San Francisco! (June 15-17)

The 15th was mostly traveling to San Francisco, mostly we managed to avoid the traffic.  We settled into our hotel, Cow Hollow Motor Inn, the name sounds kind of strange, but apparently this section of the city is named Cow Hollow.  We went and had some very tasty wood-fired pizza from Amici's East Coast Pizzaria for dinner, which has made all other pizza seem just not quite as good.  They also had a really tasty gnocchi appetizer as well.  We didn't do much else the first day, all the driving in the last two days made for a much needed rest before heading out the next day to see the city.

Thursday we decided to go see the California Academy of Sciences, it seemed like a good place for Richard and I to visit.  We saw the planetarium, the rainforest, the really awesome living roof, a snake exhibit, an albino alligator and many more things.  I stopped in one of the stores and found a neat little sea horse ornament to go on our tree.  After spending most of the day here we went and checked out a park by the Golden Gate Bridge to take some pictures of the beautiful sunset.

Friday we walked down to the dock for a trip to Angel Island and Alcatraz.  If/when we get to this area again I would like to go spend more time on Angel Island, there is so much history and so many things to see that we just didn't get to see everything in the short time we were stopped there.  Alcatraz is full of so much history, it was pretty neat to see.  There are also quite a few nesting birds on the island so we got to see lots of little baby chicks.  Walking seemed like such a good idea to get there, but I was pretty tired by the time we got back from our tours.  We went to the Fisherman's Wharf on the way back to the hotel and enjoyed some tasty clam chowder in a sour dough roll.  Yummy!  Then because I for some reason decided we needed to get everything in I figured we should walk back to the hotel by way of the crookedest street in the US, it is crooked, it was fun to take pictures of but OH my is that on a hill!  I was very much ready for bed by the time we got back to our hotel.  

The next morning we headed out of town over a very foggy Golden Gate Bridge and headed on to the next leg of our journey.


Neither Richard or I are really city people, but if for some strange reason we had to live in a city, we think San Francisco isn't all that bad.  We had a good time there, someday I wouldn't mind going back and seeing some of the things we missed this go around.

Angel Island

Alcatraz