Do you still have to take a bus from the OAK airport to get to BART? It was a screwy system, I think I had to buy a separate bus ticket and then some sort of ticket for the BART. This was before the contactless card era so things might be different now.
No, there is a cool driverless mini-train that goes from the airport to the top level of the Oakland Bart station. Has never been very crowded and very clean. Costs extra, but not too much.
I never took the old bus, it sounded awful.
Yeah, when I was regularly flying between LA and SF, I used Oakland. The SF Airport is really inconvenient, especially since I was usually staying with folks in Marin.
Yeah, we thought of Oakland. They didn’t have any flights for us. Good point, though.
Yep, we stopped there (Vista Point) via tour bus a couple of times, I know exactly what you mean. Driving over the bridge, in fact, I spied the folks waaaay up high to the left (turns out that was Spencer). “That’s where we need to go” said I.
mmm
Much, much better to LA. I suspect SFO is closer to Marin in miles, but you don’t have to go through the city to get there from Oakland.
Bingo!
Ha! I made that same mistake on my first visit to San Francisco. I had just moved to California and still felt like a tourist, so I decided to take a day trip there during a long weekend (come to think of it I’m pretty sure it was July 4 weekend). I knew the weather in San Francisco was cooler than it was inland, but I figured if it was 90F in Sacramento it couldn’t be that much cooler in San Francisco. I was so wrong. That was actually when I visited Alcatraz for the first time, and I was miserable on the ferry ride. I guess maybe i should have warned you about that. Sorry.
It wasn’t actually Mark Twain who said that. It was some relatively unknown person. But quotes like that tend to get misattributed to a more famous person who seems like someone who would have said it.
ETA:
What’s wrong with BART? IMO since it’s a fairly compact city San Francisco is one of the few US cities where public transit works pretty well. And BART goes right from the airport to downtown.
I’m interested as well. I hate to say that I can’t really recommend the CTA in Chicago especially at night from Ohare, I used to recommend it enthusiastically. And I wasn’t a hypocrite, I took the blue line from the Loop to Ohare often before Covid. I’ve got a friend who’s a flight attendant and we’d try to meet if he overnighted in Chicago.
I’ve used BART often and definitely preferred it to San Francisco Muni metro trains. Used to take it from both SFO and OAK when I used to travel to the Bay Area before Covid.
When you commute on a motorcycle you are part of the climate. It’s 45 miles from San Francisco to Dublin / Pleasanton and in the summer afternoons it would be 100s when leaving Dublin / Pleasanton and 50s in San Francisco. On a motorcycle coming home and crossing the Bay Bridge, it was pretty cold.
while in North Beach, don’t forget the Vesuvius bar (where Beats hung out) and the bookstore next door
Welcome to microclimates (though Sacramento isn’t in the SF area microclimate.) It’s one of the things the housing assistance people told us about when we did a house hunting trip, and you’ll see them on the weather in the local news. There are major temperature changes from Milpitas and Fremont to Pleasanton as you go over the Sunol Grade on 680.
Probably nothing. We were advised against it, though, due to being luggage-toting tourists. Also, I suspect that it does not drop us off at the front door of our hotel as Lyft did.
mmm
I was warned but got away with just pants and a t shirt except for the ferry ride (on a generic bay tour boat that sailed past the various landmarks, including Alcatraz, but didn’t stop there.) Once I got to the shore of the bay I realized that it was going to be very windy on the bay, and thankfully there was a stall there at an open air market that was selling tie dye beanies*, and I thought, I could use it three ways, as a souvenir, to protect my head on the bay, and to run/hike in the winter because it is lightweight and would not be as easily misplaced as a black beanie.
Ironically, it was so windy on the boat that the beanie was in danger of slipping off! Thankfully it wasn’t that cold without it.
*Not sure exactly what I should call it. It was the thickness and shape of a beanie but was one solid sheet of material without anything special on its top. It was thinner than a toque and only fit slightly over my ears without being able to roll it. And it was not as solid as the other types of skullcaps that Wikipedia lists (and skullcap itself connotes a specific type.)
Well, it isn’t the attribution that’s the key here…it’s the quote itself. But, thanks.
City Lights???