First exploration of San Francisco

On Saturday, Andrew and his friend Rick who's over here for a week went to a SysAdmin "camp" that was on in San Francisco for the day and I went exploring. Above are just a couple of images from the day, the rest of the photos can be found on the America page of our photo website.

So we all caught the train into San Francisco, they went off and did their thing, and I went for my first real trip around the city. It was a wet and windy day and I hate carrying stuff so had left the umbrella at home, which meant for a cold and not quite so pleasant morning. I ended up having to buy a touristy nylon jacket which was fleecy inside and very cozy! It's actually a pretty nice jacket, and was only $20, so I can't complain.

Anyway, so we got to San Fran about 10:45, and I wandered around a bit. After an hour of walking around aimlessly in the rain, I finally decided to go to a book shop and buy a San Fran specific cheapie guidebook so I could figure out how the city worked and what I could do (I had about 4 hours before Andrew would be done). So I did that, and sat down at a sourdough bread bakery, and enjoyed a feast of clam chowder served in a bread bowl made of the much talked about San Francisco sourdough bread, while figuring out what to do.

Turned out there was heaps of things close by to do on a rainy day, so I started with buying a day pass for the cable cars to go exploring the city. I'd heard a lot about the hilly streets of San Fran, but it was great fun to really SEE them on a cable car to get a real perspective of what they're like. You get to hang out the side of a cable car (quite precariously...), and look right down the street and wonder how good the brakes are! To get an idea of how it looks, here's a map of the cable car routes which includes contour lines of the city.

I also went down to the Embarcadero where the Port of San Francisco is, had a wander around there, and then back to the cable car, and changed over to head down towards Fisherman's Wharf. It was a fairly long trip though timewise as the cable car stops at each street corner, and the amount of Saturday traffic makes things a bit slower. So by the time I got down to Fisherman's Wharf (where I had just enough time to buy my jacket), it was time to head back again to meet Andrew and Rick.

All in all it was a pretty good day, and now that I have a rain jacket, I'll be better prepared for future adventures :)