San Francisco

Our SF-based reading/viewing selections

On our 15th Anniversary, Josh finally told me why he'd reserved the first weekend in June on my calendar. San Francisco, Baby! He was extending a work trip to include a long weekend with me, so he booked the flights and childcare while I prepared our household for 5 days without me (Ah!).

We flew out early Friday morning, and I spent those 4 lovely hours on the plane NOT keeping someone else entertained (ahhh). We had a quick stop in Los Angeles where I paid $18 for a sandwich (ah!) while listening to a Nashville country star's music blasting through the airport (take that, LA!).

We were in San Francisco by noon, and enjoying lunch at Zuni Cafe (*****) by 2pm...

Hotel Nikko

Which makes it all sound very tidy, but this first couple hours was indicative of the rest of our trip. Riding from the airport, we passed aging row-homes packed tight with no vegetation, lots of utility wires and dirt and city-ness, and then arrived at a sleek, beautiful Japanese hotel with an excellent menu. We walked the down-and-out blocks of lower Market St. to get to a delicious-local-creative-cosmopolitan food spot for our best lunch of the trip.

If there was a theme for our vacation, it was the merging of my mental San Francisco and the real thing. The cultural projection of a cosmopolitan, smart, anything-goes, wacky city on the cutting edge of everything - Sausalito, Berkeley, and Palo Alto rolled up together - was not always easy to reconcile with the city I was walking through, with tourist traps and mediocre restaurants and plenty of unkempt you-name-it.

To be fair, this is almost always true for cities so famous that I arrive with unrealistic expectations, from San Diego to Paris, New York to Rome. No one shows these pictures:

Probably no one takes these pictures. But you will see ordinary streets when you visit anywhere.

Which means I spend the first few days in a new city trying to enjoy the gritty reality and still see the romantic points behind it. Like these quirky bits of signage...

Some excelled at stating the obvious:

While others were lovably wacky:

Bottom right: Yes, those are thousands of dried leaves hanging from the ceiling of a restaurant in Little Italy. We did not eat there.

The first evening we took one of the famous old cable cars (which was cool)...

 To and from Fisherman's Wharf (cold, but not so cool)...

 With a lovely crab dinner on the water,

And ice cream afterward...

It was also the first--but not the last--time we bought jackets in San Francisco. While we'd brought some on our trip, we didn't realize how much the climate varies from block to block and minute to minute. We'd leave our hotel comfortable in short-sleeves, and wind up freezing 1/2 a mile away. It could be sunny and hot everywhere but the corridor by the bridge, where it was suddenly cold and foggy. A local told us they call it "micro-climates" and someone else said they need an app, showing the weather on each street corner at any given moment. It explained why we saw so many others wearing the same cheap, touristy jackets we'd bought on the Wharf. Still, I LOVED the cool temps and wished I could have brought them home with me!

Next up? That famous black-and-gold (??) bridge in San Francisco, Day 2! ;)