San Francisco - day 4 (and trip details)

Our last day in San Francisco wasn't overly exciting - it was a clean up day, in a sense. We hadn't made it to the Mission, the Castro or the Painted Ladies. We realized though that since we were up so early and there was a BART station close by, it made sense to just check out early and walk towards the Painted Ladies, and then down.

On our way, we saw the civic centre (and city hall).

City Hall

 What a gorgeous building! I'm not sure what's up with the kind of weird looking trees, but maybe in the spring and summer they look nice. For now, they just look a bit funny!

After that, we walked to Alamo Park to see the Painted Ladies. I wasn't really blown away by this 'attraction' .. They looked nice, but so did most of the houses in San Francisco! Ahh well. Took the obligatory tourist photo and headed on to the Castro and Mission.

Painted Ladies

With the last few things seen and done, we headed back towards the Castro and Mission districts where we wandered around, ate a bit more and headed to the airport.

The details:
We stayed at the Mosser Hotel. It was cheap, really central and really cute. I like old-style buildings with big trim and old doorknobs.. this place fit the bill. We opted for the shared bathrooms mainly because neither of us care that much, and it was cheaper.

Some of our favourite restaurants from the trip are:
Cassava - a really cute cafe in the Richmond area. We had a grilled veggie panini and a salad, both of which were awesome!
Restaurant Lulu - our fancy dinner out. This restaurant was fairly close to our hotel. We shared some seriously amazing and tender beef and a grilled eggplant pizza.
Tropisueno - this was my favourite of the trip. Also close to our hotel, this was authentic Mexican.
Boudin Bakery - This is San Francisco's original sourdough bakery. We headed there for lunch after going to Alcatraz. Pretty awesome sour dough, and clam chowder in a sourdough bowl (I didn't try it..).

I forgot to mention that I searched "San Francisco" in the Apple store before I left, just to see if there might be anything useful. I found this "Top 25 San Francisco" and loved it. It worked while in airplane mode (map included!), had prices, etc. It was really useful, and I will definitely be looking for another similar app next time we travel!

San Francisco - day 3

Today we took the bus to Golden Gate Park. We planned to spend the day in the park and at the Golden Gate bridge. This part of San Francisco is actually larger than downtown, but our map was condensed so that what 2.5 miles looked twice as big as 4 miles..

We started off in the Japanese Tea Garden (free on Mondays before 10am!). We wandered around for a little while and then had some tea.

Pagoda in the Japanese Tea Garden

The weather was gorgeous, and being in such a quiet place in the morning was quite peaceful.

Japanese Tea Garden

Japanese Tea Garden

From there, we wandered west through the park toward the ocean. We saw a herd of bison (yep! in a park, in San Francisco..), many ponds and lakes, and along some nice trails.

Windmill at the west end

We came out near this windmill and then headed straight for a gorgeous beach..

Gorgeous beach!

From there, we wandered east to find some food, and eventually a bus to take us to the glorious Golden Gate Bridge.

Bridge!

 I'm still not over how gorgeous this bridge was, how amazing the weather was for our trip.. or how good it felt to be away from home in February!

More bridge.

 We walked under, hoping to be able to walk across on the west side of the bridge (to get photos of bridge + city) but for some reason it was closed.

Underside..

 We walked to the first tower on the east side of the bridge. It was pretty busy..

Cables.

 Gorgeous though. As awesome as it was to see this with clear blue skies, I think that it would be pretty neat to see it covered in fog, too. Next time, perhaps!

San Francisco - day 2

Sunday was another gorgeous day (what more would you expect from California?!). We had booked tickets to Alcatraz for 10 am, so we decided to take the cable car assuming it would be less busy than other days. We missed one and ended up waiting for the third because every other car went where we wanted it to.

Cable car!

 When we first started exploring on Saturday we really thought people were joking about the hills. Where we started out, it was mostly flat with a little bit of slope. About half an hour later we understood..

Looking straight out from the cable car.

 Hilly.. yes. Just a little!!

We finally made it on the boat to Alcatraz, where we were rewarded with gorgeous views of the city.

San Francisco!

About 10 minutes later, we had a close up of Alcatraz.

Alcatraz. The penitentiary is at the top.

A tree!

