After a short stopover in Salt Lake City where we visited the Mormons temple we drove to San Francisco. On the way we stopped at the Bonneville Salt Flats, which is the place in the salt desert where all world land speed records were measured. Afterwards on the way to San Francisco we drove through the states of Utah, Nevada and California seeing almost nothing but desert areas.

In San Francisco we visited Florin, a school colleague of mine which I haven’t seen in 12 years so we had a lot to talk about. Florin moved there 5 years ago so he knows the city very well. On weekend he showed us the city and outside of it we visited also the Muir Woods, which is a nice park with very tall red woods.

San Francisco is now definitely on the list of our favorite cities. It has so many attraction points but the one that we liked most was the area around the famous Fisherman’s Wharf. Here you have a lot of nice restaurants with seafood specialties as well as a place where sea lions gather to sleep in the sun (see the pictures). We did not miss the other touristic attractions like the Golden Gate, the beautiful Lombard street, walked all the stairs up to the Coit Tower to have a beautiful view of the city and took a boat tour around the Golden Gate Bridge and the Alcatraz and went also to the beautiful town Sausalito. Another thing that’s nice about San Francisco is that it’s all built on 43 hills and some streets are so steep that you feel like being in a rollercoaster when you drive there.

San Francisco was almost completely destroyed after an earthquake in 1906 and the fire that lasted for 4 days after the earthquake but there are still some nice Victorian buildings in town. A nice story is that all the houses in SF are not insured for earthquakes because the risk of another big earthquake in the future is so big that no insurance company is willing to sell a package which covers earthquake damages. This also happened in 1906 and because of this there were a lot of cases where people set fire to their own houses because otherwise the insurance would not cover the partial damage.

One amazing thing we’ve seen or done

One amazing thing that happened to us in San Francisco was when we wanted to buy tickets for the Hop-on-Hop-off bus. The person that was selling the tickets was from my hometown where I grew up and went to the same schools like I did so we got the tickets for all attractions in San Francisco for FREE. We also rode the Rocket Boat, which is the fastest boat in the Bay and the ride was definitely something to write home about.

Utah

San Francisco