San Francisco - Day 1

We spent our Memorial Day weekend this year in San Francisco. We had a chance to join two of our friends, Joe & Gina, for a weekend trip out there. It was too good of an opportunity to pass up so it meant going right back out on the road for me after just getting back from Disney World and for Mike just a day after getting back from Africa. Our plan was to spend 5 full days out west, leaving early Friday morning and returning late Tuesday night on the red eye.

When we arrived on Friday afternoon we were starving (especially since gone are the days where they even give you a snack on the plane - or free tv for that matter), luckily Joe had the perfect lunch place lined up for us, appropriately named, Joe's Cable Car. And it was on the way from the airport to the city. When we pulled up the restaurant doesn't look like much from the outside or even on the inside but it was the food that counts. This place was a diamond in the rough, so much so, that it was even featured on the show Diners, Drive-in's, and Dives (one of my favorite mouth watering shows to watch). We had some of the most fantastic hamburgers we have ever had in our entire life. They might as well cut up the cow in the back that's how fresh these hamburgers are. I went for the "california fresh" that had the most amazing sauteed onions on top, it was delish! We left there wanting to make another trip back!

 Mike showing off his. My delicious california fresh on the right!

 The boys thoroughly enjoying their burgers!

Once are tummy's were full we headed into the city to go check into the hotel and get settled. We were staying at the San Francisco Mariott Marquis which is in the Union Square part of town. For the rest of our afternoon we decided to do some walking and check out the city and walk we did! It felt like we walked through the entire city, we covered a lot of ground.

We started our walk by heading down to the San Francisco Ferry Building which was only a couple blocks from the hotel.  The Ferry Building had a lot of nice little shops inside that all looked so quaint and fresh (more to come later on the places we went to in there) but it was very nice to stroll through and see all the great looking food and other things in there.

Then we thought we'd walk down to Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf, little did we know it was a decent walk to get down there but we made it. We got our first glimpse of all the action down at Pier 39, there's a lot of restaurants and little shops down at the Pier (apparently it's the most visited attraction in San Francisco). We checked it out for a bit, walked around to see what was there and we even saw the famous sea lions that call Pier 39 home, that was pretty cool to see!

We didn't set out planning to walk miles through the city, but our walk continued on from Pier 39 down to Fisherman's Wharf. We passed through the Wharf and headed onwards, we were actually looking for this place called Kara's Cupcakes that sells gluten free cupcakes for Gina, so we continued on to Ghiradelli Square for the coveted cupcake. On our walk we also got our first glimpse of the cable cars which was cool, one of the main stations is right near Ghiradelli.

We finally made it over to our destination and could sit down and relax for a few minutes, Gina got her cupcake and I got a small chocolate ice cream from the Ghiradelli ice cream shop. According to google maps at this point we'd already walked 3.2 miles to get down here and we still had to get back to the hotel. Once snack was over we started our trek back. On our walk back we managed to walk through China Town, the North Side and I'm sure a couple more places, it felt like we walked through the whole city by the time we got back but it was a great way to see the city on our first day!