Advertisement
Published: October 15th 2012
Edit Blog Post
According to the Scott McKenzie song, you should wear flowers in your hair when you go to San Francisco...I had no flowers but my shampoo smelled kind of flowery...does that count??
So we hit the road up the highway, plugged in the ipod and selected our new America playlist, with a selection of great appropriate US related tunes!
Now these American highways are not renowned for frequent service stations, I had obviously overdone the coffee and an hour into the journey, desperately need to "go" ! Pulled off the highway to the next "town" we saw.....drove through as quickly as possible and straight back on the highway!! Axe murderer in hot pursuit...or so we imagined.
By this time, I had my legs crossed as tightly as one possible can when driving at 65 mph.
At last in the distance a little town with plenty of gas stations! Chose to fill up (and empty!) at The Wild Horse Cafe, King City, what a cool name!
Feeling relieved in many ways, it was back on the road. The traffic started to get busier as we approached San Francisco, we had an idea of the hotel we were headed
for and the Tom Tom came into it's own.
Now like most large cities San Francisco is incredibly expensive for hotels. I would like to at this stage warn all travellers against checking out Trip Advisor when choosing a hotel, it only makes you paranoid and brings out the OCD in any normal person, I mean 1 person hates the hotel, complains of bedbugs, roaches and rude staff, then the next person finds it spotlessly clean, comfortable with faultless service, who the hell do you believe??? Basically as long as bedbugs and roaches weren't mentioned, I can live with the rude staff, road noise and weak coffee.....I mean who cares if you didn't like the colour of the bedspread, it's not like you're buying the place!
So we arrived quite easily at the Travelodge By The Bay...not exactly by the bay, in fact a good 15 minute walk from the bay, but clean comfortable rooms and onsite parking, unlike many of the overpriced hotels in the Union Square area. Handy for public transport and the first thing we did was buy a 3 day MUNI pass, which you can use on all forms of transport, imcluding the famous
trolley cable cars.
Took a walk down to the Embarcadero and stood in a long line to take the trolley car to downtown for a look around the shops etc. These things are an amazing piece of engineering, up and down the most incredibly steep hills. Had a wander around town, showed Alex the crew hotel where I used to stay, 5 times the price of our little travelodge but the best location on union square.
Picked up the wrong cable car to get back to the hotel so got a cab back, a jolly Russian guy who recommended we didn't eat in any of the restaurants near the hotel....hmmm......so we walked a good 5 blocks to the area strangely known as Cow Hollow and found a huge selection of restaurant, again decided on the healthier option....NOT! The GBR restaurant, aka the gourmet burger restaurant! Ice cold beer and a delicious medium rare chilli burger on a wholemeal pitta (my nod to healthy eating) Blue cheese burger and onion rings for Alex. A very busy Friday night in the city by the bay, restaurant full of the people lucky enough to call this amazing city home.
Fat
and full called for another cab home! This time, our friendly driver was Dave, I am really a drummer in a band, not a cab driver...had a great lengthy rock music related chat with him, he practically had to throw us out of the car, asked ourselves how many F words can a person throw into a sentence...cool bloke though, must google his band BITE....
And no escalators
Advertisement
Tot: 0.342s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 11; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0573s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb