USA 2009 – San Francisco Day 7

The day of many buses and many misdirections…

Still trying to shake of the exhaustion of day 6, we headed back to the local cafe The Grind (see previous post for a link) to refuel and stock up on coffee. For some reason they either don’t grind their coffee fine enough here or they have never heard of tamping, because it usually takes 3-4 shots to get the equivalent of a single Adelaide coffee.

So 3 x 3 shot coffees later, I managed to catch up on the blog posts but that was about it. So while I bedded down for a bit more catch up sleep the others caught up on email, reading and other pottering around type stuff.

Mid afternoon we headed further up Haight Street on the number 6 bus (bus 1), where I managed to find a money clip for all the pesky $1 notes I’ve been collecting, and then it was decided that we’d head over to the Golden Gate bridge for sunset (which has been about 5-5.30pm) “It’s just a quick trip” says Pat as we hop on the number 43 (bus 2), which we ride for about 20 minutes before changing to the 28 (bus 3). Nice close up views of the GG bridge, and we walked to just past the first pylon, when the freezing cold wind and our hunger got the better of us and we headed back to find somewhere to eat.

This is where the fun began. There is really nothing much in the way of places to eat around the bridge, I was in favour of getting the 28 and N back to where we were staying and eating at an Italian restaurant I’d spotted a few days before, but Mish wanted to try a few places she’d read about in the guide book.

Since by the time we’d had this conversation we’d been waiting 25 minutes for a bus we decided we’d jump the first one that came along.

Onto the 28 (bus 4) we hopped but going away from the N back to base and vaguely in the direction of where Michelle suggested. We rode the 28 for a few blocks then had to change to the 45 (bus 5) to get where we needed to be.

It was about 3 blocks walk to the 45, and I thought I’d worked out that if we walked back to the turnaround we could cut a block off of the walk, but I got confused and we ended up walking 4-5 blocks up some nice steep San Francisco hills instead, This got everyone in a good mood as we finally made the 45. We got off at Hyde where we were in the 1900 section, and the place Michelle was looking at was in the 1500 section so another 4 block walk later we found the spot, but by this time we’d realised that the prices in this part of town were a little on the steep side.

So off we set again. I at this point was in favour of getting the cable car back to the N and then back to that little place close to base, but the others had different Ideas. We jumped the Cable Car (which we’ll call bus 6) back to Powell then started walking… through Chinatown to Little Italy. By this time I was getting pretty tired and had thrown a few tantrums about going back to base and leaving the others to it, but I persisted and after walking another 5-10 blocks (I’d lost count by this time) we found a nice little place in little Italy right near a number 45 buys stop!

By this time we were well and truly ready for a drink and some dinner. Pat was a little disappointed with his Lasagne, but otherwise the food was really good and we had quite an acceptable bottle of Californian red.

After the great success of both Michelle’s and my navigating skills we left it up to Pat to guide us home. We walked back 2 blocks to Stockton where we grabbed the number 30 bus (bus 6) back to Powell street station where we jumped the N (which we’ll call bus 7 for the sake of it) back to Dubcoe Park and the short walk to base.

Day 7 over, thank goodness….