Leveling up in San Francisco

During the last few weeks I’ve been ‘levelling up’ in San Francisco and getting to know the city better. With Bex I’ve been eating, drinking and touristing all across the city with serious emphasis on the eating.

Here are a few highlights…

Wine country

After a brief bit of uber tourist fun around union square, we headed to Napa Valley for fun with wine. I’d highly recommend driving there and staying a few nights: as well as being totally gorgeous (even outside of the summer/harvest seasons), there is so much valley to see and visit. The whole valley is full of natural beauty. The benefit of driving is that you can be totally flexible over which wineries you visit. (Without a car you’d also be at the mercy of the wine train which is over $100 per person per day). My favourite napa pics:

My favourite part of the whole Napa experience was how easy it was to get a delicious picnic and enjoy it in the grounds of a beautiful vineyard. While vineyards of sufficient scale were reasonably rare, when you found (ie. spent ages researching online) a place that did offer a picnic area, they were always exceptionally beautiful. (And their wines weren’t half bad either).

Extra treats

If you drive all the way to the north end of Napa valley, you’ll find a reliable water jet named Old Faithful. We’d already seen several geysers when we went to Iceland a few years ago, but I couldn’t resist this blatant tourist trap even if it was $10 each for two already-exhausted visitors. To the right of this photo, you can see our final take-home stash: not large, but not too shabby for a 3-day trip.

Back to the city

Once we were suitably chilled from Napa, we hit the pavement and began some serious downtown touristing. Cable cars were first up, which helped us navigate towards Coit Tower (and stunning views of the city).

The climb down telegraph hill (just below Coit Tower) was almost more beautiful than the views from the top: people live in treehouse-like streets that are sign-posted just as officially as any main street elsewhere in the city!

Jail time

Later that afternoon, it was time to go to jail. Alcatraz was a wonderful audio tour and a very intriguing place. It’s bizarre to think how relatively few people it held, (especially compared to how many could gaze upon it from the city). The island and prison have a very surreal quality as you look around it. Some of the views back towards San Francisco are as striking as the prison buildings are stark.

Bike the Bridge!

The following day we set out to “bike the bridge”. I’m not sure quite why this is a such an attraction, but Bex loves biking and the weather appeared to be great, so it seemed worth a try.

The weather quickly changed, but despite gale force winds and slightly overcast skies, we managed to keep our smiles and get some fun shots:

Chinawoods in Sausalito

We rounded off our touristathon with some old fashioned wandering around Chinatown, a trip to Lori’s diner (which had reasonable food and an insanely cute bunch of retro-chic furniture), an ankle-busting walk through Muir Woods, and a gorgeous lunch in Sausalito.

I’ve only skirted the surface of the amount of places I’ve eat and drank at in the last few weeks. If you’re in the area, shout up and let’s yelp it up. If you’re not planning a trip here, MAKE PLANS!