San Fran Trip Day 4 - Brunch and Seeing The Sights

The morning after the wedding we were invited to Jared's work for a brunch. His workplace is in an industrial area with a spectacular view near 8th Street and clost to where Zynga has an office.

Since it was way too far from the hotel to walk, we had to either take a cab or the bus, and Natasha came up with a briliant third option: Sign up for the Big Bus Tours Hop On/Hopp off tour bus that makes a circuit around San Fran and from one of the stops take a bus down 8th to the building.

So we bought a 48 hour pass for us and the kids and took the Big Bus route from the hotel to the stop nearest 8th and then took a Muni bus southward. Into quite an industrial, run down, and rather spotty area. We then found the building and got in without further problems.

The office had a balcony area with great landscaping and a spectacular view:

It was a very nice brunch with family and friends both old and new and then we headed off to catch a Big Bus for more of a tour of the city and its environs.

8th is a one-way street, so we were planning to walk up it to get to the Big Bus stop after having trouble figuring out where to get a Muni bus to take us back up in the direction we needed to go. However, we were clearly warned in no uncertain terms by quite a few helpful passers-by near the Zynga building that you simply do not walk up 8th street as it is unsafe, and they directed us where to go to find the right bus, which was very nice of them.

We took the Muni bus to the Big Bus stop and then got on with our tour.

This tour bus had a live guide and she added a lot of fun local content to the tour, other buses had recorded audio but the live guides were certainly better and a lot more fun and informative.

One of the stops was to see San Francisco's city hall:

We then drove by Golden Gate Park, which we were to visit the next day, and entered the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

H-A was the nexus for the hippies and the whole Season of Love thing, and apparently is still a locus of hippie culture and a distribution zone for lots of brownies with herbal additives in them (no, we did not get off to partake). We passed by the mural of Jimi Hendrix:

We took it over the Golden Gate Bridge and into Sausalito.

Going over the bridge on the top of the bus was very cool - the wind roared along and it was a very cool experience.

Sausalito is a very pretty and very expensive town across the way, with some lovely views of San Francisco. We had lunch there in an Italian cafe - the wood burning pizza oven made some incredible pizza.

Then we took the bus back to San Fran and got off at Union Square, where we had dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. First time having gone to one, and it was pretty full with a 20 minute wait to get a seat. It was worth it, and the cheesecake was at the very least to seriously maim for.

It was a very fun full day indeed.