City By The Bay: Day Two

Friday morning, I awoke after a good night's sleep around 9 AM...wait a minute, that was 7 AM in San Francisco! What a wonderful feeling to know that I had time to spare in getting ready for our morning's outing. After a luxurious SECOND cup of coffee with the Girls...we headed out the door for our tour. We walked a few blocks over...not too bad, since most of it was down hill...to catch the cable car. Unfortunately, our cable car didn't look like this. Our car was pretty crowded, so we couldn't sit together. Two of us were able to sit in the open air area and the other two sat inside looking out the window. Like us, most on the car were visitors heading to Fisherman's Wharf for a day of sightseeing.


We had an appointment with "Mr. Toad" for a "Tour of the City". We traveled the city with our tour guide, Patrick, in a 1921 Rambler. It was open air, so I had to slip into my sweater pretty quickly. This picture was taken under the Golden Gate Bridge a little further into our tour...but you get the idea of how we toured the city in style!

Patrick is an actor and he helped us spot not only the local landmarks, but he also referenced the movie settings as we passed. We saw the church where Robin Williams filmed 'Bicentennial Man' and the park from 'So I Married An Axe Murderer', and more. We stopped and took pictures in front of "Postcard Row"...otherwise known as the home of the Tanner family from Full House. Maybe one of the other Girls will post it. I don't have a copy of it myself. (Check my sidebar for Stacy's and Robin's blogs to see more pics and hear more stories. It will be interesting to read our different accounts of the trip since last year I was the only one who blogged!)
This was cool too! We were able to watch fortune cookies being made in Chinatown. Did you know that the first fortune cookie was made in San Francisco? Me neither. You know how the fortune cookie has influenced my life. Without it, I may never have gone on my first Grandmas Gone Wild trip! (Just kidding! But I do like reading my fortune cookies.)

Do you recognize this? Okay, me neither...but I learned that this was the setting for the "Summer of Love". No that is not another movie title, but the beginning of the Hippie movement. There will be more to tell on Haight-Ashbury in tomorrow's post, but let me just say that this place was 'interesting' and had a funny smell!

After driving through a section of Golden Gate Park (the flowers and trees were beautiful), we headed down to see the bridge. It is huge!

I can't remember all of the trivia that Patrick gave us on the bridge itself...how many times the cable from this bridge would wrap around the equator, etc. I do remember him saying that it takes four years to paint the bridge. There is a crew that works five days a week, eight hours a day painting. Four years later they get to the other side...at which point it is time to start over again! I think this random trivia stayed with me because it reminded me of cleaning your kitchen or doing your laundry. As soon as the job is complete, it is time to start again!

We watched surfers under the bridge. I got some great shots of a few of them. I felt like paparazzi...click, click, click, click...until they dove off their boards!

Mr. Toad's Tour of the City was three hours long and my second favorite thing of the weekend. I really felt like we 'saw' the city and got a taste of it. If I had it to do over again, I would have taken better notes of what we saw and Patrick's recommendations of places to eat!

Our tour brought us back to Fisherman's Wharf. We grabbed a bite to eat at Fisherman's Grotto #9. It was a 'quaint' place that reminded me a little of Tavern on the Green, but 'grittier'. The inside was lined with carousel poles at each booth. I didn't get a picture, but it was pretty cool looking...even if our seat was unusually situated.

After lunch, we spent several hours touring the boardwalk at Pier 39. Here is a picture of Robin in front of the tulips. The flowers were beautiful. I think I enjoyed them so much because they are the types that don't do well here in the heat of Texas. They reminded me so much of spring.

Just around the corner, we enjoyed the barks of the sea lions. There were about a hundred of them floating on small docks just off a pier. These two were in the midst of some kind of conversation.

We did a lot more shopping before calling it a day and heading back to the flat to get ready for our dinner reservation.

Now, I haven't said a whole lot about the 'walking San Francisco' thing...although Robin has mentioned it on her blog. After the reservations were made for dinner at Harris' Steakhouse, Robin ran a map so that we would know how to get there and how long to plan. It was .7 miles away. We figured we would leave the flat forty five minutes early to insure that we had plenty of time to make our reservations. Let's just say that .7 miles to your restaurant in San Francisco is not like walking .7 miles to your restaurant in New York City! Add to this the fact that myself and one other Grandma were crazy enough to wear boots with heels to take this trek! It took us almost forty minutes to make it to the restaurant.

Dinner was great. Being from Texas, we were ready for a good steak! I had my first 'fois gras with truffle sauce'. I am glad they didn't tell me what it was until after I ate it...but it was delicious. As a side note: though the food was great, I wouldn't recommend checking more than one coat. Right, Lola?

We caught a car outside the steakhouse and proceeded to the Fairmont Hotel for a nightcap at the Tonga Room.

There were tiki huts and a lagoon in the middle of the room. The live music was performed from a boat in the lagoon and occasional rainstorms fell around them. It was cool. We even talked the hostess into giving us lei's!

Thankfully our flat was just a block away, because when we left the Tonga Room, ONE of us had Conga'd at the Tonga just a little (okay, a lot) too much!

Tune in tomorrow for Day 3.