I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO

Hello, friends!  I hope all has been well with you during my little hiatus.  I just returned from my week long trip to San Francisco last night and it was fantastic!!!  The weather in San Fran was amazing - it was sunny every day and didn't rain at all while I was there.  My pasty, sensitive skin that has been covered up all winter here in Winnipeg wasn't used to the sun and I ended up with a bit of a sunburn on my face and arms!  It's starting to peel a bit now and is thankfully turning into a tan.  Unfortunately I returned to cold weather in Winnipeg, and there is even still some snow on the ground.  I know I had a reprive from Winnipeg weather while in San Francisco but it's still hard to come home to the cold when it's already the end of April.  We don't usually have snow in Winnipeg in April, but this year Spring seems to be taking it's sweet time in arriving.

I did so much in my week in San Fran that it seemed like I was gone so much longer than seven days.  The first couple days I went on a hop-on-hop-off tour bus around the city.  I'm not really a fan of group tours but the hop-on-hop-off bus was a great way to see lots of the city in a short amount of time.  You could get off at various stops around the city and a bus would come to the bus stop every 20 minutes to pick you up when you were ready to go.  It made it easy to get from place to place and spend a bit of time at the spots you really wanted to see.  Then the rest of the trip I walked and took the city bus all over San Fran to various places I wanted to visit that I didn't get to on the hop-on-hop-off tour bus.  I downloaded a free transit app for iPhone called Hop Stop that was extremely helpful in figuring out which buses to take.  Hop Stop allowed me to input my start and end locations and then it would give me all the bus and walking options.  Every time I used the directions from the Hop Stop app they worked perfectly - all the buses came at the scheduled times or a few minutes after so it was fantastic.  I was able to save the directions to my phone and use them to get from place to place very easily.  I don't consider myself to be great with directions or maps or transit systems, but I didn't get lost once so I was pretty happy and it made me feel really independent getting around on my own.  I did lots of shopping, drank some fantastic coffee, ate lots of delicious food and did tonnes of walking up and down the hills of San Francisco.  And the hills...holy shit, the hills.  When you come from the Canadian praries where it's pretty much flat all over, the hills of San Francisco are intense.  I think I almost had a heart attack walking up to the Coit Tower and through the North Beach and Nob Hill areas.  And going down hill wasn't much better - it was so steep at some points that I thought if I tripped I would end up rolling all the way down to the bottom.  I found that any walking directions that I had would take me twice the approximate walking time because I was so slow dragging my out-of-shape body up the hills then carefully navigating down while trying not to trip over my own feet. 

All in all it was a wonderful trip and I would love to visit San Francisco again.  I got to see and do almost everything that was on my list, but there is definitely so much more to experience in San Francisco so I see myself visiting there again in the future.

In the next few weeks I'll be sharing some of the things I discovered in San Francisco here on my blog.  If you would like to see some of my photos from San Francisco you can take a peek at my photos on my Instagram and you are welcome to follow me on Instagram too - @roomforhappy. ▲

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Photo:  Taken with iPhone 5 - Alamo Square, Postcard Row, San Francisco, California