This is the third, and last, part of my California trip. I had so many photos from the trip, I decided to break the post up into three sections. Part one consists of our arrival to San Diego March 14, 2011 and our travels throughout Southern California. You can view that post here. Part Two covers our trip from San Diego to San Francisco via the Pacific Coast Highway. That post can be viewed here. This last post will be the stories and photos from our time in San Francisco.
We arrived in San Francisco Friday afternoon, March 18th. We went straight to our hotel, The San Francisco Inn on Lombard Street. After unloading our luggage, we hit the streets headed out for some urban adventuring. Our friends Brett and Ashley got there the day before and were out doing some exploring of their own. Our first stop was to the Pier at the end of Van Ness Ave for some great views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and the city of San Fran. Next we headed to the first shop we could find to pick up some umbrellas, as it had been raining off and on all day. One of my main goals was to go to Pier 39 where the Sea Lions have taken over the docks. So we headed down Jefferson St towards the Sea Lions, passing through fishermans wharf and a few shops on the way. We finally made it to Pier 39, it was pretty crazy how hundreds of these Sea Lions were fat and happy just laying on these docks all day. The extreme weight of all the Sea Lions, which weigh about 800 lbs each, were causing some of the docks to be partially submerged. They were mostly just sleeping but every once one would belch out their trademark “AARRFFF” sound and try to bite their friends. I think I only saw one with its eyes open and that was when he was biting his neighbor.
After we visited the Sea Lions, we made the walk back to the hotel to meet up with Brett and Ashley. We decided it would be a good idea to walk 20 or so blocks to a mall in San Fran. So we loaded up on Starbucks and hit the sidewalk. Not only did it end up being a longer walk than we had thought but it was starting to get dark before we got there. I’ve never seen so many homeless people, asians and drug dealers in my life. It was definitely one of the sketchier situations of the trip. I didn’t bring my camera with me on this excursion, which was probably for the best because we probably most certainly would of gotten mugged. We literally saw some drug deals take place right in front of us. But we eventually made it to the mall in one piece, and besides having to pay to use the restroom, we went to some really cool stores. And we made sure to take a taxi back. We topped off the evening by having a great dinner at a Italian restaurant down the street.
The next day we started off by grabbing some breakfast burritos and coffee at a little cafe across the street from our hotel. We then split up, Brett, Ashley and I made the drive to Oakland to meet up with the famous pro rollerblader Brian Shima at a little restaurant owned by the drummer for Green Day. John and Allie stayed around the hotel because John was selling the surfboard he bought in San Clemente. We had this meeting with Shima because Brett is in the process of designing a skate for Shima’s new skate brand; Shima Manufacturing. After returning from Oakland and driving down the imfamous “Zig-Zag” road on Lombard st, we met back with John and Allie, and headed to a couple locations for viewing the Golden Gate Bridge. First we went to a little touristy spot before heading up to the Marin Headlands. This was a spot I had mapped out beforehand that I really wanted to go to, so I was psyched to get to it. After that we went a checked out Ashbury/Haight streets (where the hippies hangout), Alamo Square (famous from the TV show Full House and the movie Mrs. Doubtfire) among other little parks and whatnot. Another thing I mapped out to do was shoot the sunset at Rodeo Beach. Rodeo Beach is located in Marin County just over the Golden Gate bridge and features some really cool rock formations. We also came across some epic views of the Golden Gate Bridge at night.
Well that wraps up the trip. The next morning we started our voyage back to good old North Carolina. Had an incredible time, just wish we had more time to do more stuff. Can’t wait till the next trip to the westcoast!
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