I left my heart in San Francisco....not really

So the nice thing about living in the middle of nor cali is that we are pretty close to a lot of exciting places; the sierra mountains are right here as well as lake Tahoe, Napa valley is a short drive away and so is San Francisco (now going to be designated sf). So the girls and I decided that after working hard for 2 days, we would go a play a little. We got to sf in about 2 hours, found a parking garage in China town, and got to walking. Oh man, the people who live there and walk every where have to be in pretty good shape! Those hills are CRAZY!! But of course sf is known for that, among other things. All I really wanted was to get some clam chowder in a sour dough bowl so we headed toward the fishermans warf over at pier 39. Along the way we went through china town and little italy which were very smelly (in a good and bad way) and exciting w/all their different shops and restaurants! Half the eateries in little italy had signs saying "si parla italiano!"-I got pretty excited at that! We hit the warf, found a place to grab some chowder and enjoyed our seafood delights! Then we wandered around a little more; we went into the musee mechanique which was a museum of all the old timey entertainments and "nickle and dime machines." You know, the fake fortune tellers that are mechanical and the "nudie women" that you can look at in a picture box and stuff like that. They all were converted to taking quarters which was pretty cool so you could hear the different ones going as people played them. We continued our trek along the coast line and got a good view of the golden gate bridge. Then we hit up the ghiradelli factory, but didn't buy anything since it's so expensive. We had some pretty good views of alcatraz but we didn't go on it; we couldn't find a tour of it :( We walked back to the car, met a very strange older man on the street who was ranting about how satanic the city was becoming (based off some wall art that we all saw together) and we walked past a restaurant called "the stinking rose." Apparently they serve a lot of garlic there. My other favorit sign was one on the pier that depicts a person going to close to the edge and the pier crumbling and the person falling in the water. It was pretty funny. All in all it was a really fun trip and we had a lot of fun laughing and goofing off and walking all around the place. When my mom and sis come this coming week we're going to go back and maybe bike the golden gate bridge and take a ferry back! I really wanted to this last time, it was just a little much and too much time for me and the girls. However, sf was a fun city to get to know a little and I'm excited to take more trips back very soon!