Monday, October 4, 2010

We love San Francisco! except for parking and 2 tickets in 3 nights


postcard from San Francisco come and join us!

old street cars


bright colors of San Francisco neighborhoods

welcome to San Francisco Chinatown

When we arrived we instantly fell in love with San Francisco. It that feeling you get when you visit a friend in a interesting neighborhood that you can see yourself living in, thats how San Francisco felt to us. We got there late afternoon and lucky we got parking right in front of the hotel or so we thought. After checking-in we took a shower and set our for to San Francisco’s Chinatown. We took transit because we didn’t want to give up our parking spot and plus the transit system was cheap and very convenient. As soon as we step into the transit system its apparent how large the chinese community is here they have chinese announcements over the speaker system. Entering Chinatown you are instantly taken to Hong Kong or a southern china city. After about 3 hours of taking pictures and window shopping we found a restaurant at first we thought it was cheap but ended up spending $38.00 kind of got rip off they said all prices needed to add an extra $1 for dinner price.

Next day we rode our bikes around the city that has plenty of bike lanes but some of the streets are pretty steep. We rode for about 6 hours taking in the beauty of the city Golden State Park was a calming place in the middle of the busy city. later we arrived at ocean beach what a site the breeze was cold and smell of the ocean air was clean. Finally we got to marina and Fisherman’s Wharf. We went to pier 33 to buy some Alcatraz tickets they were sold out for the day so we purchased for the next day at a cost $26.00 each. Its pretty expensive for only a 15 min boat ride to the old prison while on the rock, we did a headset tour that was included in the price. A lot of neat stories about prison that is now run by National Park services.


Alcatraz "the rock" locals call it was the most secure prison of its time now a Nation Park

docking at the Rock port lines of people waiting to go to prison

Final day we had to drive over the Golden Gate bridge and what a day to do it. The fog that day
was something out of a movie. We park the sienna and rode our bikes on the bridge what an experience the fog was so think that day we couldn’t see the water from the bridge and the sound of the fog horn vibrated the bridge.

look at that fog, the temp on the bridge had to 15 c. lower than on the land



riding over the bridge was really fun experience

San Francisco is such an attractive city with all its culture, entertainment and interesting people but we left with a soured feeling. The 2 tickets we got on the same place for 2 different reasons was crazy plus the last night we spent over an hour looking for a parking spot finally finding one 4 blocks away from our hotel. Saying good bye to San Francisco is hard but its time to travel south to Los Angeles.



all aboard! we had to try the old cable cars $5 one way trip its seems more for tourist now