Today was a little disappointing, but we made the most of it by visiting the Golden Gate Bridge.
We had arranged to take a half-day wine tour, but it was cancelled due to the lack of demand. The weather has been pretty much the same for the last few days—about 17° and slightly overcast.
Golden Gate Bridge
After thinking about it, we decided to get on one of those hop-on hop-off double-decker buses primarily because it went over the Golden Gate bridge towards Sausalito and then back.
We thought we could get off at the lookout point and walk into town. It turns out to be too far a distance to walk.
As you know, San Francisco is known for relatively narrow streets that are up and down and quite steep. Also, many streets are full of buses, trolleys, trams, cable cars and tourists. As a result, the bus tends to skirt the interesting parts of the town, and you’d have to get off and explore them yourself.
If we hadn’t taken the bus, though, we probably would’ve left at the excellent tourist spot of Pier 39. And if not, we would have missed the day’s highlight, the seal lions.
The blubbery sea lions at Pier 39, one of San Francisco’s smelliest and most famous tourist attractions. The sea lions’ initial colonization of the pier almost 35 years ago, in late 1989. They just started showing up one day and as their numbers increased, their traditional hang out, Seal Rocks, became less populated. There are all sorts of theories about why the pier became a favorite haul-out spot for the sea lions, but no one knows for sure why the animals’ behavior changed.
We ended up downtown at the end of the day and walked home through the rolling hills of San Francisco. We stopped off at our favourite little corner store Limoncello, to pick up supper and a bottle of wine.