San Francisco

Friday in San Francisco was yet another lovely day. In keeping with my theme of a song per post, this post uses San Francisco by Gregory Alan Isakov:

The mist fills, quiet room. San Francisco

Because the City reminded us today why it is called Fog City as, while the temperature was in the high 60s, the fog was hanging around. This always seems to be the case when we plan to take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.

We began the day with coffee in the room while watching local news on TV. We left the hotel at 8.30 and walked up the two blocks to California Street where we caught the Cable Car all the way to its terminus at Van Ness. 

We visited a Whole Foods Market store, three weeks ago we spent an hour in one of these stores in Georgetown, seeing the quality of the food here is always worth doing. This time we only went in for breakfast, we both had a roll and coffee.

We then caught the no 1 from Van Ness/Stockton to California/Park Presidio Boulevard where we changed on to the 28 to travel to the Golden Gate Bridge and walked up on to the Bridge. Four years ago we drove across the bridge in even more fog. Today it was lurking at the top of the bridge. While we were there we saw some America's Cup boats in the bay. 

From the Bridge we caught the outbound 28 to Fort Mason one of the key historic military locations in San Francisco, that paid a key role in World War II. This is part of the City I'd never visited before. 

From Fort Mason we caught the 30 to Columbus and Bay, and walked down onto Fisherman's Wharf. 

Given that it is Friday we'd agreed to have a fishy meal as our main meal at lunch right here on the bay. So we went to Alioto's, our favourite seafood restaurant in San Francisco. We were sat at a table with views over the bay.

For starters I had crab cocktail. It had a lovely spicy tomato sauce over a mix of brown and white crab meat. Drew opted for a crab bisque and really enjoyed it.

For mains I went for one of the house specialities: Nonna Rose's Famous Cioppino, cioppino was invented here in San Francisco and includes crab, clams, shrimp, and mussels is a fish and tomato soup stock. Given the shellfish is all in its shell you get special utensils (see right) to eat the cioppino.

You also get a bib, see the before and after in the pictures.

Drew had a shrimp and crab cappellini, this pasta is called angel hair in the UK. It was a stunning dish of food which Drew enjoyed and completed, but he still had to wait for me to finish the cioppino.   

Drew finished with a selection of desserts, a taster plate, including a creme brulee, strawberries, sweet cannelloni filled with cherries and cream and a homemade vanilla ice-cream. He loved it.

We finished with espressos then walked up to Taylor and Bay to catch the Powell-Mason Cable Car. Due to the crowds Drew had to hang on the outside, he is more nervous of this than I am, I love it, for me it is something which is at the heart of being in San Francisco.

We got off at Bush Street and walked down the three blocks to the hotel. 

Later in the afternoon we went down to SoMa, Drew wanted to visit the Moscone Centre where lots of geeky events take place.

From there we caught the 27 back up through downtown and got off at Leavenworth/California and caught the California Cable Car back to Grant. Given we had a big lunch we stopped for a Subway on the way back to the hotel, Drew had a Turkey Sub and I had a Veggie Deluxe.

On an accounting note

Back in 2000 when I started giving my sister updates on my holidays, by e-mail, before blogs become common. I would always want to evidence the deal of buying multi-day travel passes. I'm still doing it, so here is that update for the last two days :-)

A single ride on a bus/streetcar in San Francisco is $2, Cable Car rides are $6. A daily ticket is $14 and a 3 day ticket (which we bought) is $22.

So, as outlined in yesterday's post, we had 9 bus rides and one Cable Car ride which would have been $24. So we have saved on our 3 day pass with 2 days to go, not a bad deal.

Today, as you can see above, we had 5 bus rides and three Cable Car rides which would be $28. So $52 rides for $22 dollars and still tomorrow to go. A great saving!