Vacation Day 5: San Francisco, Take Two

Wednesday: I came out to the living room and Jordan was still in bed. I didn't want to wake him so starting watching last night's baseball game on mute. I just needed my sports fix after so many days without any. I grabbed a bowl of grape-nuts and before I knew it, Anne was coming through the door, back already from her early morning meeting in San Jose. Jordan still wasn't up and I wasn't dressed so we both took care of those things, grabbed our map and were out the door on our way to the City.

With our onboard navigator set to Treasure Island, we were soon on our fourth bridge of the week (Richmond/San Rafael and Golden Gate on Saturday, San Mateo on Sunday). The view of San Francisco from Treasure Island in the middle of the Bay Bridge is a favorite of many, especially at night. Ours was a cloudy, slightly wet view, but still lovely and dramatic.

Next stop was the parking structure near the office. I gave Anne a quick tour of my home away from home and, after lunch at the now near-famous Thai hole-in-the-wall, we were off through Chinatown and North Beach to Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower. It was still pretty cloudy so the views weren't that great but we decided to see what we could see from the top of the tower. We paid our small fee and took the manually-operated (not by us!) elevator to the open air viewing area. You can walk 360° around with something interesting to see from every window. It was especially fun to look down on the rooftops of the buildings in the area.

Back in the car we navigated our way to the top of Lombard Street's crooked block and Anne drove slowly and carefully down. I tried to take pictures on the way but I'm sure I got nothing but some very blurry flowerbeds. Next on the itinerary was the Palace of Fine Arts. I failed completely as a navigator on this stop because we accidentally took the highway toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Luckily, you can get off at the visitors' center and we did. Anne and Jordan got out to take more pictures of the bridge and even walked out far enough to get some shots of the City.

While were we out there, I thought we'd go down to Fort Point and stand right under the bridge. Unfortunately, construction stopped us from driving that far but we did see a surfer braving the rocks. We took a shortcut back toward the Palace of Fine Arts through the Presidio (some very interesting buildings there) but as we were approaching the Palace I again failed and we again were headed back towards the bridge! At least we knew where to get off. We decided to take a slightly different route to the Palace with our third try and ended up driving through George Lucas' new campus in the Presidio. And when we got to the right place, the Palace was completely surrounded by fences and we couldn't stop and go in. Bummer.

We were headed to the ocean when Anne and I saw banners advertising an Arts & Crafts special exhibit at the City's DeYoung Museum. I'd seen a program on the new DeYoung building recently and was interested in seeing it. So we thought we'd check it out and were off to the Golden Gate Park. We discovered that the museum was closing in an hour and we didn't want to spend that much money with only an hour to see everything so we took advantage of the facilities, browsed the over-priced gift shop and headed for the beach.

Just as we parked, the sun came out. It was beautiful. Anne and Jordan got out to take some pictures and, possibly, wade in the ocean while I checked our AAA Tourbook for any recommendations for restaurants in the area. I found one, the Beach Chalet. It sounds like a touristy burger joint, doesn't it?

We decided to make one more stop before supper. I wanted to revisit the site of a wedding I attended in August, Fort Riley. The parking lot has great views of the bridge to the northeast (weren't we tired of that yet?) and the ocean to the west. The trail up the hill to the grassy field goes through the coolest (and I don't mean cold) forest I've ever seen. The sparsely-branched black trees are covered in green moss. Jordan thought it looked like it could be from the Lord of the Rings.

The downstairs of the Beach Chalet is a visitors' center and museum. We were hungry so didn't stop to check it out. Upstairs we scored a window seat but ironically the sun was so bright we had to pull down the shade. It was a rather fancy kind of joint but our jeans weren't too out of place. We ordered the root chips with sun-dried tomato, artichoke dip (very good) and then we all had steak (delicious).

We detoured around Twin Peaks and through the Mission on our way to the highway and home. It was a lovely day. One of the best of the vacation.