San Francisco - June 30th to July 3rd

On Sunday morning we headed over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco on our way to the meeting, and were treated with a clear view of the bridge (quite rare in summer apparently, which we soon discovered was definitely the case!) – had a great meeting with Adrian & Petrea originally from New Zealand, and Logan from Alberta, Canada, who’d been to Australia a few times including living there and visiting our families!

Common view of the bridge - driving over it a couple of days later...

We had lunch with Adrian & Petrea & kids, Logan, & some other kiwi cousins who were visiting (Trevor and Lachlan Murray, cousins of Adrian), in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, which was nice – is a massive park in the middle of the city which goes for about 50 street blocks and has SO much stuff in it! A bit like Central Park in New York City. We went up a tower to view part of the city, saw a folk music concert, bought an ice cream, saw some bison in a paddock and much more, then headed to the mission across the bay with Logan.

Typical large houses on a street near the meeting - the small houses are tiny looking from the road!

Part of the city view from the (free) tower in the park

We stayed with Logan in his studio apartment in the city for 3 nights, and it was great to catch up with him again! We picked our timing pretty badly as Logan’s wife Heidi and 9-10 month old son Nolan were away visiting Heidi’s parents, but hopefully we’ll be able to catch up with them again while we’re still over here.

Logan was a fantastic tour guide and on a day off from work on the Monday, showed us lots of the main sights in San Francisco – including some of the fantastic food places! There are SO many in such a close area, all in walking distance from their apartment, and from what we’ve seen, they’re all so good AND cheap! Went to a local Indian restaurant, Pluto’s sandwich and salad, Crepevine (possibly one of the nicest meals I’ve EVER had, so good in fact that I had it again for breakfast a couple of days later!), and a few different gelato and ice cream places, including Smitten, where they make the ice cream in front of you using liquid nitrogen to freeze it quickly – was so good too!

About to dig into some salted caramel ice cream from Smitten.. mmmmmmm

Logan drove us through a few of the different neighbourhoods around the city, some of which are pretty distinct… And then we visited the San Francisco Ferry Building (area of shops etc), then the Fisherman’s Wharf area (very touristy, but with a lot of things I’d wanted to see, including Pier 39 where the sea lions hang out – but this day there was just one massive sea lion there!). We would have loved to do a tour of Alcatraz (previously the high security prison, out in the water about a mile away from the city), but didn’t realise it was so popular that we would have had to book it about 4 weeks in advance! So we settled for seeing it from the wharf instead – pretty impressive sight to see and think about the prisoners hearing city life while in their cells, and even having hot showers so they couldn’t get accustomed to the cold water if they somehow managed to start an escape.

The Bay Bridge (similar to the Golden Gate but actually a lot longer and just not red)

Very exciting shop :) (with close supervision by Lawrie...)

Another lolly shop (sorry I mean Candy store) at Fisherman's Wharf, selling saltwater taffy

Piano stairs!

Lawrie & Logan in front of Alcatraz

Alcatraz

The lone sea lion on the usually crowded Pier 39

Steep streets that the cable cars go on

We went to a couple of different places to view the Golden Gate Bridge from, which was cool, as it was a really clear day (again, pretty rare with the fog that comes sweeping in during summer!), and wandered through parts of Golden Gate Park again. We caught a train/tram (tram above ground, stopping at all the traffic lights etc, but like our trains at home when it went underground) into the Civic Centre area of the city, and went through the impressive City Hall building with all of its detailed architecture.

Then after our absolutely delicious dinner at Crepevine (I highly recommend the ‘Philly’ crepe!) we headed to a different part of the city with Logan and the Murrays (from New Zealand) and one of the friends, Ben, for a game of soccer (with the guys who Ben usually plays with – just for fun, but pretty serious games with high skill levels!) – as the fog rolled in to stay… Couldn’t see when it changed from day to night, and it just got COLD! And was still like that when we got up the next day – seems it can stay that way for days at a time, and is most common in summer – but just a couple of miles away over the other side of the bay, or even just over the water, is a whole different story with hot sunny weather!

All in all, San Francisco was a great place to visit, and would be a cool place to live! With fantastic company and great food, as well as heaps of places to see, I’d highly recommend it!! We could have spent a lot more time there exploring… But on to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom we went for the day with Trevor, Ryan and Lachlan Murray, for a day of adrenaline (or just plain fear?!) filled fun! J Then back to the city for the night and a gigantic breakfast at my new favourite restaurant with the Murrays before heading back inland.