San Francisco

 Our final destination was San Francisco. We flew into a beautiful sunny afternoon and after taking the train and then taxi we managed to get to our airbnb apartment which was just a few minutes stroll from the oh-so-famous Haight Street, and within a minute or two from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury.  We had five days to explore this magical city.  As with our other destinations we hopped on an open top double decker bus and spent a few hours being driven through and around the city - including driving across the Golden Gate Bridge - which was sooooo cold and windy.  But stunningly beautiful.

 This is one of the groovy houses a few doors up from our apartment building in Oak Street. The wooden houses in San Francisco are simply fabulous and our wonderful guide on the open topped double decker bus was able to tell us all about the various genres of housing style including the classic 'painted ladies'.

 Lots of touristic cliche images in San Francisco - the bridge, a cable car like this one, Alcatraz in the pic below.  We took a cable car back to Haight Street one evening and though we didm;t hand out the side we still enjoyed it. Public transport in this city on the street includes buses, trolley cars (which have been sourced from all over the world and painted up to authentically resemble what they looked like when they were carrying people in New York, Milan, or wherever else, and cable cars. We had wonderful weather most days we were in San Francisco except one

 when it was quite overcast. This is a pic of Alcatraz - which alas, we didn't get to.  Next time, hopefully.

 The Golden Gate Park was just a few minutes stroll from where we were staying and we spent much of one day strolling through the park. We spent some time admiring the tropical plants in the Conservatory of Flowers, wandered more solemnly through the AIDS Memorial Grove and then spent several hours investigating the exhibits at the California Academy of Sciences.

 On our second last day we took a bus about 45 minutes out of the city to Muir Woods where we were able to walk amongst the redwood trees. This was a beautiful forest and the redwoods towered above us, although the giant ones with the huge girths are elsewhere in California. We managed to spot a black tailed deer though.

While we were in San Francisco we saw the touring version of Pippin (we  had seen it in Broadway a few weeks earlier but this version included among the cast the fellow who had played Pippin in the original 1970s version as Pippin's father; the daughter of Lucile Ball, Lucy Arnaz as the grandmother; and the fellow who originated the new Pippin in he revival - so we just had to go.  We also saw a hilarious musical review called Beach Blanket Babylon - see pic above, left...apart from being so funny and so musically brilliant, the show also featured the most amazing hats - check out that hat!  We also enjoyed The Wizard of Oz accompanied by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
The other pic on the right is looking up Castro Street, dominated by the giant rainbow flag. This is the 'gay and lesbian precinct of SF and we had dinner on the street on our first night, lunch with our friend Andy who was visiting for work and we almost took a gay and lesbian history walking tour (expect I buggered up the day and we were waiting on the Sunday when it had actually taken place on the Saturday.  Stoopid me).
Anyway, we loved San Francisco. Our apartment was beautiful, the weather was fantastic, the city is glorious.