What Should I Do In San Francisco?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Go up the campanile at Cal, if views from tall towers are something you like. How much of a view you get will, of course, depend on the weather.

It would also be a good place to encounter mobs of tourists and all the tacky tourist shops, if that’s your thing. You can get tacky tourist stuff cheaper in Chinatown if that’s what you want, though.

They do that, in the Bay Area. Things we would consider back East to be mountains, they call hills.

Don’t drive over the Bay Bridge (SF to Oakland or the other way) if you can help it. The MacArthur Maze is a nightmare. At one point, 580 East and 80 West are the same road (yes, really). It’s not well marked which lanes go where, so you have people trying to get across three lanes of heavy traffic when the freeways split. When I lived in the Bay Area, I always took the San Mateo Bridge from San Mateo to Hayward instead.

I like Zachary’s Pizza in the East Bay, Saigon Express in Berkeley, and Great Wall in Oakland. I think those are the Bay Area restaurants that I miss the most. I had good Burmese food at Burma Superstar in Berkeley last year, but unfortunately Nan Yang, the Burmese restaurant in Oakland that I really liked, has closed :frowning: Filippo’s and Pasta Pomodoro both have inexpensive Italian food, I like Filippo’s (in Oakland) better.

22

Oh, and go to Yountville for lunch at a place called Bouchon. About $90 a head, but the real California style French experience.

23

I highly recommend going to Tourette’s Without Regrets. That would be a great window into what the many underground events around the Bay area are like. Great local flavor.

Sorry, but I think the Stinking Rose is overrated and a bit of a tourist trap. I would recommend going to Franchino’s two doors down, an immigrant family-run Italian restaurant that is much homier and better food.

24

Hint re restaurants and signs:

If it has a gaudy sign - and especially if the gaudy signage has floodlights - it serves crappy food and/or is a place for tourists.

Stinking Rose and Tommy’s Joynt are the prime examples of the phenom.

The only thing Pier 39 has going for it is that there is/was an Inn-N-Out burger place - Inn-N-Out being one of the few So Cal transplants actually welcomed in SF.

25

Pier 39 has one other thing going for it: sea lions. There’s a big group of them that hang out there. Here’s a webcam.

26

If you want to tour the famous squiggly Lombard Street (the squiggly part is only one block), I recommend walking it instead of driving it. It is nicely landscaped, and should be full of flowers this time of year. It is only about one block from the Cable Barn, so you could do both of those in one outing. (Don’t say you weren’t warned: That block of Lombard is steep, so if you walk down it, you have to walk back up!) The cable car between Hallidie Plaza (in the downtown area) and Fisherman’s Wharf has a stop there.

Re: Suggestion to view the bay from top of Campanile Tower at UCBerkeley: If you like grand views like that, you can do even better. (I assume you are driving a car.) Drive up to Grizzly Peak Road (which runs along the ridge of the “hill” on the east side of Berkeley and Oakland. Drive along this road. Stop at various turnouts. Assuming clear weather, you get a majestic view overlooking the East Bay Area. While you’re in the area, you could check out Tilden Regional Park. There’s a visitor center there, a short loop trail around a pond full of turtles, an early 1911 Herschell-Spillman carousel (article ; photo) (There’s a similar carousel in Golden Gate Park too.) (ETA: And additional miles and miles of hiking trails if you’re into that, and picnic areas.)

If you’re into outdoor recreation, in particular visiting redwoods and doing hiking, there’s [del]hills[/del] mountains full of redwoods and hiking trails all around. East Bay (along Skyline Blvd, which you get to from Grizzly Peak); North Bay in the hills west of Santa Rosa; South Bay in the hills between Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz.

For another grand view, drive over the GG Bridge into Marin County, taking note of the mountain just past the bridge on the left. At the first exit (Alexander Av, to Sausalito), get off but turn left instead of right at the end of the off-ramp. Go under the freeway (takes you towards an on-ramp right back to SF), but just before that on-ramp, turn right into Fort Cronkhite, a steep road going up that mountain. Ruins of several WWII era fortifications there; interesting geology (you can see the layers and folds in the rock where they cut into it to make that road); and a view over the Bridge, the Bay, and San Francisco like from an airplane.

Oh, and back in the East Bay: Southward, near (or at?) Union City, right at the edge of the bay, is a large marshy wildlife preserve area. (Forgot the name, but you can find it on any on-line or paper map.) Good bird viewing, probably. A small hill you can climb right at the edge of the bay, with a good view overlooking the whole South Bay region.

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Oh by the way, RayMan, you are required to come back to this thread after your vacation and report back to us all the places you went, and things you saw and did.

28

RayMan, are you a member of the AAA Auto Club, or anybody you are visiting is? The Northern California chapter puts out a quarterly magazine. The last two issues have feature articles on places to see in and around SF. See if you can get your hands on either of those issues. You may be able to find it on-line too, at www.aaa.com if you can navigate your way around that site. The magazine is called Via.

Sept/Oct 2014 issue: Has cover story called “San Francisco Secrets” listing (briefly) a half-dozen very famous points of interest, then for each one, discusses in detail a similar by lesser-known point of interest. One interesting item is the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps – an outdoor staircase decorated with mosaic tiles (article with photos), just off 16th Av between Moraga and Noriega. (BTW, if you haven’t noticed, the east-west streets in that neighborhood have names arranged in alphabetical order.)

