San Francisco, Part Deux

Last Monday we got to see Mates of State at the Independent, which was awesome! They always put on such a fun show, and the venue was cool. 

On Tuesday we went to Fisherman’s Warf, which is the super touristy part of SF, but I wanted Sam to at least see it. It is quite the spectacle, and we had a mediocre, overpriced seafood dinner, but we got to watch the sun set over the ocean, so I still call it a pretty good evening.

Sam had the 4^th of July off, so I had a whole day planned of outdoorsy things I still hadn’t done in the city. We started out at Golden Gate Park, where we spent most of our time in the Botanical Gardens, which are impressive. We probably wandered around and explored the meandering forest full of various regional plants for three hours. 

From there we walked all the way to the beach and ate at the Cliffhouse, which my dad has been telling me for years is his favorite restaurant in the city, but I had never made it before. I really enjoyed it! Plenty of windows overlooking the ocean and waves crashing on rocks. Not a bad way to enjoy a sangria and some super fresh calamari! Afterwards we hiked the coastal Land’s End Trail, from which you get an amazing view of the ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge, which was just breathtaking! The evening did not end up as planned… we tried to hike the rest of the way to where we were going to watch the fireworks, which said three miles, but we did not anticipate that 1) a lot of the trail was in sand, and 2) Google had some trail listed that was not actually there. We ended up exhausting ourselves and not even coming close to making it to the fireworks. When we finally found a bus station to get home, they were running ridiculously late because of the firework traffic, and we ended up sitting in the freezing cold for at least an hour waiting for it. It was an incredible day, though, so I’m going to try to mostly remember that part. :)

On Thursday, the Lotus Moons were playing in Oakland, and since everyone had been raving so much the weekend before, we decided to check it out. We bar hopped a bit before the show to get a feel for the area, and we were completely blown away! Everyone was so incredibly nice, and all three of the places we checked out, Bar 335, Somar Bar and Lounge and Café Van Kleef, were all totally places I would hang out! We also were told about a taco place, Xolo that had these mushroom tacos that were to die for! (Sam had pork ones that were apparently also fantastic.) So at this point, Sam is already leaning towards maybe living here rather than in the city. Oakland has much more normal rent prices, and is a 10-15 minute train ride into the city, which coming from Dallas, is nothing. I was completely resistant because of how much I want to live in the Haight, but… well, it keeps coming up. We keep meeting cool people in other places who are from Oakland, love it, and say things like, “you look like you could be an Oakland girl.” It’s honestly starting to get weird, and as I’m trying to be a more conscious person, I feel like I have to consider that maybe it’s where we’re supposed to live. We’ll see.

So our last night in the city we got tickets to Blind Pilot at the Fillmore, which was incredible! For one, they were sold out, and I managed to get tickets off of Craigslist for $20 rather than $32, and the guy even met us at the show. Sam and I have very different musical tastes, but for some reason we both just love Blind Pilot – they’re kind of “our band,” and one of their songs, Three Rounds and a Sound, is kind of… “our song.” Whatever, it’s cheesy. After an awesome show, at the very, very end, the band got down into the crowd, actually convinced everyone to shut up and put their cell phones away, and played an acoustic version of Three Rounds with the whole crowd singing along just loud enough to still hear the singer. *swoon* It was a perfect end to a perfect stay in SF!

We finished off the week at the Fractalize festival, which was less my style of music than the others, plus it was its first year so it was super small and I'm pretty sure we were the oldest people there. We were pretty lame the first evening, but Sunday was awesome! We actually made some really cool connections while floating around on the river and dancing to sub-par electronic music. :)