Rich and Cat's Travels: One week in San Francisco

For the next week we saw and did lots in San Francisco and it is a very interesting place. There are millions of hills and every corner you turn seems to present a new hill, bigger than the last one you climbed. At least the week here is really working out my legs because all the junk (and huge portions they serve) we have been eating over here needs to be worked off! This includes our trip to Ike’s Place which is a sandwich shop where they did a Man Vs Food challenge on a huge sandwich which we decided we needed to order. The sandwich contained seven different meats, Stuffed Jalapeno Poppers, mozzarella sticks with some salad and in our defence we ordered one to share but it was sooo big we couldn’t finish it at lunch time so had to have it for dinner as well!

There are a lot of crazy people and a lot of homeless people but we found out that this is because there is a good support system here for them so they come from all around the USA.

In the week we headed out to Golden Gate park and hired bikes to ride around the park, however we chose to do this on a Sunday when the roads where shut to traffic (to make Rich feel better about riding the bike). This would normally be fine but we chose the only Sunday we were here for but it happened to be the day that a fun run was on that involved thousands running in costumes, drinking and generally celebrating in the park. Not everyone was in costumes, some ran in normal running gear and some ran naked – mostly ugly old men – which was very off putting while on the bike. However we pushed on and we managed to cycle around the park and saw bison, the Japanese tea garden, a couple of museums, a waterfall, two windmills and eventually we made it to the other end and to the beach before heading back through the other side of the park by the lake.

We also went to see the golden gate bridge and walked across it which gave good views of the city and of the bridge itself. We also went to the two other large parks (Presidio and Lands end) in San Francisco and walked around them where we saw a range of things including the foundations of some historic baths, some wildlife conservatories and some nice beaches.

We visited several different districts within San Francisco including Mission where we were able to see the political murals which were painted on various walls depicting a range of things. Some of them were very well done and had very interesting meanings.

We did a trip to see Alcatraz as it was something I really wanted to see. We got the first ferry of the day over to the island where we took the audio tour around the prison and learnt about the famous prisoners (most of them I hadn’t heard of but it was interesting to learn about them). The prison was only open for 29 years but did see some of the most notorious criminals in American history and those who like to try and escape prison. There were a few escape attempts but they do not believe that anyone managed to escape (three people went missing in the ocean and their bodies were never found).

As we were here for a while we did have some spare time so we managed to do some other activities including seeing a comedy show (okay but not great), going Go-karting (very good but took 1.5 hours to get there, through some very dodgy areas), do a room escape (with a guy we met and the three of us managed to escape the room in less than an hour) and went to the cinema for the first time in 6 months.

We did enjoy San Francisco but we could have done everything in just 4 or 5 days so we have used the extra time to plan the rest of the trip and relax a little. Next we are off to Yosemite and Death Valley for a couple of days before heading to Las Vegas for a few days of fun!