The next day we moved south to San Francisco, and spent some time in another X Headlands State Park, this one being where X equals Marin.

The Golden Gate Bridge is wonderful when viewed from the Marin Headlands.

More bridge. I took a lot of photos of this bridge, but I particularly like these ones taken from the rest area on the east side of the 101, looking south.

We had to put the convertible top down as we drove across.

Andrea caught this view looking up at one of the towers.

We were deposited onto Lombard Street after leaving the bridge, so for fun we drove to the bit known as the crookedest street in the world. I have driven down it before and it is not hard, however I was amazed at how scary it was to drive up Lombard Street on the opposite side of the hill. With so many cars lining up to drive down the crookedest street, we found ourselves waiting, foot on brake, while the car rested at about a forty-five degree angle pointing uphill.

After I dropped off Andrea at the hotel and the car in Oakland I took the BART train back into the city and caught this shot of the Embarcadero from Market Street.

Then I walked up a long, long hill. The Fairmont Hotel is on Nob Hill, which meant that each trip back to the hotel involved real exercise. But it'sa nice hotel. It as actually built in 1906 and was completed just in time for the major earthquake of that year, which was the worst on record and destroyed much of the city. The Fairmont was gutted by fire but its thick stone walls survived, so it was rebuilt.

The lobby was restored a few years back, and is beautiful.

Our room view was excellent. Here is North Beach, the Wharf and Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. This room would have been a fine place to watch the July 4th fireworks, though we ended up going to the Wharf for that (see below).

In the hotel lobby a plaque commemorates the drafting of the United Nations Charter, which was signed in California. The signatories met in Muir Woods, and we saw a photo of them there when we visited that redwood park in 2000. Originally The UN building was to have been in San Francisco, but enough influential members were European that the building was put in New York to make their trip shorter. The pneumatic mail tube next to the plaque was made in Rochester, NY.

We walked to the Haas-Lilenthal House on franklin Street, which is a nice Victorian that survived the 1906 quake, partly because houses on Van Ness Street were demolished as an emergency measure to prevent the spread of fire.

The main foyer. A lot of the features of this house were prefabricated, and ordered much like items from a Sears Catalog. Quite a lot of the interior elements were designed to look like other materials, like redwood walls made to look like mahogany. The leather walls in this foyer are actually fake leather.

The toilet in the bathroom is original to the house, so this is what a Victorian toilet looked like.

If you look closely at this portrait it features an original resident and the house in the background.

Wel walked down the hill to Market Street and over to Dolores, and I got this shot of the telecom tower on this hills south of the city, which seems to be floating in the encroaching fog.

On Dolores we visited Mission Dolores, an original 18th century mission dedicated to St. Francis. This building was, at one point, the only thin in San Francisco. The city is named after it.

Inside the original chapel the ceiling was painted by an Amrican Indian tribe.

Tombstones in the cemetary that is part of the mission.

We took a streetcar up Market Street and walked up toward Columbus, passing the Transamerica Pyramid along the way.

The next morning we went to the Apple Store and looked around. The design of the store is very eye-catching.

We set ourselevs up on a PowerBook and browsed wedding photos.

Andrea spent a while with the photos - here she is through the glass starcase, still browsingi away.

We walked north to Columbus Ave. again. This is the Sentinal Building, which you will probably recognize from many films. It is actually the home of Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope production company.

Here is a nice view of the Sentinal Building.

Up Columbus is my favorite San Francisco pub, Vesuvio. It's a nice place to hang out, and was once the haunt of the beat poets, many of whom had their books published by the City Lights bookstore next door. This was the case for Jack Kerouak, Alan Ginsburg and others.

From near Vesuvio I caught another photo of the Sentinal Building, this time with the Transamerica Pyramid in the bckground.

We stopped for a drink at Vesuvio ...

... then walked north on Filbert Street, where I snapped this photo looking down the hill toward Sts. Peter and Paul Church. I had no idea the bird was in the photo until I saw it later.

Coit tower is at the top of Filbert Street on Telegraph Hill.

This is what the hill looked like. It's a tiring walk.

Coit Tower. Built in the 1930s, it was designed to be a marriage of classical and art deco architecture, and it does the job well. The ground floor inside is decorated with floor-to-ceiling murals.

On the other side of the hill we went to the Wharf and took some photos of the bay. This is Alcatraz.

And this is the USS Balcluthca, docked near a park called Fort Mason.

In Fort Mason, on a hill overlooking the bay, we waited for a while for the fireworks to start and caught a great sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge. I took a whole bunch of photos of basically the same view and I don't regret any of them. It was positively golden. I had thought at the time that the factory buildings on the wharf at the bottom of the frame would ruin the view, but in silhouette form they actually make it look better, since the sun lit up the windows beautifully.

And then we went back down to the shore and watched the fireworks.

More fireworks.

And still more. I'm surprised these photos came out so well. I tried a couple shutter speeds, but I thnk it ultimately came down to how well I timed the shot with the fireworks.

On our last day in San Francisco we walked down to Japantown. Here Andrea stands at the pagoda.

We trieda sushi restaraunt in Japantown that had a neat sushi canal, with sushi floating along on boats. The color of the plates determined the price of the dish.

We then walked to Alamo Square, which is the location of the Painted Ladies, better kown as the houses from Full House.

I sit on the hill overlooking the Painted Ladies.

That afternoon we walked to North Beach and had dinner, and on the way we stopped at the San Francisco Academy of Art, which has a great mural I've seen before and some rotating exhibits - worth a stop if you're in the area. They have a reflective glass wall through which you can see a view of the bay and Alcatraz, so I got another photo of us reflecting there.

Near the Academy is Lombard Street, this time looking up.

Our last view of the area before heading off to the airport was of Alcatraz over Mason Street.