Introduction
With only about 24 hours notice, Josh and I were sent out to San Francisco to support a project for Genentech. He flew in from Florida on Tuesday and I came in from Baltimore on Wednesday. We'd been told that there was a ton of work and that we should expect to be working late nights and over the weekend. But, when we got there and started on our tasks, we realized that the load wasn't as great as advertised and so there was no reason to kill ourselves. So, we took the weekend off, and Josh and I set out on Friday night to cram a week's worth of sightseeing into just two days.
Friday night, we took BART into the city from South San Francisco where we were staying, caught a cablecar down to Fisherman's Wharf and walked around down there, checking out Pier 39 and some of the street performers, then headed back up to Powell Street on the cablecar again, and walked through the lovely Tenderloin District to find a Vietnamese restaurant recommended to us by one of our local co-workers.
On Saturday, we BART-ed in again and took a really interesting tour of Chinatown, then ate lunch at a Dim Sum restaurant and walked down to Coit Tower. After taking in the view from the top, we headed back over to the waterfront and made our way over towards Ghirardelli Square, pausing for me to dip my feet in the Pacific Ocean. Then we headed back over to Pier 39 to see if we could get tickets to Alcatraz for the next day. They were sold out until Wednesday, but a woman who was escorting a tour for Cisco had a couple of no-shows and sold us tix for the next boat. We wandered around Alcatraz for a few hours, then headed back into the city, ate dinner at an Indian place in North Beach, then walked all the way back up to Powell and headed home.
Sunday, we got a pretty early start, driving down through the city and over the fog-bound Golden Gate to Muir Woods National Monument. We took the Fern Valley Trail, but when we hit a closed section, we switched onto the Lost Trail, then the Ocean View Trail, then the Panorama Trail, and then the un-named trail which took us to the Tourist Club where a German Folk Festival was going on. We had a beer, then continued down a really steep cut through down to Muir Woods and heade back home, alittle winded and very sunburnt.
