Travelling from L.A to San Francisco was a long day. It took a 9 hour bus journey to get from the Greyhound station in L.A to the one in San Francisco, which is a long time to be sitting on a bus!
We were in San Francisco for one week in total, however, on three of the days we went on excursions out of the city – I will do a separate blog post on these! In this post I am just going to cover the things we did/visited while in San Francisco itself.
We stayed at the USA Hostel, the same chain as the hostel we stayed at in San Diego, so we knew what were getting going in. If you want to see what I thought of these hostels, head over to my San Diego blogpost!
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Pier 39
On our first day in San Francisco we decided to walk to Pier 39 and the Fisherman’s Wharf area to explore. The pier is around a 40 minute walk from where we were staying, which was in the area of Union Square. There are lots of hills up and down, which San Francisco is famous for of course, so be prepared for this when visiting! Of course you can always get the trolley if you wanted to, but that only goes part of the way.
Pier 39 is famous for being the resting place for a group of sea-lions, which you can see (and most definitely hear!) from standing on the pier.
On the pier itself there are many restaurants and shops. There are also performers on that you can watch if they take your fancy!
Lombard Street
If you don’t know what Lombard Street is, it is a famous area of San Francisco with a ‘zig-zag’ road, or hairpin turns if you want to be technical. You can walk up the sides of it, or drive down if that takes your fancy. It is interesting to look at and definitely worth the visit if you’re in the area!
Alcatraz
Another thing that we did in San Francisco itself was take the ferry to Alcatraz. I feel like this is a must-do activity if you’re in SF, as it is such an iconic place from history. You get the ferry from pier 33, which is just around the corner from pier 39 and depart around every half hour, but you can find all this information on the Alcatraz Cruises website!
Once on the island, you can go straight into the cell block, where you pick up an audio guide that talks you through each area, or go to the cinema for an introductory video. We went to watch the video first as it gives you an overview of the history of Alcatraz. Following that we went to the cell block tour.
You can visit a lot of the Alcatraz Island, not just the cell block, including the outdoor yard and the gardens. You can spend at least a couple of hours here, so give yourself plenty of time to look around everywhere. You can catch the ferry back at any time you want, just choose a time from the schedule and turn up in the queue!
Golden Gate Bridge
Possibly the most famous attraction of San Francisco, the Golden Gate bridge is a must visit if you’re there. You can go over the bridge in different ways, be it on foot, on a bus tour or on a bike. The latter is probably the most popular choice amongst tourists, and is what we chose to do. This would have been a great idea, if we weren’t complete idiots. We rented our bikes from a shop on Lombard street, which I wouldn’t recommend doing. Lombard street is quite a way from the Fisherman’s Wharf area, which has a lot of bike rental places in itself. I would recommend renting from there, as there is a bike route to follow along the waterfront. Instead we got lost, quite a few times, and had to go up lots of hills in the red hot heat. Eventually we made it to the bridge, and somehow lost each other on the one track… I said we were idiots. Nevertheless, the views from the bridge itself are amazing. You can ride across to Sausalito, where you catch the ferry back to Fisherman’s Wharf. Ideally, we would have liked some time to explore Sausalito more, but a mishap with my bike chain meant that we ran out of time and so had to go straight to the ferry in order to return our bikes in time. Even though we messed up in almost every stage of the day, I would still say to go across the bridge on bikes, just follow my advice, not my actions!
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As I mentioned earlier in the post, I will do a separate post on the excursions that we went on out of San Francisco. Then after that, it is onto my time in Canada! I am slowly but surely getting through all of my travel posts, so keep your eyes peeled for all the updates, hope you’re enjoying them so far!
Introducing Georgia 