Trip to Hilly San Francisco

     I was sitting in the office and thinking about July, 4 holiday. We can do something interesting that weekend and we did. We flew to San Francisco, California in summer 2000. Many people told us that San Francisco is great city, that's why we wanted to see it ourselves finally.
    We flew there through Minneapolis without any problems and then settled in the hotel. We exited from the highway in the wrong place trying to find our hotel. I was driving and it was quite to challenge to drive on these hilly streets first time in the night.
Nevertheless it was ok and next day I was driving again. Mike forgot his glassed and so I was driving all the time.
    We've been there for about 3.5 days. We walked in a downtown and near the ocean. The weather was quite cold and not very sunny especially first 2 days. The ocean was cold but it looked wonderful. People were walking on the beach.
first we've been in the Golden Gate park which is very big park and has several museums and small parks inside.
We visited Japanese Tea Garden, it was very colorful and elegant. The same day we visited Palace of Honor which is
actually small Museum of Art. It contains many Rodin sculptures and others. We saw a temporary exhibition of some painter from San Francisco, his pictures are nice and really show the best views of the city. Palace of Honor stands on the hill and there is very good view of the bay, islands and San Francisco itself. We were trying to reach Coit Tower but it was closed for private party what was very disappointing especially after we climbed by thousands steps from our parking till the top of the hill with this tower. Finally we were trying to find a parking place near Golden Bridge but it wasn't success again. so, we crossed it and took pictures from the other side on the island. BTW, the bridge looks fine but it's quite short comparing to the Bay Bridge another bridge in San Francisco.
   Next day we had a trip to Alcatraz the prison island. This island is actually very close to the main land. No wonder some prisoners escaped successfully (they of course think they are dead). You know Alcatraz is a very gray old place, nothing
special ... Just movies and stories keep it alive I think.
   Finally we climbed on the top of Coit Tower which looks really great on the whole San Francisco view. This tower looks very bright on the San Francisco landscape. Somehow we found about a very strange street in San Francisco called Lombard street. I
didn't read about it on the any web site but people were all over it.  You know what is so special about it? The street has zigzag shape and goes down from the top of hill. And...cars can drive through it though very slowly! That's fun, I also drove there at night. We took many pictures from there including the one in the beginning of this page. At the end we walked around the Marina district and saw many good-looking houses, some with a very good view. In fact we liked these residential districts especially that many houses should have very good view on the city and bay.
   San Francisco has a lot of restaurants and we visited several including very good persian. Also I was eating a soup inside the famous sourdough bread that is San Francisco feature.
   BTW, on our way back we saw July 4 fireworks from the plane staying in the Minneapolis airport!
   After spending 3 days there we understood that it's not enough at all. One should spend at least a week there. There are many other museums to visit (like Museum of Modern Art) and many scenic routes to drive... And everybody knows about famous San Francisco opera.