San Francisco: Day One

Whew! What a week! Many times I've found myself thinking longingly about last weekend. We took a wonderful trip to San Francisco, and we had a great time. Of course, I took a million pictures, but I've tried to limit those that I share with you. Still, it may take a few posts to show our entire trip. But here goes! Our vacation to San Francisco:

A few weeks ago, I realized that I had a Friday with no school coming up. So we decided to take a short trip. We left after work on Thursday, getting in pretty late. Friday morning, we began our crazy day of seeing a million sights (or so it felt)! We started in Chinatown:

The Chinatown gate.

The real Chinatown.

The streets surrounding Chinatown were the most interesting to us because those were the areas in which the Chinese-American population actually shops and lives. "Chinatown" is just where the tourists go.

On to the next destination. Good thing Matt had his trusty map:


We tried to check out Union Square, but there was a crazy marathon taking place that weekend. They had taken over the square! But I imagine it would have been pretty, were it not for the giant red tent.


We saw the historic trolleys:

Matt, thrilled to be on the trolley!

After our trolley adventure, we exhausted ourselves by climbing Lombard Street to the "Crookedest Street."

It was steep.

"The Crookedest Street." We felt no desire to climb any higher than we had. But it was cool to look at.

We were tired. (We may have been faking this picture...)

Continuing our crazy walk around the city, we headed to North Beach.

St. Peter and Paul Church. Or St. Paul and Peter Church. Regardless, it was pretty.

Lunch. Yum.

Then on to the famous Pier 39. Which was kinda lame.

A lot of stinky seals. Cool?

Tourist traps. Lame.

Boats. On the back side of Pier 39. Not as lame as the touristy other side.

After that waste of time (okay, it wasn't really that bad), we headed to Coit Tower.

Inside the base of the tower, there were murals painted on all the walls. They were really cool, though this one was a little confusing. I believe this is an image of someone getting run over by a car. Weird.

View of the Bay Bridge.

View of downtown. There's the church we saw.

View of Alcatraz. And a statue.

Then we headed back up to the shore to see Ghirardelli Square.

It was basically a bunch of Ghirardelli shops, but it was pretty.

We had a Ghirardelli chocolate shake. Delicious.

Our last stop of the day was Fisherman's Wharf.

There, we saw a couple of cool boats. Yay. Matt really liked the boats.

At the end of the day, we were very tired. Matt figured that we walked about 7 and 1/2 miles throughout the day. It doesn't seem like a lot when you think that we'd hiked 10 miles a couple times this summer, but it sure felt like a lot. But we were able to see a ton of sights in a short amount of time. So, that was cool. And we still had a lot to see!