"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."
Mark Twain
Truer words were never spoken. Somehow in the process of getting my son ready for Oklahoma and getting the rest of us ready to head north, I forgot to pack a sweatshirt or jacket for this trip. On the way up we encountered temperatures of over 100 degrees, but the high today in San Francisco was 61, and it didn't get there until late afternoon. More on that later.
We started our day with a 50 minute ferry ride from Larkspur landing (right by our hotel) to the San Francisco ferry terminal. Here are the ladies getting ready to board the Sonoma:
We arrived at the ferry landing which is at the end of Market Street, and is about 1.25 miles from Pier 39, the big shopping and tourist mecca. We hiked the distance in a very cold wind, and me in just a Hawaiian shirt with no jacket or sweatshirt. By the time we got to Pier 39 the priority was clearly buying something warm. My wife bought me a nice jacket (at a good discount) so I wouldn't have to spend the rest of the day shivering.
When we were in Washington a year ago, we took a tram tour of the city that was very useful in helping us get the lay of the land. We decided to do the same in Frisco and signed up for a 2 1/2 hour narrated tour on this bus:
It was well worth the money, and during the trip, they take you to many interesting parts of town. We had three photo stops - the first at the Palace of Fine Arts which was built for the 1915 Pan-American Exposition. It's a pretty impressive set of columns and structures.
The second and third stops were at the bottom and top of the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog shrouded the upper portions of the bridge while we were there, and the cold wind made things pretty chilly. The tour took us through the Presidio, which is now being fixed up and converted to civilian rentals. We also saw a home, right on the bay in at Cressy Field, which is owned by Mikail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union. He's got a pretty nice place with a killer view of the bay and the Golden Gate.
We also visited Pacific Heights, Japantown, Chinatown, Little Italy, the Financial District, Union Square, and a bunch of other neighborhoods. We got a lesson on Victorian homes in the process and saw a great many beautiful examples.
About the time we returned to Pier 39 the sun finally came out and the crowd had really grown. It was wall-to-wall among the 100+ shops and restaurants in there.We caught the 4:30 ferry back to Larkspur and tomorrow we'll head up the highway a ways to Sonoma State University for our visit. That should be interesting. My daughter is already enamored with Northern California, and I think we'll be spending quite a bit of time up here in the coming years.
Someone asked me how I feel about her coming up here among all these Northern California liberals? Absolutely fine - she'll straighten them out.
More tomorrow.
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