San Francisco

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It's been quite a while since Fiona and I had a decent trip away together - I've been fortunate enough to get away to Costa Rica and Grenada (as Fiona keeps reminding me - God bless her), but poor little Fi has been stuck slaving away at work without any decent break (the three months in Jacksonville has been the longest time in one spot for five years). So it was long overdue that we planned to head to the west coast of the US for a big driving trip. Fi was super excited about this one as it had been a long time for her, and we haven't really taken much time for a big trip since Jacko and Jenn's wedding this time last year. The plan was to fly into San Francisco for a couple of nights before heading out to the Napa Valley then up the west coast to Vancouver and back to Seattle before flying home to Jacksonville. I'm currently writing this blog sitting in a Laundromat in Northern California, and we have already seen so much that we'll break the blogs up in three parts so they won't be an endurance event to read. This part of the blog will cover our adventures in San Francisco.

We've been pretty excited about heading to San Fran because one of our close friends, Alan, has recently moved from San Fran to Jacksonville. As a chef, Alan has his finger on the pulse when it comes to the food and wine industry, so we were front loaded with all the best places to dine and drink. We flew into San Fran at midnight on a Thursday and caught a taxi to our hotel. We'd had a stroke of luck with our hotel choice, as it was like a cross between a high end hotel and a youth hostel. We had shared toilets and showers, but the rooms and the facilities were all top class - the showers were all marble and granite finished and they were really really clean which was all Fi was worried about!

We woke early next morning as the west coast is three hours behind Florida and enjoyed a complimentary coffee and muffin from the hotel before stepping out to explore the city. We'd booked tickets on a hop-on hop-off double decker bus city tour, so first thing on the list was to catch the cable car to the other end of the city where the bus tour started. The cable car turn around point was only half a block down the road from the hotel. Even though we were early, there was an absolutely massive line up to jump on the tram. The bus tour didn't start until 10am giving us two hours to kill, so we decided to stroll up the hill for a bit and jump on the cable car at one of its stops a little further up the road.....bad idea. San Fran is famous for its hills, and it seemed like we were walking up every bloody one of them. Up and down, up and down we went, but it was a great way to see the city, and the views from the top of the hills were magnificent - SF is a very picturesque city. We eventually arrived, still on foot, at Fisherman's Wharf, the departure point for the tour, and jumped on the bus. Although these tours are obviously aimed only at tourists and they only take you to specific parts of the city, they are a great way to orient yourself and tick off all the crappy tourist stuff nice and quickly to allow you to see the real city - the pubs! We cruised around the town and after two hours we had seen most of the key tourist attractions except one - the Golden Gate Bridge.

San Fran is famous for its fog in the summer - just as Jamo about it, he's got a wide selection of photos of him standing in front of a fog covered Golden Gate bridge. However, we had fortunately been blessed with a crystal clear sunny day, and what better way to get out to the bridge than by bike (the bridge is a fair way out of town). We rented a couple of bikes and and lazily rode our way along the SF water front toward the bridge. There were sweeping views across the bay from the bridge around to Alcatraz and then to the city - it was stunningly beautiful and we had a perfect day to see it. After a few more up and downs we made it to the bridge, and I've gotta say it's pretty specy. We rode our bikes out onto the bridge, but as you would expect it was a zoo of pedestrians and cyclists all there seemingly to annoy the crap out of a few locals who actually need to use the bridge to get to work. After nearly running over quite a few small children we'd had enough and decided to keep riding the coastal road. After about another twenty minutes I realised (with some prompting from Fiona) that cycling may not be the easiest way to see the city of San Francisco, there just seemed to be a complete absence of flat ground. Fiona had a saying about cycling San Fran, what goes down must go up, and she wasn't wrong. We decided to cut our ride short and headed straight for Golden Gate Park, which is the largest city park in the world, and it is absolutely massive. In our New York blog, I talked about how big Central Park was, well this thing made central park look like a malnourished midget. It was beautiful riding through the bike paths, but you had to be careful because of the nine hole Frisbee golf course - random Frisbee's were flying around everywhere. By this stage, Fiona had just about had enough, and I knew the best place to take her to freshen up - the Toronada brewery.

