San Francisco adventures

Gosh, I am sorry for being so useless at blogging recently. As I said in my last post, things went a little mad. I think that they should calm down by the end of this week and I have to say that I am really looking forward to it.

I managed to leave both the battery charger and the memory card reader in the hotel in San Francisco and only realised when I was packing on Saturday. So the only pictures that I have to show you are the ones that I downloaded to my computer whilst we were in SF. I only got back to London a few hours ago and am feeling the jetlag rather strongly. I shall go and buy the memory card reader and a charger tomorrow if all goes well.

Those of you who were in London last year (or in Chicago, I believe) will remember the cow invasion, the 'Cow Parade' - well New York is suddenly sprouting apples all over the place - part of the 'Big Apple Fest'. I saw plenty, some odd, some interesting and some that I wanted to take home with me. Here are a couple.

Then I flew off to SF and guess, what? They have hearts popping up all over the place - it's called 'Hearts in San Francisco'. Here is one of my favourites, outside the Ferry Terminal.

We had a fantastic time in SF. The weather was lovely so we donned our walking boots we walked, walked and walked. We walked along the bay from the Ferry Terminal to Pier 39. I spotted this sign on the sea front and I just loved the sentence taken from an advertisement for the Melodeon Bar by the Bay - a long time ago.

Pier 39 is the classic tourist spot, full of shops aimed at tourists looking for a souvenir as well as the speciality shops that the Americans do so well - stamp shops, chocolate shops and even a shop selling nothing but alpaca things. Not the kind of place that the locals go to. But just behind Pier 39, I found the seals. It was the noise that told me that they were there, as they bark very loudly. And then, as you get closer, the smell gives them away a little too...

They really were very cool. They all climb on top of these floating planks, but also on top of each other. There's a lot of shoving, pushing and falling into the water going on. All rather amusing.

We then walked through the streets of SF, up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower. This is a shot of Coit tower which figures on a lot of the souvenirs from SF.

And here is the view of the Christopher Columbus statue with the island of Alcatraz behind it.

I will post pictures of Alcatraz at some point, but the pictures are stuck on my camera for the time being. Here's the other view from Coit Tower: the Golden Gate bridge:

I have to admit that I could have stayed up there for hours, the view was stunning.

I don't have any knitting pictures for now as I haven't had time to knit. I did knit on the plane on the way back but messed it up royally and shall be frogging tonight if I can face. Instead, I leave you (especially for Sharon this one) with a picture of a store that sold almost nothing but nasty acrylic ponchos in North Beach in San Francisco. Even the husband thought it was quite terrifying and said that he was glad I didn't knit that kind of stuff :)

Posted by Amelia at October 4, 2004 04:22 PM