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San Francisco Vacation
Tuesday, 2006 August 8 - 10:23 pm
Amy and I spent the Sunday after BlogHer in San Francisco.

Sunday was our day to be tourists. We drove into San Francisco with plans to see as much as possible.

I had left my GPS at home, so Amy was navigating using tourist maps we picked up. That worked fine until she tried to tell me to turn on Embarcadero street. "You're coming up on Enca... Embra..." And then she made jazz hands and I was on my own.

But we made it to where we wanted to go. We drove down Lombard street. And yeah, it's crooked. But it's quite pretty. I imagine it'd be neat to live there, except for all the dang tourists who traipse through day and night.



We walked around the Fisherman's Wharf area. I liked it, except for the bathroom facilities, which seemed like they hadn't been maintained in fifty years. I don't know about the women's side, but in the men's side, there was a pipe sticking up out of the floor where the sink was supposed to be. And there were about a thousand flies buzzing around. The nastiest part? Some guy was in there changing clothes and brushing his teeth. Remember, there was no sink in there. So I can only imagine how he planned to rinse.

But aside from that and the occasional passed-out bum, it was beautiful.







We rode streetcars. You'd think this would be an efficient and fun mode of transportation, but the problem is that there's an hour-long wait just to get on the things. (Again, dang tourists.) So fun, yes; efficient, no.





Oh, just before we got on the streetcars, Amy bought a Paul Frank sock monkey. She dubbed him "orange-utan."



We rode the streetcars into ChinaTown, ate some dim sum, and wandered into all kinds of shops. There were places selling some really fantastic furniture, but we figured it was doubtful that stuff would fit in our suitcases. Amy looked through some jewelry that was 80% OFF! Um, 80% off of the usual 1000% markup, I guess. And one store had dried seahorses. It seemed to be a grocery market, so we speculated that the seahorses were intended for consumption. Though that seems a little weird.



The absolute highlight of the day was when we rented Segways and tooled around the city. Yeah, we looked like dorks, but those things are fun. It was $70 to rent one for a three-hour tour. I'd love to own one, except around Raleigh, I don't think it's actually legal to ride them on any public streets or sidewalks. I guess I could just keep it at work and use it to ride to the bathroom.





We had dinner at McCormick and Kuleto's, a pretty nice steak-and-seafood restaurant. It was crowded, but we snagged a bar table and were able to eat there. The house vodka there, by the way, was McCormick's... no relation to the restaurant, though. It was actually not bad. When I got back to North Carolina and found the vodka in the store, I discovered it's cheaper than Aristrocrat. Holy cow. Amy and I still like Svedka as an inexpensive house vodka, but we'd be willing to keep some McCormick's around as emergency vodka.

After dinner, we went to the Ghirardelli store and ate their free samples for dessert.





We wrapped up our adventures by walking around, pointing at things, and finding fun pictures to take.







Our day in San Francisco finished as the sun went down.



Good night, orange-utan.

Permalink  1 Comment   Bookmark and Share
Posted by Ken in: lifetravel

Comments

Comment #1 from Phil (Guest)
2006 Aug 9 - 3:14 am : #
"And then she made jazz hands..." Tee hee, that's excellent.

SFO is an awesome place and I'm lucky to have many friends there. I divide the SFO experience into three parts: downtown, public places outside of downtown (e.g,. Golden Gate Park), and the neighborhoods (e.g., Mission, Castro, Noe Valley). I like the neighborhoods best but doubt I'd have ever gone to visit them if it weren't for friends there. I'm psyched to have friends there. Same with Denver.

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