On New Year's Day, we were back in San Francisco, and excited to explore the city!
Of course, we had to take a cable car ride, which ended up being the highlight of the day. It was so fun and scenic! I need to remember this if we ever go back to San Fran: if you go to the beginning of the cable car line, there can be an extremely long line and wait longer than an hour. We went a stop or two down the line, and only had to wait 5 minutes or so! We hardly missed anything, so it was fine. The only downside to this was that the cable car was already filled, so we had to stand on the outside and hold on to the bars. Yikes! I actually liked that better though. Get the full experience!
Excuse the random guy in front of me.
The cable cars at the end of the line
Once we got to the end of the line, we walked to Pier 39. We decided to do the Aquarium of the Bay first. I had printed out a $2 off per person coupon from baycityguide.com. It was still a little pricey at $14 per person when you consider the fact that it took less than an hour to go through the aquarium, start to finish (and this is with a husband that likes to read all the plaques). I still think it's worth it to be able to get an idea of what goes on in the Bay. :)
It was a beautiful day to walk around Pier 39.
Jeremy had heard that there were sea lions at Pier 39. We rounded a corner and could suddenly hear the sea lions barking (two of them were fighting). Jeremy immediately let go of my hand and walked briskly, almost ran, over to the fence to see the sea lions. Haha!
We had lunch at Boudin's, which was San Francisco's original sourdough place! We sat at a table outside, and an adorable Chinese girl (2 years old, maybe) was sitting next to us with her mom. After a few minutes, the mom got up and walked away! I think she was ordering a drink or something. Jeremy looked at me and said, "I guess she trusts us." It was so weird!
We walked from Pier 39 to Fisherman's Wharf to walk around the shops.
At Fisherman's Wharf is the Musee Mechanique, which is a museum of antique "video game" machines. They all still work, and we dug some quarters out to play some of them. It was so cute!
This guy was in the movie "The Princess Diaries"!
After Fisherman's Wharf, we decided to make the long walk back to our hotel and see more of the city that way.
We were all the way up this hill and could still hear the sea lions barking!
We passed "the crookedest street in the world" where tourists line up for blocks just to be able to drive down it.
We got back to our hotel and rested for a little while before heading back out for dinner and to walk around some more! One of the places we went was The White Horse, where we had gone with Laura a few nights before. This is silly, but I felt really attached to this place, I think because we went there with Laura right before taking her to Chico.
Image from Yelp
The inside of The White Horse looks like an authentic English pub, which is probably the main reason I loved it so much.
Jeremy and I weren't all that impressed with Seattle when we went there, so we were expecting to feel the same way about San Francisco. It was completely different than Seattle, and we both loved San Fran so much!
