San Francisco Getaway: Day 3

We started Day 3 just like all of the others: with a scrumptious breakfast of whatever the heck we wanted to eat. I think Embassy Suites has taken my heart through their amazing omelets.

We headed out to the BART station where we caught a bus to visit the Legion of Honor art museum. It’s at the top of a hill in the middle of a golf course, so we had to hike up through the links to get there, but the view from above was definitely worth the near asthma attack.

I have to say, my husband enjoyed the art museum much more than I thought he would. I don’t think I’ve been to many museums with him, and I was pleasantly surprised. Personally, I love art museums. We saw works by Monet, Picasso, Renoir, Rembrandt, Dali, and one of the largest collections of Rodin sculptures outside the Louvre. Very cool.

We then hopped on a bus, made a transfer and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge. Amazing to be right there…I would have liked to bike across it, but that will have to wait for another trip. Had fun browsing the gift shop, reading about the bridge, and of course, taking our pictures with the foggy bridge in the background:

Next stop, The Palace of Fine Arts.

Once inside the “palace” it is a science exploratorium. It was on our CityPass, so we hurried on in, even though it closed a half hour later. Can’t wait to take the kids there someday. As much as we enjoyed it there, it was almost worthless without them. Here is a picture of us messing around inside the kaleidescope mirrors. (Wish I had a wider angle lens with me, but I only brought my 50mm since it’s easiest to carry around.)

2023 edit: This vacation was taken in 2007—way before smartphones! I’m sure grateful for my iPhone, but I also don’t take my big camera on vacation as much anymore and sometimes that makes me sad.

Under the guise of trying to find the right bus stop, we walked through a very victorian part of town and admired the homes there. Very fun. After walking down several residential streets, we finally figured out how to get back down to Fisherman’s Wharf and headed out.

We ate lunch/dinner at Ghirardelli Square in a little diner place. I was feeling like a good old fashioned hamburger and fries. No more fancy food for me, thankyouverymuch! And then my husband had the nerve to order another huge sundae at Ghirardelli when I had sworn off of such evils. I almost didn’t speak to him for the entire rest of the vacation.

Lucky for him, in the square was a fun red door, and that lifted my spirits quite a bit. For some reason I have a fascination with finding cool brick buildings or alley ways with funky doors to photograph. We seem to have a shortage of such places here in Cedar City, so I took the opportunity while I had it:

After nourishing ourselves a bit (do you realize we only ate two meals a day? Our big fancy breakfast, and then somewhere in town late afternoon or early evening. Great diet plan, coupled with all that walking, don’t ya think? Too bad I didn’t actually lose any weight. I blame the caramel heaven I ate.) we hopped onto the cable cars and headed for Chinatown.

By the time we got there, it was dusk, but it was still really fun to walk through and look around the shops there. We bought a couple of those cheap paper umbrellas for the girls (which they adored, by the way) and a couple other things.

We hopped back on the cable car and took a brief stop off at Union Square to browse and pick up some juice at Walgreens, then headed back to the BART station and went back to our hotel. But if you think we decided to actually sleep after all of that, you think wrong. No, no, no…we found a bookstore close to our hotel and we went and stood in line until nearly 1:00 am to buy the new Harry Potter book at the midnight release.

I got a huge kick out of this window display:

And then I stayed up for another half hour to read the first 2 chapters.

I realize I’m insane. No need to tell me.