It is pretty much accepted by most Australians that American beer is like 'having sex in a canoe', or in other words, ''f@#w$ing close to water'. Having had no choice but to endure this rubbish for the past 18 months I was pretty excited to try out a few of the many Microbreweries that San Fran had to offer. Fi was feeling pretty adventurous too, so most of the brewery stops were a lot like a wine tasting - start at the top with the light ones and don't stop until you've finished the hardest of the darkest. We really had some great beers, although two of the best and probably the most unique we tried were a Watermelon Wheat lager and a Golden Vanilla Ale. After a few refreshing ales, the cycling was much more interesting if not more dangerous, and Fiona had some renewed vigor for the hills. We decided it was time to return the bikes after making one more stop - Lombard St, the most crooked street in the world - well, it's not really, but anyway, it really is quite crooked. This crazy street was put in place as the hill was so steep that residents were having trouble getting their cars up and down the hill. The unfortunate part about this story is that we had to get our bikes up said hill - not happy Jan! After a lot of walking and not so much riding, we arrived at the top of the hill and pushed our way into the traffic and rode down the street - much more fun the riding up!! We returned the bikes and enjoyed a stroll along the very commercial and touristy Fisherman's Wharf. One of the attractions here is that a clutch of sea lions (I'm not sure what you call a group of sea lions, so I'm going with clutch) has taken over Pier 39 and they live on the floating pontoons. At times there can be up to 1000 of them hooting and carrying on. Unfortunately this little stop meant that our bus had stopped running and we were forced to walk home......up and down, up and down, all the way home. Fortunately along our way was a hotel with a roof top bar known as 'Top of the Mark'. So of course we stopped in to enjoy and incredibly overpriced Martini with sweeping views of the city. It was quite spectacular.

The next morning we woke and again enjoyed our complimentary coffee and muffin - the breakfast of champions. We then enjoyed a stroll down market street to the Saturday morning farmer's market. San Fran is very much the leader in the organic movement in the US, and the massive farmer's market is testament to this. Unfortunately San Fran is also the leader in the number of crazy weird people wandering the streets, and we encountered many of the latter before arriving at the market. In fact San Fran has a considerable homeless problem and you cannot walk the streets without coming across homeless people or panhandlers in some shape or form. Many of them seem to be either crazy or high on something, which is usually identifiable by them having conversations with themselves at volume. This makes walking around the city a very interesting experience. After enjoying the fares of the farmer's market, including the Pluot which is a hybrid Plum/Apricot, we strolled down to pier 33, the departure point for the tour to Alcatraz. We were pretty excited about this, and had fortunately booked it well in advance - the place was just a throng of people. We took the ferry across to 'The Rock' and enjoyed a brief tour with a Park Ranger before the self guided audio tour of the cell house. Long before it became a maximum security penitentiary, Alcatraz had been a military jail, and with the rise of organised crime in the years of the great depression and prohibition, it was converted into a jail. The self guided tour was absolutely outstanding. It was narrated by both inmates and prison guards and told the story of Alcatraz from both sides of the bars. It walked us through the cell house, telling the stories of 'the battle of Alcatraz', and the escape made famous in the Clint Eastwood movie aptly titled 'Escape from Alcatraz'. Interestingly, the tour also told the stories of the families who lived on Alcatraz, including the children who grew up there while their father's worked a prison guards. The prison was a pretty dark and lonely place, and solitary confinement would have been torturous. After wandering around that place you felt sorry for the inmates until you reflected on the reasons they were there in the first place! The trip to Alcatraz was really worth while - it is an interesting part of American history and is a must do if you visit this part of the US. After returning to San Fran we climbed Telegraph Hill to have a look at Coit Tower (yes, it is called Coit tower, and yes I was pissing myself laughing the whole time, and yes I am immature). This tower was left as a monument to San Francisco's fire-fighters and provides great views of the city and bay. We wandered down from Telegraph Hill through little Italy and stumbled across a 7 piece swing band playing in an open air pub, so what to do than sit in the afternoon sun and enjoy a beer while listening to some great swing music. After a couple we wandered up, down, up, down back home before heading out to another of San Fran's Microbreweries for dinner.

