San Francisco 3rd-April-5th April

We flew from Seattle which took appprox 2.5 hours and took a taxi to the hotel from the airport which was quite expensive($40), but neccessary, due to the amount of luggage we still had. We seem to accumulate more stuff after stopping in one place for a while. Our hotel/motel  was called Super 8 and located in the Pacific height area. Even though the price was still $80 per night it was fairly
basic, but it served its purpose

Overall we were really pleased with the location, it was on Lombard Street, on the main bus route to the tourist attractions but within easy walking distance to all the restaurants and shops. Also just down the street from the hotel was a very famous American diner called Mel's Place which was used for the film American Graffetti.(We had soup in there followed by a meal as we were freezing after riding over the bridge)

Dell's Place

The following day we took the open top bus tour which took us to 20 of San Francisco's main attractions, some of which were the famous Golden Gate bridge,

Fisherman's Wharf, the Maritime Museum ,National Historical Park, the Cannery Shopping Centre, Ghirardelli Square; Farmers Market; Union Square and Chinatown .

This was a very informative tour well worth doing. It takes about 2.5 hours if you don't hop on and off at any of the stops. It is good to do this  if you have time on your side as you could easily take the full day over this or spread it out over two days

San Francisco city centre

Trans Am Building

City Hall

Steve stood in Fisherman's Wharf

Our only disappointment was were were unable to go on the Alcatraz tour as it was booked up until the Friday, however we could still view the Island from the harbour.

Alcatraz

We personally did not feel the harbour front of San Francisco had the same wow factor as Sydney or Melbourne, but did have its own uniqeness.

The main city was impressive and just like what you see on the tv with the long hilly streets like you see ion the films, apparently there are 42 of them some of which had nice large victorian houses running along them . We felt Fishermans Wharf was a bit tacky, very grey and dull with lots of industrial containers.

One of the 42 hilly streets in San Francisco

The bridge was further out of the city than we imagined, you could only access the bridge by car or bus, we crossed it with the tour bus but it was really windy at the time, however you did get good views of the city from the bridge.

The bridge

We stayed for a couple of nights overall and then hired a car from Alamo. We had checked out lots of car rental companies ,but going through the UK and using National Car Rental was easily the best and the cheapest of them all with no drop off fee.

We are now looking forward to the next part of our trip, wherever we end up!!!