San Francisco: Fisherman's Wharf
We were lucky to be able to meet up with a few friends who live outside of San Francisco. Our first day in SF, we met up for breakfast with a friend. After, he offered to drive us to Fisherman’s Wharf, which was great because Fisherman’s Wharf was way farther away than we thought it was!
One thing that we didn’t realize about San Francisco was how spread out all the tourist attractions are. The Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf, Japantown, Chinatown, Mission District, are miles away from each other! We were planning on using public transportation, but we were confused by the cable cars, and ended up taking either the BART or using Lyft! Once we got to Fisherman’s Wharf, we were surprised by how touristy it was. We can’t complain because we were one of them, but it was definitely the most crowded out of all the other tourist attractions we visited. It’s cold there by the water and all of the tourist shops were conveniently displaying sweatshirts.
Someone recommended that we go into Ghirardelli Square, so that’s where we started. It was a huge complex with a bunch of outdoor shops, restaurants, and of course, ice cream and chocolate shops. It made us crave ice cream so we stopped at The Baked Bear, where we could create our own ice cream sandwiches (they had gluten free cookies and vegan ice cream!).
One popular tourist attraction is Alcatraz Island, which holds an abandoned federal prison. There are tours where you can actually go in, and we’ve heard that they’re cool, but we were short on time and had other things we wanted to explore. We heard from a friend how cool it was to see the sea lions on Pier 39, so that was our main mission.
While we were walking there, we found Boudin Bakery. We watched the bakers through the window and could smell the sourdough in the streets! It smelled so good that we explored inside and took a tour. We wanted to get something to try, but the line was out the door. We ended up finding a smaller Boudin Bakery on Pier 39 and tried some sourdough there! It was hard to get a good look at the sea lions because so many people were there, but it was such a fun experience!
- Nick + Jess
