)
Friday rolled around faster than we thought possible, and so after a terrible night's sleep for all four of us, we were up and about attempting to pack our things into our shrinking bags and make our way to the hire car, that hadn't yet been hired!
To cut a long story short, it proved rather difficult to find a hire car, on a rainy day in San Francisco, without having booked prior to arriving at the rental shop. However good old Enterprise Car Rentals (travellers tip!) came through with the goods and the rest is history. At three that afternoon we were all packed up and ready to roll, Nev was excited, Sharon was keen and the 'road trip' was underway, kind of.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.118s; Tpl: 0.017s; cc: 11; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0846s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb