San Francisco! 4 Parks in 1 Day! April 15-16

  We drove about 5 and a half hours north from L.A. though the amazing mountains and into the central valley. It was a beautiful, but gusty, day.
   We are staying in Emeryville, near Oakland at a Hilton Garden Inn that Mark got for a good price and...when we got here, they upgraded our room.

We are staying where the green dot is

   We are on a peninsula on Powell Street that goes into the bay. So, we walked down to see the sunset on our first night here. (About 2 miles round trip.)

Sunset from Powell Street, Emeryville over San Francisco Bay

    On our only full day (Saturday) we drove across the Bay Bridge. We drove to Dubose Park near Haight Street in order to surprise former student and Peer Support member, Keri Fishman. She had posted that she'd be volunteering for "Dogfest" for her sons' school. We got there early and she was not there yet, so we wandered down Haight Street and ate at  funky International Cafe where Barbara had a smoothie and Mark had eggs and a bagel.

Cafe International

     Then, we walked back and strolled up to Keri who was staffing the raffle table. Shockingly, she recognized us right away. We hugged and chatted for a few minutes. Keri does voice overs and has been the voice of Walmart and is still one of the voices of Pandora.

Squinting into the sun with Keri

       After that, we drove around Golden Gate Park, but everyone in San Francisco was out today having fun in the sun and we did not get a parking spot near the Botanical Garden. So, we decided to go toward Ocean Beach where we went to Lands End and walked a bit and looked out at the water. There were hundreds of volunteers sprucing up the park - mostly attacking invasive plants, but also painting curbing etc.
      

Panorama Shot from Lands End

Lands End

White-Crowned Sparrow

Golden Gate Bridge from Lands End

After that we were hungry. We tried to get parking on one side of Golden Gate Park, but couldn't find any, so we crossed the park to the other side and found another area of Chinese food and stores and ate a late lunch there.

    Then, we drove back into Golden Gate Park and still couldn't find parking by the Botanical Garden, so we gave up. We then went to the Presidio Park. The Presidio was the longest continually-run military base in the U.S. until it was decommissioned and it is now a park. We parked at the top and then drove down the hill and parked by a huge marina and watched a huge flotilla of sail boats coming back from a day of sailing. It was beautiful.

The flotilla under the bridge and coming back to port

Sailboats assault on Alcatraz!

Looking at San Francisco from the Marina

Both evenings we ate at the Hilton's Garden Restaurant and...surprisingly, it was very good and reasonable. Mark had wings each night and Barbara had a very good garden salad for just $6.00, full of interesting ingredients. We would love to have a few more days here, but...we don't.