Day 10 (part 2): San Francisco

We spent about a month this summer on a 7,000+ mile road trip across the country, from the Washington, D.C., area to California and back. I began posting privately about the trip while we were gone, and I’ve kept the original dates from when I started the posts. But we’re home now, so I’m updating my posts with photos and making them public. Here is a what we did after arriving in San Francisco on Day 10, which was July 12.

We had planned on only one night in SF. So I’d booked us at a hotel in the Fisherman’s Wharf, so that we could easily walk to most of the touristy attractions we wanted to see, instead of having to spend a lot of time in transit. The plan was to arrive in the city early enough to spend the afternoon and evening sightseeing, spend the night, and then spend the following morning walking across the Golden Gate Bridge before leaving the city and heading up the coast.

San Francisco is not new to me. In fact, it’s one of my favorite U.S. cities. I’ve lived in the Bay area, so I’d already seen the best known attractions of the city, but I had not been there in years. Bob had visited once, and Jon Morgan had never been to California at all before this trip. So we wanted to hit whatever we could that day of Ghirardelli Square and the Fisherman’s Wharf area, as well as eating some terrific local specialties.

Once we’d checked into the hotel, our first priority was chocolate. Does that surprise anyone? We walked to Ghirardelli Square, ordered the famous ice cream sundaes there in lieu of an actual lunch, and enjoyed them at a table on the square before browsing through some of the shops. In fact, this was not the only day of our trip that we ate ice cream for lunch, though usually it was because we had a lot of miles to cover before nightfall, wanted something fast, and happened to be near a DQ. Ghirardelli Square was way, way better!

From there, we walked to Fisherman’s Wharf, where we took in all the sights: ships and sea lions, sea gulls, stores and streetcars, a carousel, and a view of Alcatraz across the Bay. We ate a casual dinner on the outside patio at Boudin Bakery, which specializes in sandwiches made with San Francisco sourdough.