The next day was a busy one for us - a trip to Yosemite National Park. We had been looking forward to this trip for quite some time, but unfortunately our timing was not so great. Although we'd had some crystal clear days to enjoy the views of San Francisco, a bush fire was raging close to Yosemite, so when we arrived our viewswere somewhat obscured by smoke. This took the edge off the natural beauty of the park somewhat, although it was still really spectacular. Although we didn't have as much time in the Park as we would have liked, we really enjoyed the amazing scenery that nature has been carving out for millions of years. The drive from San Fran to Yosemite was also quite interesting - the scenery is very similar to Australia, right down to the eucalyptus they have introduced from home. It is quite dry in this region, however many farmers make their money from orchards. They use an amazing technique called grafting to grow plants that otherwise could not survive in this climate. Basically they grow local hardy plants and then cut them off just above the ground. They then graft new plants or trees they wish to grow onto the existing root system, and this allows introduced species to survive.

The following day was our last in San Fran. No trip for Fiona is complete without sampling a few of the local shops, so one handbag later we decided to catch a bit of culture and head to the SF Museum of Modern Art. This was an interesting mix of work, although my favorite had to be the work entitled 'White Canvas', which was a piece of canvas painted white - art my arse. There were some great pieces there, and Fiona and I both enjoyed wandering through the almost brand new galleries.

Having lived in the US for a while, there has been a few things from home we have missed, and Meat Pies is certainly one of them. San Francisco is known as a culinary mecca of the US, and it was only a matter of time before we stumbled across a shop selling pies. Now pies are a bit like sex - they don't really matter until you aren't getting any, so we were pretty excited to find this shop. After chowing down on some first class pie it was time for more shopping. Our Lonely Planet Guide book mentioned a warehouse size shop selling womens clothes which had Fiona salivating much in the same manner I had been over the pies. By this time, the weather had turned somewhat overcast and there was a biting wind blowing through the streets - someone had forgotten to tell SF that it was summer. We took off on the rather long walk to find the shops. After about two hours of floundering around without finding a single shop mentioned in the guide book it was time to get out of the cold and enjoy a beer - we had certainly earned it. The cold air forced us indoors that night - our Florida acclimatisation coupled with poor packing of clothes was working against us. We decided to head to the movies and see the new Batman movie - it was a very relaxing way to finish our time in San Fran.

Of all the cities we have seen, San Fran is now our favorite. It is a very eclectic city, you will see people from all walks of life in most suburbs, homeless, hippies, yuppies, ferals, all blending in together. It seems that in San Fran you will be accepted regardless of who you are. The architecture is very unique too - the bay windowed town houses give the city a look which can only be defined as being very 'San Fran'. But the highlight is the food and drink. Restaurants of every style can be found throughout the whole city, be it the Thai, Chinese or Vietnamese found in Chinatown or the more unusual Iraqi or Afghani food which can be found throughout various regions of the city. The industry is fed by wines from the Napa Valley and the numerous microbreweries dotted around the city make it a beer lovers delight. All these factors marry to make the city a delight for the palate, although I must admit it can be harsh on the bowel after a bit of Indian and a few Stouts!! So we drove out of San Fran heading toward the wine country of Napa Valley with Fiona singing 'I left my heart in San Francisco'.

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Photos

The Golden Gate Bridge
The biggest icon San Fran has to offer.

Iron Building
This building was just around the corner from our hotel and we got this photo at dusk.

Riding the bikes
Here's Fi riding along one of the wharfs with the city in the background.

Fi in front of the bridge
We finally made it up here after all the hills.....just!

San Fran Architecture
This style of architecture is typically San Francisco and is all over the city.

Up & Down again...
This hill was just a little too much!

Lombard St
What a tourist trap this place its - quite pretty though.

City Scape
The view of San Fran from the 'Top of the Mark'. The big pyramid is the Trans America building. Uuuuuugly!

In Solitary....
Dan in a Solitary confinement cell in Alcatraz.

The Cell Block
Here's Fi strolling down what was known as Broadway St between two of the cell blocks.

Coit Tower
We spent a lazy hour laying in the sun at the foot of Coit Tower - this was our view.

Yosemite National Park
The hazy view of the Yosemite Valley.

El Capitan
El Capitan is a climber's mecca and the most known landmark in Yosemite.

The San Fran MOMA
Here's Fiona fitting right in as one of the pieces of art at the MOMA.

Monkey Boy
Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, root no evil.

We left our heart in San Francisco
This is Fi and I in front of one of the many painted hearts around the city. This one was in Union Square.

Comments

[Sven]

Assessments about art...
You are dam right that a piece of canvas painted white is not art... you should have got a texta, drawn a stick figure on it and then asked them to buy it off you...