Fortune Travels: The San Francisco Treat

Golden Gate Bridge!

This year we went to San Francisco for 5's birthday. As mentioned in a previous post, I haven't been to CA in a long time and all I remember from SF was the fog. And it was windy.

We stayed in the Mission which was super convenient and we hit the ground running when we arrived. Highlights of the trip:

Chinatown (smaller than I thought it would be, although I've been corrected by some natives that it's HUGE and I just didn't go to all the small side streets. I guess i was expecting it to be more like Manhattan Chinatown x 10)
The Haight. Whoa, hippies.
California Academy of Sciences. Free admission! Waxy tree monkey frog! Albino gator! Educational!
Golden Gate Park. It's a mix of Central Park (sorry, I'm a New Yorker so I have to use it as a frame of reference) with more museums, bison, and homeless people.
SFMoMA. Art and a free cookie.
Japantown for the Cherry Blossom Festival - surprisingly, there were not cherry blossoms in sight. However, there was my fave Japanese dollar store, Daiso.
Alcatraz. Nice ferry ride. I wish there was more information on the tour. So much history they could have shared!
Muir Woods. Oh my, it was probably my favorite thing we saw. The redwoods are really amazing and a little bit magical. AND, I saw my very first banana slug. I was so excited--I've heard so much about them and although it wasn't banana slug season (yes, there is such a thing), at the end of our hike we came across this slimy blog that at first looked like a weird poop. But no, it was exactly what I had been looking for. Hurray!
Napa wineries. We hit up Coppola Wineries, Sterling (scary old tram up the hill!), and Castello de Amorosa Winery, housed in a fake Tuscan castle. Unfortunately, we arrived too late at the last one to get a full tour, so no fake dungeon for us. I will say, I'm no expert, but the wines--even the cheapie ones--were really good.
Food: Tartine bakery (almost every morning), Delfina Pizza (def not up to NYC pizza standards), In-N-Out (my opinion has not changed), Mitchell's ice cream, Papalote Tacos (good stuff!), Gott's Roadside (which Schnipper's in NYC seems to have copied), ramen in Japantown, Blue Bottle Coffee (meh, but I liked the venue), and a burrito spot in the Mission. Oh, and I got a loaf of sourdough bread that was great. Love the sourdough...

It was a really fun trip, and since Cinco had lived in SF for a few years, he played tour guide and navigator so I got to sit back and be a tourist. The weather was FANTASTIC. Not a cloud in the sky and in the 70s. Not bad at all!