Taking it easy in San Francisco

August 30, 2010 | Category: California, Driving, Hiking, Oceans, Travel

Golden Gate Bridge

Golden Gate Bridge

After a solid 3 weeks on the road, I was in need of some serious downtime to rest, and San Francisco was the perfect place. I’d been here before and had seen much of the must-see scenery, with a few notable exceptions. Spending a few days in a hotel with my french buddies and then spending a few more days in Berkeley with an old college buddy was great. In that time, I happened to shoot a few snappy snappies, so here’s a looksie at some of my favorite photos that I happened to take while getting caught up on this blog on the drive from LA to SF.

After a couple days of chillaxin’ in our hotel room, we opted to go into town. Granted, my friends had already gone once while I stayed back to work on the blog, but this was my first reentry back into San Fran. To get into town, you can either drive over a bridge, take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit… their local metro system), or hop a ferry across the bay. We opted to take the ferry across into town.

San Francisco from the Oakland-Alameda Ferry

San Francisco from the Oakland-Alameda Ferry

It was the priciest option out of the three, but it was nice to do at least once. Having been to San Francisco a few years back, there were really only two things that I wanted to see/do.

The first was check out the sea lions on Pier 39.

Sea Lions on Pier 39

Sea Lions on Pier 39

The sound a sea lion makes had me lol’ing like crazy. After this stop, I spent a little while speaking sea lion. Wanna hear what they sound like? Click here. (Source: SeaWorld)

There weren’t as many sea lions as there sometimes are, given the number of empty floating platforms, but you can see some sea lions in the distance on the far platforms. They’d stick their heads up in the air and squeak/honk. The kids next to me and I had a little conversation back and forth in sea lion. 🙂

The other thing I really wanted to do during my stay in San Francisco is drive down the Russian Hill.

Looking up the Russian Hill

Looking up the Russian Hill

The next day after our walk around town, my friends wanted to go back, and for some reason I felt like going as well. That day we drove on over and since I had my car, I made a point to go drive down this thing.

About to drive down the Russian Hill

About to drive down the Russian Hill

As you can see, the SF trolleys conveniently make a stop right at the top of the hill for us touristy folk to pay a visit. When the people and the trolleys cleared away, we were able to drive through.

Driving down the Russian Hill

Driving down the Russian Hill

The road is made of brick and while it isn’t the most tractiony, it sure is pretty-like! On the way down, I stopped, opened the window, and shot a shot out the window.

Looking down the Russian Hill

Looking down the Russian Hill

The light on the buildings looked so nice. 🙂

Near the Russian Hill, the town treats you with a wonderful view of Alcatraz and a big boat in the distance.

Alacatraz in the distance

Alacatraz in the distance

Another thing that I found particular amusing was this…

Free wifi bus

Free wifi bus

See that written on the bottom right of the bus? Free wifi baby! A mobile hotspot! Seriously, too cool… we found we were able to hop on and get internet when driving next to the bus, or even when we pull a good distance away! I’d estimate we had a range of about 150 feet or so in traffic. Pretty convenient to get password-less free wifi when on the road. 🙂

After my french buddies and I said our goodbyes, I was actually quite sad. I tremendously enjoyed their company on the trip and really didn’t feel like going back to traveling solo quite yet. Once we went our separate ways, I went to go visit Amanda, a fellow photographer friend from back at Georgia Tech. She’s a grad student at Berkeley now, studying earthquakes, faults, and all sorts of cool earthy stuff. I’d met some friends of hers who were also into geophysics, geochemistry, and other earth sciences, and I got really excited at the idea of going on a hike and having them explain to me how the land we were hiking through was formed.

(Lately one idea I’ve been getting has been to travel with experts in different fields… landscape photography, time-lapse photography, cinematography, botanists, outdoor survivalists, and so on… learning lots and lots from people whose area of expertise spans an enormous range across the outdoor arena.)

In any event, we drove out to this wonderful area of town that Amanda particularly enjoyed hiking.

Curvy wheat road

Curvy wheat road

The curvy road we took on the way up honestly made me pretty nauseous, and I wondered whether or not I’d even want to hike by the time we got there. I chugged a bunch of water and ate some of my food and felt much better, so off we went to go hike through some gorgeous San Francisco landscapery!

Amanda and Jim in the cloudy wheat fields

Amanda and Jim in the cloudy wheat fields

This place was so beautiful… just these gorgeous rolling hills covered in wheat. I was having a field day shooting here, no pun intended. 😉

Hiking down towards the beach

Hiking down towards the beach

Down to the beach below is where we hiked to have lunch. Farther in the distance there you can see Point Reyes, famous for the 1906 earthquake. There’s a fence there that ran across the San Andrea Fault. When the two chunks of land slid past each other in the quake, it actually broke the fence and shifted it 18 feet apart. 🙂 We didn’t hike that far, but it’s cool to know it was right up there.

Don't Even Visualize Parking Here sign

Don't Even Visualize Parking Here sign

However, incidentally, we did happen to run across another fence I particularly enjoyed. 😀

Hiking back to the car uphill was far less intense than I had imagined and was also very enjoyable in good company. The whole time we basically just cracked jokes and had a great time.

Hiking through wheat fields

Hiking through wheat fields

It makes my heart sing to explore so many different types of landscape and scenery…

Oh, back in Berkeley,  I happened to come across a Rumi quote carved into the sidewalk, a quote I absolutely adore. 🙂

Rumi quote on the sidewalk in Berkeley

Rumi quote on the sidewalk in Berkeley

Oh, I totally forgot… speaking of Berkeley, there was one other thing I really wanted to see in the SF area…

Underneath the stadium at UC Berkeley runs the Hayward Fault which runs goalpost to goalpost. Imagine that… one half of the stadium is moving one way, the other half the other way!!

I wanted to go see the stadium and check out any visible signs of damage due to the fault, but there was construction going on at the time (it’s the beginning of the school year there now, just prior to the football season) and so I couldn’t go in and take a closer look. From what I could see, and even asking one of the construction workers inside the barricade what he could see, there wasn’t any external damage visible. I think they repair it quite a bit there.

In any event, on one side of the stadium, the fence was open and I was able to stroll in and sneak a peak of the inside of the stadium.

Berkeley's football stadium on a fault

Berkeley's football stadium on a fault

By this point, after I had said my goodbyes to Amanda and San Francisco, it hit me pretty hard that it was time to continue the journey and keep heading north up to Alaska. Whew boy!!

One Comments

  1. chingyue
    on January 26th, 2015
    1

    Hi great traveling article! any chance you can share the location of the wheat field where you hiked with Amanda? Thanks!

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