San Francisco - busy and full of life!

We spent a day in San Francisco...

• where's the best place to go?
• where should we park and not pay a fortune?
• what place should we see?

The answer to these questions and more are unfolded as we went.

We stayed in Pacifica in a nice place along the coast. We woke on Sunday to chilly temps and fog. There was a huge event going on in San Francisco on Sunday...the 40th annual Pride Parade. So we figured we would be dealing with lots of people but we didn't know what was normal so it didn't matter to us.

Along the way, we coined a phrase to help us enjoy our vacation..."we aren't here to nickel and dime"...meaning we weren't going to try to save a dollar on everything that we wanted to do. That would make us crazy and take lots of extra time in making decisions on where and what to eat and what to do. It ends up serving us well.

We drove towards SF and went up Route 1 and went over the Golden Gate Bridge. Too bad it was so foggy but what was cool about the fog is how it rolled off the mountain, over the bridge and onto the bay! It was a fast roll - nothing like the fog in Mystic!

We headed back over the bridge and decided to pay the money and park in Ghirardelli Square parking garage. We could have searched longer and fretted to save $5 at the end of the day but this was one of those decisions to just park next to where we wanted to go - "we aren't here to nickel and dime" :-)

The CitySightseeing Tour is who we went with and we rode the Downtown Loop to see parts of San Francisco. This tour company had a lot of different loops and packages and we could hop on and hop off at any of the stops for the loop that we picked. This tour matched what we wanted to do. We did run into a snag which turned out to be fun. Because of the Pride Parade, two of the stops on the tour had to be skipped during the parade time but they made up for it by taking us on different streets and improvising on the stories they told.

Our tour started at Ghirardelli Square - why wouldn't we start where the chocolate is??? It was sunny but we still chose to sit on the top of the double-decker touring bus. We went down different streets and heard stories about the history of the town. It was fun to see the different big name stores and watching all the people. We hopped off in Chinatown and at lunch at House of Nanking (recommended from Suzanne our guide on the tour). We hopped back on and then got off at Fisherman's Wharf. Lots of people there. We saw the sea lions that hang out on the pier and watched some performers on the corner - very talented kids putting themselves through college. We finished our time in San Francisco with ice cream & chocolate at Ghirardelli!

Walking along the coast in Pacifica and our finds there are next...