A brief and somewhat belated summary of our
time in San Francisco.
From Juneau we flew down to San Francisco. Our friend Fi kindly put up with us for a
couple of weeks while we stayed at her place.
The first few days were spent organising and catching up on
stuff.....boring stuff like completing tax returns etc. We then spent some time exploring the
city. Summer is fog season in San
Francisco so the weather was not very warm for our time there. Some days the fog would clear for a few hours
in the middle of the day which was nice, others remained foggy all day
especially on the coastal side on the city.
Apparently the fog was worse this year and temperatures were well below
average.
What we got up to and checked out:
-
Farmers market by the pier
-
Checked out the central city,
union square and Chinatown
-
Hired bikes for a day and biked
around the waterfront and over the golden gate bridge in the fog. Chris wanted to bike up over Marin
headland....I wasn’t so keen, we made a start but biking into a headwind up a
hill wasn’t much fun especially since it was cold, drizzly and we couldn’t see
much because of the fog. We decided to
head back and join all the other tourists in Sausalito where it was sunny. We then caught the ferry back to central
city.
-
Rode the cable car to
Fishermans wharf. The cable car is the
thing to do in San Fran. So many
tourists were waiting in line to get on, the queue was over a hundred people
long and not moving very fast. We’d been
told that you can get on at the second stop, as the cable cars never leave
completely full, and avoid the queue.
After watching a few cable cars go past we realised it would be better
just to get on when the cable car was stopped at the traffic light before it go
to the second stop. We timed it right
and got on one, it was a good thing that we did as the car was full by the time
it got to the second stop. The conductor
saw us get on and we had money ready to pay, but he couldn’t be bothered coming
over to us as the car was so full. So we
ended up getting a free ride and didn’t have to wait in line.
-
Checked out the academy of
sciences in golden gate park.
-
Caught up with Chris’s cousin
Tony who took us out for a very nice dinner.
-
I did some baking (it was great
having a real kitchen again rather than a camping stove), ended up making
strawberry and rhubarb pie a couple of times, see here for the recipe http://www.joyofbaking.com/StrawberryRhubarbPie.html
Near the end of
our stay Fi’s boyfriend Hugh arrived from NZ, we all headed south east to
Yosemite National Park for a few days.
The weather was great. We did bit
of walking, swimming, and basically checked out the park...see all the
photos. Chris had wanted to do the half
dome hike, but it is so busy on weekends that you have to get a permit ahead of
time to do it and we weren’t very organised.
We also saw a black bear, some deer, a pika, a lots of squirrels and
chipmunk type animals.
Well that’s all
for now, a very brief summary as I am very tired. It has been a very busy first week in
Peru. Chris will update you all later.
