Are you going to San Francisco?

Day: 4
States: CA
Locations: San Francisco  (Treasure Island RV Park, Embarcedero, Pier 39, Lombard Street, Fisherman’s Wharf)
Total Miles Travelled: 380M

At some point today, yes we would be but we still had to get out of this rest stop and back on the road - Phils turn to drive!! ;-) I've driven a 31 footer before so it wasn't too nerveracking for me but I think Phil had more than a few butterflies this morning being at the wheel of a 27 foot lorry!

All went smoothly with us heading north to San Francisco through various wind farms and small cities and a lot of heat! Daaaaayyaaaamm it gets hot on the California mainland! Air Con to max please!

Finally the landscape started to change to something more resembling civilisation and the temperature dropped as we approached the coast again. We hit a tunnel and before you know it we were on the bay bridge! A mighty fine view here as you can see - glad I was a passenger at this point!

Across the bay bridge we went into San Francisco and heading south in search of our first RV park. Our first attempt was an RV park in Pacifica - a nice lady there advised us that there is a local metro system called thed BART. It turned out that another RV park was walking distance to one of these stations so we scooted over to check it out. This is to be our home away from home for 2 nights while we visit SF so we parked up and the owner came over. Apparently we disturbed him while he was munching his cookie - he didn't charge us for the inconvenience.

Right then, off to San Francisco except that before we had a chance to plug the RV in and leave we had a visitor. A Californian named Monty from Bakersfield who works as a nurse in SF and had just returned from the burning man festival (apparently the best one in a few years). He offered us a beer, some tequila and pointed out a few places to visit in SF - cheers to you! We then proceeded to fill up all the water in the RV and realised that all along we could have used the toilet, had a shower etc! Doh!

Finally we managed to get back on track (but not on schedule) and headed to the local BART to catch a ride into SF. Finding your way around on the BART was much like taking the London Underground for the first time - you stare at the map until you take a chance on a line.

This stop (Embarcedero) pretty much took us to the heart of SF where we were in range of most of the sights with the Port of San Francisco in front of us. We took a strole down the Embarcedero past all the piers including famous and huge Pier 39. Here we could see the seals gathering on the boardwalks and basking in the sun, live street entertainment and also visit the Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant.

 

From here it was off through Fishermans wharf (an absolute tourist trap, but we already knews this) and up some of the steepest roads we've ever walked to reach lombard street - known as the crookedest street due to the density of bends.

As well as the novelty of lombard street we admired the views that the residents see on their balconies every day including the steep city streets such as nob hill  and Alcatraz in the distance.

All worn out from this stomping it was time for a recharge – this involved a stomp back through fishermans wharf where we scoped out the various restaurants including some where they had live blues playing etc but as we were in the SF bay area it seemed there was only one type of restaurant we should be looking at - seafood.

Being in San Francisco we weren’t expecting anything to be cheap but being away for 3 weeks we were still attempting to watch the pennies so we looked at a few places that looked nice but looked as though we could afford – this strategie soon seemed backward once we found that the most sensibly priced restaurant was Neptune – a posh looking restaurant at the very top and edge of Pier 39 with views of the entire bay. It was a tad busy so we had a 30 minute wait so we had some beers and Dan had a whiskey. At first we thought he’d been ripped off by spending nearly $15 on just a shot of whiskey – when a quadrouple measure was delivered to the table we soon took that back!

Simply put, both the view and food could be described with one word - Awesome! I’ve never paid so little for so much quality seafood in my life and it was all cooked to perfection as well as accompanied by great service, including a bib!

After the meal and a few beers we were already ready for bed so the mission was to get back to the RV. What we hadn't realised about SF was how cold and windy it gets later in the day so the 35 min walk back to the BART started to seem daunting especially as I didn’t bring a coat - we hopped in a cab back to Embarcedero (driven by a dude from London - cheers for the discount! The trip seemed to take forever with 25 mins on the metro plus having to walk round the massive costco building in between the station and Rv park but we got there in the end and got some needed sleep as we were zombified, as demonstrated very well by Phil on the BART: