San Francisco

We went to San Francisco last weekend. Ryan was between semesters so we took a little trip. It was really fun. We did some cool things. Cool thing #1 ... the AMTRAK! This was not only my favorite part of the trip but probably my favorite thing that I have ever done!!! Here's some video.



We stayed in a funky hotel called the Mosser. It is similar to the Pod, the hotel we were at in New York. We saw Wicked (amazing!) I loved when they were singing the Emerald song and everything turned green and sparkly. I've done four Broadway lotteries and NEVER have I had my name drawn! We ate some GOOD food (thanks Yelp!). We rode our bikes across the Golden Gate bridge. Well, actually if they were OUR bikes we could have gone the whole 15 miles in an hour or less and still had energy to spare. THESE bikes (rentals) weighed about 80 pounds and it felt like you were either riding through sand or riding through sand pulling a car. The bridge was cool and I couldn't even imagine building it. However, when riding a bike across the bridge there were 3 things that worried me. #1, being high up on a bike made the guardrail look pretty short and you had an even better view of the water 120 feet down. #2. The wind would scootch you off your path. I don't like the wind doing that to me, especially on a bridge. #3. I wasn't a fan of the GAP between the bridge and guardrail. Not exagerating, if I fell off my bike (which I haven't done in 2 years, yeah!) I could probably slide right between the bridge and guardrail. I didn't really take these things into consideration, and also that I don't like heights very much, before we started. Oh well :) We got some good pics of the bridge. When we go to Sacalito we took a ferry back :) We got a great view of Alcatraz and got pretty close to some saliboats. I really wish we had a boat down there. People would charter their own boat for us but nothing cheaper than like $150 an hour. No thanks.

We also saw the sea lions. They were awesome! We watched them for a LONG time. We (I) would make up narratives for them. We rode the cable cars and went to the Cable Car Museum. We rode the cable cars at night time which was really cool. We went to Ghiradelli square at night time and it was really nice how there was like nobody there. We just ate a really big cookie and window shopped. We walked up and down Lombard street, walked to the top of a hill which was a really cool neighborhood, walked the Embarcadero, did the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning and also the Ferry building. There's a video of Ryan eating an oyster below. We also got a personal tour of Guittard chocolate factory. We have a good relationship with them so they showed us all around and and explained their whole factory from the cocoa beans that come in the burlap sacks to their labs to the production and packaging. It was really nice of them to let us do that. We also visited a company, Foodzie, that sells our chocolates. We ate clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls on the pier and looked at the submarine and the WWII ship.

San Francisco shopping is great, of course. The flagship store for Banana Republic is there and the sale section is as big as a regular store! The flagship store for Gap and Old Navy is there also. We went to Old Navy to buy some short sleeve shirts because it was a lot warmer than we expected. I usually don't like Old Navy because if I wanted to wear clothes off the floor I could just get them from my bedroom. However, this was a cool big store with 3 floors and a huge selection. ok, no more words, here's pictures.