The Blog: West Coast Road Trip - Visalia & San Francisco

After leaving LA, my sister and I drove north through thick, rolling hills that looked like they were covered in dark, yellow velvet. We were headed to the small town of Visalia to visit my friends Alex and Catharine. When we arrived in the evening, we had a wonderful dinner complete with homemade sangria. ^_^

The next day we all went downtown to Brewbaker's bar & restaurant to see the final match of the FIFA World Cup: Germany vs. Argentina. Now, I'm not a soccer person at all. I played for about three years when I was in elementary school, but I never followed professional soccer. I've gotta say though, this was really fun--especially since Catharine's brother is a big soccer fan and he was there to get us up to speed on everything that was going on. It's always so much more fun doing anything when you have an enthusiast present. :-)

It was a relatively short visit, and later that afternoon we drove on to...

DESTINATION #3

San Francisco: a suburban city, with rows of delicately painted, life-sized doll houses lining street after street, and a seemingly endless parade of dog-owners who don't believe in using leashes. It was both self-consciously chic and deliberately squalid. Fancy boutiques share the same block as tie-dyed tattoo parlors; young hippie-hobos and their half-starved dogs walk right by ladies in expensive, skanky fripperie; scruffy bikers without shoes coast down the street, yoga mats strapped to their backs. SF can be surreal in the extreme.

We didn't have any luck with finding a couchsurfing host in SF, so we stayed at the Marin Headlands Hostel on the recommendation of a friend. Like all American hostels, it was kind of absurdly expensive for a dorm room ($30 per person per night), though the facilities were nice enough--but what really made it worthwhile was the location. The Marin Headlands are just on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, and they are beautiful--large, rolling hills covered in scrub and shrubs of every kind: green, grey, yellow, black, purple, red.... When the fog rolls in off the sea they're perfectly ethereal. There are walking trails all around them. One night I walked all the way out to the beach.

I felt like I was in Ireland.

Much of the headlands near the sea were covered in this strange viney plant, which I later learned is an invasive species called iceplant.

The headlands are also full of old, abandoned military installations like these:

And many of those are now covered in elaborate (and sometimes creepy) graffiti.

And yes, you can also see the Golden Gate Bridge from up there.

(Unfortunately I didn't have my camera when we were wandering around up there, so these are other people's pics)

On to the city itself! Our first full day there, Liz and I visited the Golden Gate Park, which is huge and gorgeous. They have, among other things, a botanical garden, museums, Dutch windmills, a Japanese tea garden, and bison!

Happy bison eating grass! Nom, nom...

In the Japanese Tea Garden:

This fountain in the Music Concourse was also pretty neat

After the Golden Gate Park, we drove to Haight St., famous as the hippie epicenter of SF in the 1960's.

Intersection of Masonic and Haight

They have all kinds of buildings, from a beautiful church like this:

To weird little apartments like this:

To more typical, SF-style doll houses like this:

You can see that Haight St. has also kept in touch with its hippie roots:

A marijuana shop

And there are plenty of other little spots on Haight that are enjoyably weird.

Haight St. is also home to Kid Robot, which is hands down one of the strangest shops I've ever seen.

Spider-rabbit, "Choice Cuts"-rabbit, & BDSM-rabbit. Though they're actually called "Labbits" - in case you missed the unmistakably Japanese blend of cute, kinky, and just plain weird

Some Tim Burton-esque creatures

And this adorable little raccoon suicide bomber called "My Brother Was a Hero" 0_0

Afterwards, we drove down Lombard St. which looks like this:

As you can probably guess, the speed limit there is 5 mph. :-) The view from the top is also pretty nice.

After a long, slow, scenic descent down Lombard, we turned left and went down to Fisherman's Wharf, which is one of the most touristy areas of SF.

We didn't stay long, opting for a quick stop at In-N-Out Burger where we got to see a snapshot cross-section of America (from the thin, chic Asians, to the pudgy middle-aged tourists, to the wildly obese fast-food regulars). We turned in for an early night back at the hostel.

During our second day in SF, we started off by visiting Telegraph Hill, which is famous for its wild parrot population--of which we did not see a single one! Maybe they were on vacation too. It's a beautiful hill though, and the views are well worth climbing all 400 stairs up to the Coit Tower.

View of Golden Gate from the top of the hill

Next we visited The Castro, a neighborhood you might remember from the movie Milk. It was (and still is) the famous gay district of SF, which took off during the 60's and 70's. You can spot it from literally a mile away, thanks to this:

Rainbow flags can be seen in or above pretty much every establishment on the street, including the Bank of America.

Of course there are all kinds of interesting and unconventional-looking shops, restaurants, and cafes all up and down the street.

Frida Kahlo and the MerQueen...

We went to a lovely bakery called Hot Cookie:

Which sells these:

And no, we didn't get one. Macaron-flavored penises are not my thing. We did have fun looking at all the photos on their wall, though.

That night, Liz and I went out to a really nice restaurant near the Marin Headlands called The Spinnaker. They have a great view over the water and we got to watch the city lights go off one by one across the bay. The food there was delicious--we had halibut and and swordfish--and our waiter had a demeanor that was positively adorable. He both looked and acted like a more mild-mannered version of Carson from Downton Abbey. The meal cost a pretty penny but it was totally worth it--a fine way to end our time in San Francisco. ^_^

P.S.

Just because SF is too full of pretty houses, here are a few more pictures for those who are interested. These are all houses around Alamo Square.