San Francisco

For us, highway 101 ended in San Francisco. I would have loved to go on and I am sure I will one day but for this road trip, we had gone as far as possible (even though San Francisco was not our last stop, but that's for later).

After quite a few days with relatively calm freeways, it was intense to arrive in San Francisco. All of a sudden we were again on one of 7 lanes and it was so busy. Then we had to get off the freeway and were right in the middle of the city. We only had to follow Van Ness Avenue almost to the end, but somehow I found it very challenging. I was so relieved when we found our hotel. Unfortunately our real troubles only started then: After almost two weeks of faithful service, my credit card seemed not to work. The clerk told me in a rather unfriendly way to either give him another card or to leave right away. Thing is, in Switzerland most people don't have different credit cards (we have money though ;-). But the guy wasn't impressed and almost knew no pity. Finally he gave in and told me to call my bank. Which I did and a friendly Swiss guy told me that it was neither my nor my credit card's fault, but the hotel's / clerk's which had tried to use my outdated (stored) credit card details instead of the credit card I'd given him. Even now I can remember that stupid feeling of arriving somewhere without knowing how to go on...

 

We calmed down and then we went out for a walk. It was only a few minutes to get to the water and the piers. The kids loved being in a city again and I had fun watching other tourists. We walked and walked, took the cable car across town and then we walked back for pizza in North Beach. On our way back to the hotel we enjoyed a beautiful sunset while climbing up and down towards our hotel.

On our second day in San Francisco the sun had disappeared and it was foggy and grizzly. Ideal weather to take the boat to Alcatraz. Everybody loved the tour around the prison grounds, even though we were glad that we were free to leave at our own desire again afterwards

The next day the sun was back and so we headed to the Golden Gate Bridge Welcome Center and just enjoyed the view of the bridge and the surfers for a while. San Francisco is definitely one of the cities I could imagine staying for a while, at least I hope I'll be back sometimes in the future...