Abbie's Real Life Blog

This is part four of a four part report on my recent trip to California.  It’s been fun to relive the trip this way.  Part one is here, part two is here, and part three is here.  And you can see more pictures from this trip as I process and upload them on my Flickr page here.

I made customized Google maps for each leg of the trip, and the one for this part is

available here.  This covers my walking trips around the city of San Francisco.

The airport Super Shuttle dropped me off at the hotel, the Sheraton in Fisherman’s Wharf, on Sunday morning (Day 7) after I returned the rental car, and I spent a few minutes unpacking things and organizing chargers and gadgets before setting out on my afternoon excursion.  I planned most of this a few weeks before, so I knew I would get to see what I wanted to see in the city.

Fisherman’s Wharf is a very touristy and very flat area in the northeast corner of the city of San Francisco.  It is home to most of the chain hotels and restaurants that I saw while I was in the city, and generally the area is not very attractive.  When I originally pulled up to my hotel, I thought it looked like a dump, but inside was very pretty and fresh and recently renovated.  They just didn’t put much effort into the outside.

Anyway, the location of Fisherman’s Wharf is great if you want to take a ferry to Alcatraz, ride a cable car, or eat at the International House of Pancakes, but it is not that great for public transportation to other parts of the city.  It’s an uphill walk in almost every direction, and no subways or light rail run there.  You have to learn to use the bus system, or you can just ride the F line of historic streetcars that run a very long route between Fisherman’s Wharf and the Castro District, though I didn’t know about these until later.

I had gone to a transit site and printed off an itinerary of buses to take to various destinations, the cost of each, etc., and planned to use it to get to the Haight-Ashbury district, where my personal walking tour would begin.  However, the transit site told me to get off at a stop that didn’t exist and I ended up very lost in a southern area of San Francisco.  But I caught another bus that took me to another bus and I was back on my way.

Haight-Ashbury was pretty much how I expected it- very wrapped up in its hippie identity and there were many tourists and people on the streets.  I didn’t do much shopping, but I did duck down side streets to get a look at the Grateful Dead house and Janis Joplin’s house, both of which are nearby.  That part of Haight-Ashbury is also known as the Upper Haight, mostly because it is at the top of a hill.  Haight Street then runs down the hill and that neighborhood is known as the Lower Haight.  I walked from the Upper Haight to Lower Haight, but turned off on Divisidero before I saw much of Lower Haight, and I continued on to the Castro District. 

The Castro, as you should know, is a the major gay neighborhood of the major gay city of San Francisco.  And it was very, very gay there, but not very lesbian.  I expected that too, as most famous gay neighborhoods are home mostly to gay men.  The lesbians usually live out in the suburbs with kids and dogs.  I was very interested in how much more gay the Castro is than Dupont Circle in DC, which is not that gay at all.  There were lots of people out and about in the Castro, and they all seemed to know each other, and they all seemed to be calling to each other across the street, and walking around on the nice sunny afternoon.

Did I mention it was sunny?  It was downright hot on Sunday too.  Saturday had been very warm and Sunday was very warm.  I was wearing a t-shirt with a long-sleeve shirt on top of it, and I should have shed it when I started to get warm but didn’t.  Other women were walking around bare-shouldered in teeny tiny shorts and sandals, and there I was in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt.  But I was vindicated later.  Oh yes.

Castro and Haight-Ashbury were also notable to me in that both were almost completely devoid of brand name chains.  No Baby Gaps, no Abercrombie & Fitch, no Hot Topic, no Blockbuster.  There was a very popular Ben & Jerry’s in Haight-Ashbury (appropriate) and a Starbucks in the Castro (also appropriate) and that’s it.

I walked down 18th Street from the Castro towards the Mission neighborhood, where I had picked out a vegetarian restaurant and also intended to stop by some stores.  For instance, I’d wanted to go to Good Vibrations since I read about it in college, and it was pretty cool.  I also stopped at a store called Therapy and bought my sister a couple of things (she took care of the dog while I was on the trip), and then had dinner at Cha-Ya, a vegetarian Japanese restaurant that was very good.

From one of the wrong buses earlier, I’d seen the F line of streetcars and noticed that they were headed back to Fisherman’s Wharf, so I walked back through the Castro to the corner of Castro St. and Market St., and caught one of those to the hotel.  It was while I was waiting for that that the clouds started to roll in and the temperature must have dropped about twenty degrees with a good cool breeze.  I thought it was great because I had been pretty warm all afternoon, and I was dressed for it, but all the women in their sleeveless shirts were clutching their arms and shivering.

I got back to the hotel and went to bed almost immediately.

The meeting started the next day, on Monday, April 14.  That’s the whole reason I was in San Francisco- for a meeting.  It certainly cut down on my available time for strolling with a camera, but I was ok with sitting for a little while for the first time in a few days.  In fact, I even slept in until 6:30am on Monday morning!  My boss met me there; she also had been touring around the Bay Area for the past week with some of her family.

After the meeting ended at 5:30pm, I had the plan to take a cable car to Chinatown and walk back to Fisherman’s Wharf through North Beach.  My plan included a vegetarian Chinese restaurant, but I didn’t end up eating there.  I did some shopping (Canton Bazaar, which proved irresistable even though everything looked pretty cheap there, and the Chinatown Kite Shop) and then realized that if I stopped for dinner, I’d end up walking back through unfamiliar neighborhoods after dark, and I don’t like to do that.  So I continued on down Grant Avenue and then backtracked a little up Columbus Avenue to City Lights Books, where I bought some books and a canvas bag emblazoned with the logo.

