San Francisco

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Another fluffy trip... This will be the third in the last year... Shauna is getting her way too much.

We headed right to Napa upon arrival in San Francisco. I'm not sure how renting a car in the US could be any easier or cheaper. I was able to rent a car for $15/day with unlimited miles... I could barely get downtown in a cab for that price. The drive out to Napa took us a little over an hour, but it was a nice drive after we left greater San Francisco.

Yountville is small and quaint, but it is right in the middle of wine country. If one loves food and wine, this is the place to be. The culinary side reminded me in some ways of Antigua with a combination of great produce and an avante guarde culinary culture. There was actually a culinary institute further down the valley.

Dinners in Yountville and San Francisco were for the most part fantastic and the highlight of our trip. It is incredible what an iPad combined with Urbanspoon, Trip Advisor, Open Table, and Google Maps can do in terms of finding the right restaurant to eat at. One almost feels like a local with these tools. Reservations are no longer a concern, because I have that much more confidence with my ability to find the right restaurant and the right hotel with these tools. Shauna couldn't be happier.

Wine tastings are the range in the valley. With a few hundred wineries, everyone is trying to cash in on wine's popularity. Even with small samples of wine, I didn't see many people spitting out their wine. The question then is -- who's driving? Where are the checkstops? Not everyone was using a bus...

The highlight of the Napa trip was a drive we took on Sunday through the valley. I can only wonder what farmland must go for here. I did a rough calculation and it seems to be one-hundred times what Saskatchwean farmland goes for. Napa's fate all changed in the mid-70's when a Napa wine beat out France's best in a blind European taste test.

We randomly stopped in St. Helena for a couple of hours. It is a nice quaint town with a historical main street. Lot of stores had free samles, so we munched our way down the street.

The other highlight of the afternoon was a stop at a old watermill. It actually still works and was used for milling grains. Wheat use to once dominate the valley. It was interesting seeing how the mill worked and the actual power of a water mill.

On Monday, we headed to San Francisco for the rest of the week. I found a nice Victorian B&B in the Mission District. This is predominately a hispanic neighbourhood, where a walk down Mission Street could be easily mistaken for a street in San Salvador or Guatemala City. What was interesting though was how the area changed a night. It was quite the contrast. At night, the shops would all lock up and these funking restaurants would light up. The Mission District is certainly a neighbourhood in transition. Best of all, it was only two subway stops away from downtown. The 10-minute walk to the subway station was more than we would have liked, but it was always a colourful walk.

The Inn San Francisco is probably the largest B&B I have been to with close to a dozen rooms. Breakfast was a buffet but huge. I was always off to good start after that breakfast. The only issue we had was with the bedroom. The queen size bed wasn't overly comfortable and the sink and toilet were at opposite ends of the room, which made it kind of noisy at nights. Other than that we enjoyed our stay and we got really comfortable with using the hot tub before bed.

Outside of a day of shopping, which was nicely centered around Union Square, we wandered through a number of the neighbourhoods. The Haight and Castro districts were the most unique. There was no doubting one was in Castro by the huge Gay Pride Flag at Market Street and Castro.

We enjoyed the cable cars and they reminded me of the one we took through Santa Teresa in Rio de Janeiro. They are sure popular with tourists. San Francisco is also using some refurbished streamlined street cars from the 1930's along some of the more popular tourist routes (e.g. the wharf and Market Street). We picked up a three day bus passed. While it barely payed for itself, it made using the transit much easier.

On Friday, we went to the Golden Gate Park, which I don't recall visiting on my last visit. One could describe it as San Francisco's Central Park. We rented a tandem bike for an hour and did a complete loop of the park. I wanted to head to the Golden Gate Park, but my Princesses said that was enough.

The weather was a bit cool, but it was sure much nicer than back home. It is interesting that it really never gets that warm here.

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