San Francisco Part 3

Tips for exploring San Francisco:

Take a sweater even if the sky is blue and it’s 80 degrees.  If the fog rolls in, it only takes minutes for the temperature to drop as much as 20 degrees.

Don’t drive in the city.  Public transportation — from the old-fashioned cable cars to the sleek underground trains to the surface street buses – is inexpensive, safe, and convenient.  I’ve never met more helpful bus drivers anywhere in the world!

Restaurants will cost more than you think.  (Can you say $40 breakfast for three?)  Portion sizes will be large enough for two in most cases.  Spend your food dollars wisely.  Trader Joe’s and other grocery stores can provide reasonably-priced snacks, drinks, fruit, and breakfast rolls.  Ask at your hotel where the nearest grocery store is.

If you’re taking the Powell-Hyde streetcar line, you have no choice but to stand in the long line of tourists at the terminal at either end.  In between the car will be too full to hop on.  For the Powell-Mason line, it’s a bit less crowded.  We successfully hopped off and on a lot.

The City Pass gives you entrance to a bunch of attractions, but, best of all, it’s a 7-day transportation pass, including the $5-a-ride cable cars.  http://www.citypass.com/city/sanfrancisco.html

Hotels are expensive.   Search the guidebooks and online reviews before making your choice.  Beware of Priceline (and probably other discounters).  They call the edge of the Tenderloin district “Cathedral Hill”.  (This is the down-and-out part of SF).  It was weird to walk my kids past drug addicts and prostitutes in the early evening when we would head out to a restaurant.  (We took the bus back.)

Get in as much exercise as you can before you go to SF.  Walking is the best way to see the city, but the hills are steep.

There are no longer aye-ayes at the zoo.  For most people, all the other lemurs suffice.  But for my daughter, who once did a school report on the endangered aye-aye, it was a huge disappointment.  (According to our out-of-date guidebook, the zoo still featured the aye-ayes.)

Make sure the guidebook you take along is current.  I bought my favorite brand off the shelf at a major bookstore, and it was about 5 years out of date.  This was a problem when we went searching for that exquisite gnocci or hauled ourselves out to the otherwise not-extradordinary zoo looking for aye-ayes.  It was also a problem outside of the city when the exit names on the highways had changed!

If it’s cold and foggy in SF, it might be sunny and warm across the bay in Sausalito.

The hike around Land’s End is spectacular on a sunny day.  You get to see the Golden Gate Bridge from the ocean side, and you can understand why Europeans sailed right past this bay for 200 years!  (see San Francisco Part 1)

If you’re traveling with kids 8 and up, the Exploratorium is worth a whole day.  It’s a science museum with some 650 hands-on experiments.  Unlike most science museums I’ve been in, this one has real experiments, not computerized baby versions.  And every experiment has a complete explanation of the science behind what you’re seeing/doing.  My kids didn’t care so much for the Tactile Dome, though — my daughter got kicked in the eye (luckily she managed to catch her contact before it flipped all the way out).  We could have skipped the Dome’s extra cost.   http://www.exploratorium.edu/