As much as we strongly disliked Los Angeles, we loved San Francisco! This might just be my new favorite city that we've seen on this trip. For starters, their palm trees are actually pretty, unlike the long, skinny, ugly ones in LA. Secondly, the entire city smelled so good! This is pretty rare for a large city, but honestly everywhere we drove it smelled like Eucalyptus! Also the buildings were so beautiful! I think San Francisco has passed Boston as far as character goes. 
So our tour of the city started with driving through the busiest, craziest street in the whole city, in the RV. We were attempting to find a place to park the RV so we could take the bike out and somehow ended up on the street with all the big shopping stores and office buildings. That was fun. Finally we found a huge park which formerly was a military base, so it had lots of pretty old buildings and big grass plazas. It was a great place to start out our tour. 
From there we drove up to see the Golden Gate Bridge and again loved the whole area. Since the park/ former military base reaches out to the water, there is a huge running trail along the water, lots of grass and a beach for swimming. There's also a pier that people were fishing from. Our favorite part was watching this huge pelican waiting for the fishermen to bring up a fish so that he could snatch it from them. So funny!
When my sister got married four years ago, she and her husband came to San Francisco on their honeymoon so they had a lot of excellent suggestions for us to see. One of them was the Ghiradelli Factory! We ate too many free samples of chocolate and mareveled at the mounds of chocolate. We couldn't buy any though because we knew it would be completely melted by the time we got to the RV. We also sat outside and listened to a guy perfrming in the little Ghirardelli plaza. We like supporting local artists so we ended up buying his CD and didn't even realize until later that he's a believer and his music is actually really good! What a blessing!
After that we just had to drive down Lombard St., the crazy curved street. It was really fun on the bike, not going to lie, and had a pretty amazing view of the city below us. There were at least 50 people along or at the bottom of the road taking pictures of it and I felt like a celebrity with paparazzi all around us photographing us coming down!
From there we drove over to the Coit Tower which really has the best view of the city. It was completely worth the ridiculous price of 7 dollars just to go up a little elevator to the top. I love that almost all the buildings in San Fran are white. It's really beautiful and makes amazing pictures of the city. The view of the Bridge was pretty spectacular too.
We had one last stop we had to make after that. My brother-in-law, knowing how much I enjoy a well made cup of coffee, insisted we go to Blue Bottle Coffee. There are actually four of them in the city so we went to the closest one which was in one of the big ferry buildings along the water. 
Now this ferry building was pretty much the coolest place in the world! As soon as you walk in, you are met with that amazing Barnes & Noble smell of new books and coffee, along with this amazing melted cheese smell. Besides a fancy restaurant, the building is basically a high class, indoor market. They had everything from farm fresh vegetables to incredibly delicious baked goods to soaps to plants to rare cheeses and a lot more. And of course the amazing coffee shop. This was no dirty, fish smelling Pike Place Market. This was like the 5th Ave of food! 
It reminded me of when I lived on the Campo de' Fiori in Rome where you could walk downstairs and buy fresh bread, vegetables picked that morning and eggs that still had feathers on them all within a half a mile radius. Amazing! I could have stayed there all day! After buying this melted cheese sandwich with apple chutney that was way too good, some pastries and coffee of course, we went right outside the building to the deck overlooking the ocean and just sat there enjoying San Francisco...
Also, we came super close to getting our first parking ticket on the whole trip. Right when we got back to our bike, a parking security lady was turning into the lot we parked in to give us a ticket. As my dad would say: close but no cigar! We then sped off back to the RV, literally flying up the crazy steep hills of San Francisco. I have to say that those streets were the funnest streets I've ever ridden on. They were so steep in some parts that I had to hold on to Alex really tight to not slide off the bike. And then once we reached the top of the steep hill, we would literally ramp onto the street, flying through the air for a second or two. So Fun!!!
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