San Francisco

After seeing the beautiful wine country, we headed on to the great city of San Francisco (quite possibly my favorite city in the U.S. to date).

Our first view of the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm not sure why, but this massive structure fascinates me.

Our first stop was the famous Lombard St.-the most crooked street in the world. I bet the people that live on this street get pretty annoyed with all the tourists driving down it.
Then, on to Fisherman's Wharf, which is a cool little area down by the water. This was Dustin's first view of Alcatraz. Next time, we decided we'll take a tour of it. Since this was his first time in San Fran, we had too much to see and too short of time.
This is where all the sea lions congregate. It's fun to watch them play 'King of the Mountain'. They get pretty feisty. We couldn't tell if they were playing or being serious...
Here is an up close pic. They look like they are singing in an opera or something :)
Gotta have a picture of a cable car. This is North Beach, which is the Italian Community. We ate a nice little lunch there and walked around some. This is Washington Square, which is a beautiful park in 'Little Italy'. Not quite Italy, but they make a valiant effort.And my favorite...Chinatown. Actually, last time I was here, this place was a little overwhelming and actually kind of freaked me out a little. This time it was a bit better. My guess is, this is about as close as you can get to the real thing.

Dustin buying a new pink umbrella to block the sun. Later, he bought driving gloves.
This was totally mind boggling and pretty much the first thing we saw in Chinatown. This man in the picture was selling live chickens. Luckily, we got to witness a woman purchasing some. He grabbed them by their necks, stuffed them in a paper sack and stapled it shut. I'm glad we didn't have to witness what happened next.

After our Chinatown experience, we went to the Ferry Building. This cool fountain was in front of it.

The Ferry Building. There is a market inside and a place where you can watch the ferries come in.

It's really a beautiful building. We enjoyed walking around the little market inside. I'm all about markets. We have a system-I walk around the market, Dustin reads a book.
A view of the city.
We headed on to the Mission District, which is the Hispanic community. We pretty well covered the ethnic districts today. These murals are all over the place in the Mission District. Apparently, the Hispanic community moved here in the 1960's and brought their artistic abilities with them.
The muralists did a good job capturing the San Francisco spirit in this one. I like the pants on the man holding the rainbow flag.


Yes, we did. We went and found the 'Full House' house. Dustin was highly disappointed that there wasn't a park across from it like in the opening of the show. How cool would it be to live in the Full House house??

And the famous Haight/Ashbury. This is quite possibly my favorite part of the city. Good shopping. Great people watching.
One cool thing about the city is the amazing views you get. Because it is so hilly, you can go up on top of a hill and catch great views. Notice all of the sailboats in the ocean.
We went to watch the sunset at a beach along the Golden Gate Bridge. If you haven't noticed, I'm a sucker for sunsets. Sunset and Golden Gate Bridge-perfect combination for me :)

I'm not even really sure where we were here, but the houses were really cool.
The next day, we went to Sausalito before we headed into the city for another fun day. I love Sausalito, mostly just to walk around down by the ocean and check out yet another great view of the city.

If you can get past the chest hair and barbed wire tattoo, these 2 men who were fishing caught a leopard shark each. It was pretty cool watching them real it in.

Dustin getting creative with the camera. Great shot of the streets of Sausalito.

We decided to take a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge mostly just to say we did. It was incredibly windy up there, but really neat to be walking on the bridge.
After walking the bridge, we drove up this huge hill to get one more view of the city. It ended up being incredible. I think we could have sat there all day.
I mean, check out this view. Are you starting to understand my fascination with this city? Who knows, maybe it's just me.


We spent most of the rest of the day shopping around Union Square. We decided to leave a few things for our next visit to San Francisco...like Golden Gate Park.

I get a little passionate about this city for some reason. I just think that compared to most cities, this one has so much character. The houses, the streets, the structures, the views, the people...it just intrigues me. We recently learned that the mainland inside the city limits forms a 7 mile by 7 mile square. Crazy that all of that fits in 7X7 mile square! Hence, the houses all built straight up and connected to each other.

We are now in Monterey, CA and we will update with our Yosemite National Park pictures soon!