Day 2 - Friday
(If you haven't already, start at SFSF Weekend Day 1, otherwise it won't make much sense!)
We woke up Friday morning ready for adventure.
I had a plan. Little Italy for breaky, through Chinatown. Luckily I'd read just the day before that the birth place of Chinese Fortune Cookies was on the way! So we set off.
We headed out on food, straight to Chinatown to hunt down the Golden Gate Fortune Cookies Company, on 56 Ross Alley, which believe me, is in a back alley! You can see them there in pic one working at their pressing machines making fortune cookies - we got to sample one as a sort of breaky aperitif. Mmmmm.
We then kicked on up the hill, all the way through Chinatown, hitting Columbus Ave, turning left and then hitting the suburb of North Beach, commonly known as Little Italy. I took HOS to a cafe I'd seen the day before that was packed full of, what looked like, locals. Into Caffe Grecco we went.
We ordered some Pumpkin Bread and the most gooey mushy looking Chocolate Banana Bread Pudding - they warmed it for us. Pumpkin Bread, average. Chocolate Banana mushy stuff....DIVINEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. It was just so good, we both took a first tentative spoonful, then looked at each other and dove right in. It was soft, gooey, sweet, yet bananery heaven. Sigh. Just right for a bloody freezing San Francisco day. Oh, and the coffee was great, I was able to grate fresh nutmeg onto the cappuccino foam...mmmmmmm, so nutty and spicy. What a perfect breakfast.
After that disgustingly good start, we kept walking towards the water to spend the arvo at Alcatraz. Alas, once we reached the ticket office we discovered all tickets for the day were sold out, we would have to wait for tomorrow. You can see HOS up there in the pic just after we bought our tickets for the next day.
So...there we were. What to do? Where to go? HOS looked around. I saw his eyes settle on the big double decker bridge, not the famous orange Golden Gate, the grey white one, much much bigger...The Bay Bridge. I saw his eyes twinkle..."Let's go for a drive".
Within 30 minutes we were driving out of Budget in a brand new white Mustang.
That's it above. A Mustang. American muscle car. With me draped all over it. It was a bloody cool car. We felt bloody cool in it! We looked bloody cool in it!
So, off we went to cross that double bridge, the bridge that held so much fascination for HOS. He was very very excited as we crossed (I'm not sure if it was the bridge or the car to be honest!). We were on our way to Berkeley. I wanted to see the famous Alice Waters restaurant, Chez Panisse. Alice is said to be the founder of the American organic movement and has a very very famous restaurant there in Berkeley. We drove past, went it, there's a cafe upstairs, we had a look, but it was a bit fancier than what we were in the mood for. So we headed downstairs and went in search of other things. We found them. Mmmmmmmm a shop called The Cheese Board - as the name suggests, it's a cheese shop - go figure! But also a wonderful bakery, which happened to sell the most delightful of surprises...the Sticky Bun (pic above), oh myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy...a wonderful light sweet roll with a not too sweet but beautifully gooey caramel cooked into and all over it. It was just the right combo with the morning's choc banana bread pudding! Of course we indulged. There was a great deal of moaning, which is sort of uncool when your car is a Mustang.
We headed back to said cool car and headed off on the open road. We took the scenic route through Sonoma, which was absolutely beautiful. We were out in wine country now, and it looked sort of like a cross between the perfect green hills of England, with the burgundy wine area of France, and the Hunter Valley in Oz. Just gorgeous. We drove up to Santa Rosa, then headed to the Coast to follow the road back to San Fran through the Tomales Bay area. We actually stopped at Bodega Bay for dinner at a restaurant called Tides Inn, it sits right on the Bay and the view was fab. The food, though was average, but the great little discovery was that this was the spot where they filmed the Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Birds. VERY VERY COOL.
It was a spectacular drive back to San Fran, although a little too windy at the end for my liking, but you can see from the sunset pic above, taken above Tomales Bay, that it was indeed the perfect romantic end to yet another perfect SFSF Weekend day!
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