Spring 2015 issue: Has cover story on Golden Gate National Recreation Area. On the SF side, you have the Presidio, with museums, shops, forested area with walking trails, and the coastal area. In the Marin side, you have the above-mentioned Fort Cronkhite area. There’s also the Marine Mammal Center there, a volunteer rescue/rehab outfit for marine mammals (mostly seals and sea lions); they are open for visitors, or were last time I was there (years ago).

29

The entire stretch of freeway from that interchange through Berkeley (in that direction) is simultaneously I-80-East and I-580-West. The road actually runs north/south, but you are “officially” driving simultaneously east and west.

It seems to be that the word “Maze” isn’t used like it used to be. A couple miles east into Oakland along I-580 is a hideously complicated interchange with State Route 24, which is also tangled up with MacArthur Blvd and other local streets, and also has the MacArthur BART station right in the middle of it. This is the “MacArthur Maze” as I have always known it.

When they built the current incarnation of the I-80/I-580/I-880 interchange (the approach to the Bay Bridge on the Oakland/Berkeley side), everyone started calling that “The Maze” instead. But I don’t see how that can be called the “MacArthur Maze”.

A bit of history: if you take the east bay shore freeway (I-880) south from here, you drive through a section that used to be a double-deck freeway. In the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, the upper deck collapsed onto the lower deck (Wiki article with photo of collapsed road), squishing a bunch of cars and people flat.

30

Just be sure to wear flowers in your hair.

31

A big attraction for me used to be visiting the fire station at Twelfth Avenue and Geary, then walking back up Twelfth to my Gramma Kranzke’s house for lunch. Then my aunt Maureen would take us for a walk along Park Presidio. Once we actually walked halfway across Golden Gate Bridge before turning back (there might have been a bus ride involved for part of it).

This was fifty years ago, and the experience may not live up to the hype today. Anyway, my gramma passed away in 2001, and Aunt Maureen lives out of the state now.

There’s a Foucault Pendulum at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park that’s still there, though.

32

That’s the only thing I ever went there for.

33

Walking & mass transit are definitely the ways to get around the city. On a visit years ago, I checked the maps to see the Diego Rivera mural & then more murals (& a view!) at Coit Tower. No problem! Take the bus from the hotel, then walk a few blocks.

Flatlander that I am, I didn’t realize that one of those blocks was straight up. At the top, I saw the other side of the hill was the famous part of Lombard Street. But my heart didn’t actually burst & I enjoyed the rest of the day. Found the Best Italian Deli In The World on Grant Street but I believe it’s been gentrified away…

And my sister dragged me to Fisherman’s Wharf–for the sea lions, not the tourist crap. Then I dragged her to City Lights Books for the hip.

I’m green with envy. San Francisco is a lovely town…

34

Some people, particularly people from the Midwest, use compass directions in addition to the direction the freeway says it is going for navigation. I think 80 East and 580 West being the same road and running north/south might make their heads explode. I remember when I lived near Santa Cruz, my parents came to visit me. I told them about the 1 (north-south) running east and west through Santa Cruz, because of how the coast is curved. That really bothered them. They said, “Well, 1 North must run north and west, right?” (I think it might actually go south and west, the coast around Santa Cruz being what it is) And people wonder why I don’t navigate using compass directions…

Even if you can go with the flow on directions, that stretch of freeway in Berkeley is generally a giant traffic mess unless it’s way off hours, so it’s worth avoiding. It’s bad in both directions, but I think it’s worse going from SF to the East Bay.

I heard it called the MacArthur Maze on radio traffic reports, so that’s what I called it (well, when I needed to call it something that wasn’t obscene). I figured it was named after the MacArthur Freeway, another name for the 580 between Castro Valley and Oakland.

35

Thanks, everyone, for the great suggestions. I’ve been able to do a few of them so far. Keep the great ideas coming.

Oh, Senegoid, I didn’t realize I would have to do a “What I Did On Spring Break” essay as repayment! :slight_smile:

36

See if you can get in to see Beach Blanket Babylon. It’s an absolutely hilarious show.
Just try to get good seats because the nosebleed region gets terrible sound and the funny lyrics get rather muffled at times. My brother and I figured we missed about a quarter of the jokes for lack of hearing key words.

—er…uh? You pissed on them?
I guess, being San Francisco, some of them might have enjoyed it… :smiley:

–G!

37

If you’re interested in a little drive, the Computer History Museum is in Mountain View, 35 miles from SF. Exhibits - CHM

Closer is the town of Colma, where most of the people from SF are buried. I went there once to visit the grave ofEmperor Norton. Although it looks like he’s giving walking tours in SF, now.

38

Okay, my trip just got much more exciting in a way I did not anticipate or intend.

I am staying in Contra Costa County, not San Francisco proper. San Ramon, California–very, very close to where I am–just had a magnitude 3.5 earthquake. This is not a delayed April Fool’s joke, I just experienced my first earthquake. It was not pleasant. The whole house moved with a big jolt and a loud bang. Something fell off the wall upstairs.

My sister tried to tell me it was no big deal. I don’t understand how you Californians do it. Please tell this midwesterner it will be all right.

39

You’ll be fine. A 3.5 is alarming if you’re close to the epicenter, but it won’t do significant damage. You now have a good story for the folks back home.

40

San Ramon is pretty close to the Blackhawk Auto Museum. It’s not huge - you can see it in a couple of hours.