With your ticket to Alcatraz comes an audio tour of the cells, which talked about some of the bigger events in the history of the penitentiary, as well as the layout and what all of the different functions of the rooms were. It was a good tour, aside from being with a ton of people and having it sort of back track to places where we'd already been once. Made for quite a few people standing in the hall, staring at a clock..

Cell in Alcatraz

San Francisco - complete with hills!

The view of the city from Alcatraz was gorgeous - tall buildings, hills... very pretty.

One of the wardens started gardening at Alcatraz, and many of the gardens still remain. There is (of course) a friends of the garden type of volunteer association. 

Geraniums, wire and the ocean (with Angel island in the background)

Flowers looking up (the hill..) at the penitentiary.

Alcatraz was a fairly interesting place, although the park rangers mentioned it's history aside from the penitentiary, there was not very many signs that really pointed it out. Obviously the history of the penitentiary with Al Capone, a few escapes and all that was way more interesting.

We spent the rest of Sunday wandering the east side of San Francisco and had a relaxing evening before heading for some awesome food.

San Francisco, day 1

This past weekend R and I took an extended long weekend to head to San Francisco. I've wanted to go there for a while - the rest of my family and a few friends have been and raved about what a cool place it was, and really, almost anywhere south of us has better weather than we do right now!

We woke up insanely early for a vacation (ready and out before 9am!) and were astounded with the gorgeous sun. It was warm too, like that first warm spring day where you can't decide if you need a sweater or not, but it's sunny so you try desperately to suck it up in a teeshirt.. definitely one of those days.

We started our San Francisco adventures by wandering through Chinatown.

Chinatown dressed up for Chinese New Year

Chinatown

The gates to Chinatown

From there, we wandered through town, looking for the cable car museum and Lombard Street. We were enjoying the weather and the opportunity to see a different city.

Union Square

A cable car! So picturesque

I think this symbolizes San Francisco quite well; hills, cute houses and a cable car.

We ended up wandering a lot further than we thought the first day, and decided to go see Coit Tower. I'm sure there's lots of interesting history behind it, but it's (in my opinion!) kind of an ugly building! The bottom floor is interesting because many artists have painted scenes from Californian life, which is kind of cool. We didn't end up paying the $7/person to go to the top.

Coit Tower

We eventually made it to Lombard Street, the self-proclaimed crookedest street in the world. I think it has 9 curves in one block. Kind of insane! It was pretty entertaining to watch people driving down taking photos and videos of themselves.. We chose to walk (way cheaper than renting a taxi, even for a block!).

Lombard St

That's the end of day 1. We did lots more, but that's enough to get an idea :)

Snowshoe Trail: Black Mountain Plateau

Last weekend six of us headed to Cypress to try out a new snowshoe trail. We found it on the BC Parks trail update - it wasn't one of the ones that shows up on blogs.


I tried out a new app during this trip too (see below!).

Black Mountain Plateau

EveryTrail - Find trail maps for California and beyond

The hike starts out by going left instead of right at the first fork in the trail (going right will take you to the Bowen Island Lookout trail, St. Mark's Summit, and eventually the Lions.. best for the summer!). The first hour or so is switchbacks, but at the top is a nice plateau with lots of little hills and fun places for sliding. If you haven't snowshoed before and you are .. smart enough to climb up a hill, make sure you bring a crazy carpet, plastic bag or are wearing snowpants that are slippery enough to slide down on. It's so worth it!

At the top of the hill, there's a nice 1.6km loop trail that was really fun. Small hills, both up and down, good places to slide and generally beautiful scenery. After walking the loop, we stopped to have some tea, hot chocolate and to feed the adorable gray jays and somewhat intimidating raven.

The trip down was really fast - we slid on our butts/crazy carpets for as long as could, and walked the rest of the way. I think going down more than made up for having to walk up.

Stats:
Time: 3 hours (including a 15ish minute snack break)
Length: 4.7 km return

A new beginning..

I've decided that I'm going to change what I post on here, which means cleaning up stuff that I no longer really care about. That will include my book updates, updates on my "25x25" list, and my running stuff. From here on out, I'll post about books only when I feel that the entire world should read them and it will mainly focus on hikes, things that challenge me, and the occassional photo. Hopefully it'll be more interesting, and a better resource for myself.