Day 12: More San Francisco

Alright, so for today, we visited what we left undone yesterday.

Unfortunately we had to miss Alcatraz since it was booked full before we even arrived here so that's a bit of a disappointment. But other than that we went by the crossing of Lombard Street and Hyde Street, so named the crookedest street for it's sharp turns in such a small area, with cars lining up a bit just to ride down it for the fun of it. For pictures of SFO you'll have to wait until I can upload them from Santa Maria tomorrow but this street really is the crookedest...

Other than that we walked along Fisherman's Wharf, as I feared it was the tourist trap I expected it would be, but with little else to do it was a sight to see as any other and it had some nice shops and places to eat and drink. Though the boats were all closed and no tickets were sold to go on them due to repairs and reconstruction and renovation and all that.

After that we went through Little Italy. Not much Italy to see there apart from the Italian flag painted on the street light poles so we didn't stay there for very long.

Last up for today to visit was a more in depth visit of Chinatown, where we went for dinner yesterday with Johan. Too a picture of Chinatown Gate (smaller than I expected) and it's quite big to walk through, about the same size as New York's Chinatown apparently. I saw a very nice dao I wanted to buy (it's a type of Chinese sword, in case you're wondering, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dao_(sword), used in wushu and by the shaolin monks) but to my GREAT dismay it was too large to fit in my suitcase! :-( So I had to leave it behind since using FedEx or the like to ship it would have tripled the price and that's just too much... Really disappointed about that, since it was very nicely done.

After all that walking we rested up a bit at the hotel, went for some dinner at Carls Jr. (on reccomendation of MacKenzie, the hotel clerk, she helped us out a lot) and now we're just spending the evening at the hotel for now, maybe watch a movie or so. We wanted to go to a Best Buy for Christophe's birthday but it was a bit far off to walk and we didn't really wanna take the subway to get there so we'll look for something else sometime.

For tomorrow, visiting Monterey and Carmel before heading on through to Santa Maria. Will be some nice scenic views and for Christophe: Cherry's Jubilee Motorsports Festival.

Oh, by the way, upon entering San Francisco we reached the 3000km mark in our journey. I wonder how much more I'll be able to add on before we finish on the 16th since we still have 3 moderate to quite long drives ahead (San Francisco to Santa Maria to L.A. to San Diego). Anyway, tomorrow at Santa Maria we should have free hotel WiFi again so hopefully I can post some pictures of San Francisco then for you and tell you about what we did while in Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea.