San Francisco

What a wonderful day we had in San Francisco. The weather was perfect for our visit (about mid 60's in the middle of the day) and clear blue skies! No fog to block our views of the Golden Gate bridge, Alcatraz or the city skyline!

We were in the car headed to S.F. at 8am and made it to the bridge around 9:30 or so. There is a $5 toll that you pay once you have crossed the bridge, but only when you are headed into the city, not when you are heading North back out of the city. We were very surprised all day at how little traffic there was and how few people were out and about. Again, a perfect day to visit as it gave us plenty of opportunities to check things out.

After parking the car we did a brief stop by Ghirardelli to check out what was to come later in the day for us and then we were off to ride the cable car. Very smart move as we were able to get right on and later in the day the line-up was very long and would have taken over an hour to get on. We took a short ride up the hill and got off at Lombard street, the "crookedest street" and walked our way down. It is a very pretty street that is well maintained and obviously, well visited. A few photos later we were on our way down to the waterfront to check out what was going on there.

We grabbed a bite to eat at Bitro Boudin where they have great sourdough bread, and as we discovered, some great clam chowder and salad too! It was fairly windy out at this point but we did decide to sit outside to eat since Boudin had a nice little spot by the fire which helped make the wind tolerable. Then we were off to begin our Segway adventures!

Wow, we had a great time on the Segways. At first it feels a little strange to step on and find your balance and whatnot, but you get the hang of it really quick and it starts to be really fun. There were only seven of us in our tour group so we made it through the training rather fast and were off on our tour. Due to the training being so fast we got extra time at the first stop on a wide concrete pier where we were taken out of training mode and allowed to zip around as much as we wanted. Yay, that was awesome!

Next we went on our official tour around the city and as our tour guide said, we were no longer tourists in the city, we had indeed become a tourist attraction. We had our picture taken quite a few times and a lot of people just staring at us in wonder. There was one point where we were headed downhill and the Scottish woman in our group couldn't slow herself down. She zipped by us pretty fast saying "help me" as she went by. We weren't sure exactly what we could do to help, but thankfully our tour guide was able to help her at the bottom of the hill. Now, it was not so funny at the time since it was a bit concerning, but we are having quite a laugh about it now!

After some more fun adventures and sight-seeing the tour unfortunately came to an end. What? You mean we have to walk places again? Bummer for us! The Segways had become second nature to us by now and we didn't want to give them up. But we complied and treated ourselves to a yummy sundae at Ghirardelli's ice cream shop! Then we had to go walk off the sundae and we hit the waterfront again. We found a sight-seeing boat offering one hour tours that would go out under the Golden Gate bridge and around Alcatraz and that sounded interesting so we signed up for that and headed out into the very windy waters and got some great views of the bridge, Alcatraz, and the city. Once back on land we went back to the car and headed to dinner. After a nice meal at a place called "Catch" we were back on the road to Santa Rosa. It was a long and fun-filled day so we decided to wait to do the blogging and instead went right to bed! ~Heather