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San Francisco
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Hello All,
We are currently working in arrears so updating you on our time in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago whilst sitting at a computer in sunny Los Angeles!
After the craziness of election night in Portland we were heading south to San Francisco. This involved an 18 hour train journey down....in a regular seat. The previous night we were planning to get a good sleep, heading to bed after the election partying, to put us in a good frame of mind for the journey. We had, however, counted against 'Foghorn' Bill who had come in the room that night - some very impressive snoring! We were tempted to sleep in the corridor/kitchen but eventually, around 4.30am, after multiple digs in the ribs from his partner, the snoring died down, allowing us some sleep!
We headed to the train station thenext afternoon to embark on the journey on the 'Coast Starlight' service. We were on the top deck and the seats were pretty comfy (+ reclined a lot) so it wasn't as bad as we perhaps first feared. The views were nice and we had dinner which was cool and helped pass the time. We trundled through Southern Oregon - noticing at one pointit was thick with snow outside! I actually managed to get some sleep which waas a major accomplishment for me, waking up around 5am as we arrived at Sacremento (where we had to sit for 90 minutes as the train was early!) It started getting light around 6.30am and we were greeted with beautiful blue skies and a definite Californian landscape outside....
We arrived at Emeryville around 8am and took a transfer to a bus and headed to San Fran over the Bay Bridge - which was an awesome enterance to the city.We checked in to the Green Tortoise hostel on Broadway and wasn't fit for much else that day, so other than a potter around China town, that was that.... We spent 4 nights in SF so we got to do a lot of exploring, including a ferry to Alcatraz and a tour around the island (which was a definite highlight) - getting some great views of the Golden Gate Bridge on the way, a good look around China town, and then went on a really good pub crawl with the hostel. The hostel was really nice - run by a hippy and very liberal. The dining/social area was a big ballroom and they put on laods of events, inc a free dinner which went down well - I would def recommend for anyone staying in the city.
As we have done previously, we managed to locate the less than salubrious part of town...Our whole time in the US we have been amazed by the amount of homeless people in every city we were seeing and in SF it seemed even worse than other places. One street in Tenderloin was incredibly run down with some people in a seeminly really bad way - so this was really not nice to see, but as we have found, seems to be a part of urban life in the US and Canada. However, its important to see both sides of a city to get a true reflection of a place....
The other days in SF we headed to Golden Gate park (a lovely park, with the exception of some of the people on hippy hill!), visited Lombard Street (the windiest in the world), Fishermans Wharf and went to Haight-Ashbury (a lot like Camden Town). In general, we both loved San Francisco, with it being a definite highlight of the trip thus far....
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