And then through North Beach I continued back to the hotel, with a stop at the Trader Joe’s on Mason Street for a few dinner things.  I had made my way through most of my grocery stores by this point.  I  burned DVDs (and got very into the first part of a newish BBC production of Jane Eyre on Masterpiece Theatre, which I later bought and watched in full).

On Tuesday morning, I got up early and went to walk around Pier 39 without all the tourists around.  I thought the Boudin Bakery would be open, but it didn’t open until 8am.  Instead, I took some pictures from Pier 39 of Alcatraz and the sea lions and then went back to the hotel.  We had another full day of meetings, and the stupid hotel conference room chairs were just really uncomfortable by the end of the second day.  I had to get up and down several times just to walk around a little bit.

After they let us go at 5:30pm, I decided to walk back over to the Hyde Street cable car route to take a picture of the cable car and maybe one at the top of the famous Lombard Street.  The day before, I’d put into practice some advice I’d heard: don’t wait at the bottom of Hyde Street with all the tourists to ride the cable car.  Walk a few blocks up and then you can just hop on the next car.  When I did that on Monday, it worked perfectly.  This time I decided to walk all the way up Hyde Street to the top of Russian Hill.  That was quite a hike.  It’s one steep hill, but it’s got beautiful views from the top of it.  From there, I caught the cable car to Union Square and walked on to my reservation at Millennium Restaurant, a famous and expensive vegan restaurant in the lobby of the Hotel California.  It was delicious and pricey and worth it, because when do I ever get to eat at fancy expensive vegan restaurants?  Never.  So that was good.  It was a great experience in a beautiful restaurant with fantastic food.  After that, I got a little lost trying to find the right bus back to Fisherman’s Wharf and ended up walking around Union Square and a bit of the Financial District.

On Wednesday, we had a half-day of meetings.  We might have left on Wednesday afternoon, but Midwest Airlines only has one flight each day direct from San Francisco to Kansas City, and we would have missed the whole day of meetings to catch it.  So we got an extra night.

My plan for my last day was the Presidio District and the Golden Gate Bridge, from the south this time.  I walked as far as Fort Mason and spent some time taking pictures of California poppies before I got on a bus to the Palace of Fine Arts, which turned out to be under construction.  I walked into the Presidio and got very lost and very confused as to that area, which appears to be a former military fort that is now rented out to various organizations and people, none of whom are big into the whole concept of signs and directions.  I had had the plan of getting something to eat, but the places I found weren’t open.  Eventually I just ate my emergency fruit leather and found another bus that took me to the Visitor’s Center next to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I had not intended to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, but the opportunity presented itself and I did.  Well, I made it to the second pillar and then didn’t feel like walking all the way to Vista Point on the north end, so I turned around and came back.  It was another beautiful afternoon, clear skies, and the sun was in a good position.  I took many photos.

When I reached the end of the bridge, I wanted to go to Baker Beach, but wasn’t sure how to get there, so I ended up hopping on a random bus and getting off in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere.  Then I jumped over a guardrail and went down a narrow path until I came out on what was indeed Baker Beach.  It’s apparently a nude beach, but it was too cool for that, so the photographers were out in force.  At least, they were later.  When I got there, I headed directly down to the northernmost part of the beach, where you can get a really nice view of the Golden Gate Bridge with the rocky cliffs and the ocean waves and all of that.  I took many many photos before another photographer came up with a model and the plan to shoot on the cliffs, which were directly in my view.  I had my shot, so I didn’t mind.  I started shooting the waves and the ocean instead, and pretty soon another photographer approached me, all full of advice and condescension about what I was doing, and all I had to do was point out that someone else was shooting on the rocks that he was no doubt planning to shoot himself.  That distracted him and he went off to bother the other photographer there.  Then I saw another photographer shooting what were clearly engagement or couple-y photos further up the beach.  I took some more pictures of the sunset, but it hadn’t dropped completely when I started climbing the little path up the hill back to the bus stop.

When I got to the bus stop, I realized that the bus I’d taken there had stopped running an hour earlier, and the last stop for the other bus at that stop was at 7:43pm.  I checked my cell phone and was relieved to see that it was 7:42pm, and, sure enough, along came the shuttle that gave me a lovely tour of most of the Presidio before depositing me near the entrance by the Palace of Fine Arts where I’d started out.

I walked into the Marina District looking for the right bus home, but eventually I was feeling pretty tired and pretty satisfied with a huge vacation’s worth of shots that I just flagged down a cab to take me back to the hotel, where I finished off a bag of trail mix and packed up all my stuff.

I had to make a run to the UPS Store on Thursday before we left, because I couldn’t make my everything fit so I just decided to mail my hiking boots home.  I also got to stop at the Boudin Bakery for a sourdough roll, and then I met up with my boss and her family for the taxi ride to the airport.  Only twelve hours, a flight, and a two-hour shuttle bus ride, and I was home again.

Home to chilly, rainy, earthquakey Missouri.

It was really quite a trip.  I had a wonderful time.

And that’s the end of the story.