Biking San Francisco!
When we were planning this trip, Chris and I had to really figure out how we wanted to budget our time in San Francisco. There are so many things to see and do, but we only had 2 full days to do everything! We decided to rent some bikes and spend the day biking the city.
Before our bike ride, we had breakfast at a cafe near our hotel called Pat's Cafe. It was pretty good! We walked a bit down the road near Fisherman's Wharf and rented our bikes from San Francisco Bike Rentals. We chose this place because you we would be able to drop off at a different location near Golden Gate Park so we wouldn't have to ride all the way back to Fisherman's wharf.
We decided to rent a Tag-a-long for Ryan so he wouldn't have to pedal the long day by himself. He rode connected to Chris and this ended up being a great plan! I don't know if he could have kept up.
We left Fisherman's Wharf area and headed west along the marina. Here is our first view of Alcatraz Island from the aquatic park
This is Fort Mason with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. You can see it is partially covered with the fog- but it cleared up later in the day
We turned at the Palace of Fine Arts and stopped to check it our for a few minutes.
Then we headed south into the Presidio. This is an old military base- turned into offices now. One of these offices is the Lucas Arts ILM office. I had read about the neat Star Wars Yoda Fountain and I knew we had to go there!
We were able to go into the lobby and see all the costumes, lightsabers, and Star Wars displays.
It was a really fun stop!
We headed back to our bikes and pedaled back up to Crissy Field. This used to be an airstrip but now is part of the Golden Gate National Park. We pedaled through here and stopped a few times to take some pictures.
We arrived at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and looked at the exhibits there.
This display shows the inside of the cables. It was really neat to see how so many small cables make up the large ones.
This exhibit shows how a suspension bridge works. There were lots of pictures and timelines showing how the bridge was built and info about the bridge.
We set out to cross the bridge on bicycle!
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| Ethan is mad that I made them stop for a picture! |
We arrived at the north end of the bridge. It is 1.5 miles each direction! We rested here for a few minutes and waited for Chris and Ryan. We had gotten split up from them and they were waiting for us somewhere else. But we found each other and then pedaled back across the bridge.
This was such a cool experience! I am so glad we rode across the Golden Gate Bridge! It is something I will never forget!
We decided we were feeling pretty good and would continue on with our bike ride. We had biked about 8 miles at this point. Here we made a bad decision- we decided to wait to eat lunch because it was just about noon, we weren't super hungry, and the only option was the insanely busy cafeteria at the Golden Gate Bridge.
We headed south and east along Lincoln and further east to Land's End. This was a really hard stretch for riding. Bigger hills, we were getting more and more tired and hungry. The scenery was beautiful along the coastline but we were getting pretty miserable. We decided to find ANY place to eat and ended up on a side street somewhere at a Polish Deli. The butcher made us up some sandwiches and we packed them onto the bikes and headed towards Golden Gate Park. We stopped at the first place we could find a place to sit and eat inside the park. It was near this beautiful lake- Lloyd Lake. We sat on some benches and scarfed down our food. It was 3:00pm! The kids walked around the lake and looked at the ducks. Chris and I just sat. : )
After resting for awhile we set out to ride through Golden Gate Park. We headed east to the Buffalo Paddock where they have American Bison in a zoo-type setting. Cool!
We rode west through the park towards the gardens. I wish we had more time to really see the park- we just sort of "whizzed on by" everything! But it was getting late in the day and we had more to see!
We made a stop at the Japanese Tea Garden. Pretty but not worth the entry fees.
And then we headed out of the park to Haight Street to return our bikes. We rode a total of about 17 miles today! Crazy!
We took a bus through the city to get back over by our hotel. That was quite an adventure! We witnessed some interesting characters at the bus stop waiting for the bus near "Hippie Hill". Once we were on the bus there was almost a fight right in front of us! The bus ride took about 30 minutes but we were all so tired from the long bike ride. It felt good to rest.
We got off the bus in North Beach (Little Italy). We had planned to eat a big Italian food meal, but we were still kind of full from our late lunch. We ended up getting a slice of pizza and then walking around a bit and checking out some sights.
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| St. Peter & Paul Church |
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| Statues in Washington Park in North Beach |
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| Coit Tower |
What an exciting and thrilling day we had! It was a blast riding all over San Francisco and we were able to see so many things. Many good memories made today!
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