24 Hours in San Francisco

The second I heard about Oh Happy Day’s pop up Color Factory museum, I knew I wanted to go. We had a blast at the Museum of Ice Cream and I was hoping it would be a similar experience. It’s in San Francisco so I thought it would be fun to fly up North for the day to visit the museum and explore San Francisco. We choose this particular Friday because it just so happened that Travis was scheduled to work in Sonoma on Saturday and Sunday. It was working out perfectly! We booked our flights, car rental, and hotel. But if you follow me on social media, you know we didn’t make it to the Color Factory. By the time it came to purchase our tickets, everything was sold out for the day. WOMP WOMP. I literally looked at tickets not even 24 hours earlier and there was not one single time slot that was sold out. Take note: Purchase your event tickets BEFORE your travel arrangements. We decided to still go through with traveling up north and just make a day out of visiting San Francisco.

As if not buying our tickets in time wasn’t enough of a fail, I left the house without grabbing the charged battery to our new Canon camera. So all pictures from our day in San Francisco were taken with my iPhone 6c and edited with A Color Story (95%) and SnapSeed (5%) Apps. It’s ok, the failing seemed to stop there… Without further a do, here is how we spent 24 hours in San Francisco.

7:50 AM | Flight out of Southern California and into Oakland Airport. Oakland airport vs San Fran airport meant no layovers and cheaper flights, but meant we needed to drive across the bay and into the city, which was fine with us.

9:45 AM | First order of business – COFFEE. We stopped at Blue Bottle coffee in Oakland before heading into the city. Blue Bottle has a couple different locations scattered around up North, and being a self-proclaimed coffee snob I knew I had to try it out. Verdict: worth a stop.

10:30 AM | I had looked up a couple different places to have breakfast in the city and settled on Outerlands. Side note: I highly recommend Plow if you ever find yourself in the city and have a couple hours to spare. We had been there on a previous trip to the city, but we weren’t fans of the hour and a half wait time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely worth the wait, but we didn’t want to waste any of our one day in the city waiting that long for food. Outerlands did not disappoint, and we were particularly fans of the less than 10 minute wait. We started with a strawberry and poppy seed donut (because dessert always comes first, right?). Travis ordered the breakfast tostada and I ordered the avocado toast that was made with fresh house made bread.

I knew we picked a great place for breakfast when I read this on the bottom of their menu: “Our commitment to sustainability is reflected in our relationships with local organic farms, ranches, and specialty foods purveyors”

12:00 AM | After breakfast, we walked around the Golden Gate Park that was only a couple blocks away from our breakfast spot. They were setting up for the Outerlands Festival so parts of it were blocked off, but the park is pretty large so we didn’t have trouble getting lost. You almost forget that you are in the middle of a city with the large trees and greenery surrounding you.

1:30 PM | I’ve lost count of many times I’ve been to San Francisco, and out of all those visits I’ve never visited the painted ladies. Being a big fan of Full House growing up, I was excited to see them in person, and there really is a park across the way, just like in the opening credits of Full House! PS: The street really is that slanted, I didn’t rotate the picture to look like that.

2:30 PM | Another “touristy” thing I never really did on my previous visits to San Fran was visit Ghirardelli Square and Fisherman’s Wharf. We walked around Ghirardelli Square and then walked over to Fisherman’s Wharf (very tourist oriented btw). They are both fairly close to one another, and once we found free parking we weren’t going to give that up to drive a couple blocks. The weather was perfect, so it was nice to walk around outside. Not places I would go back to – but fun to experience once.

3:30 PM | Late lunch at Boudin in Fisherman’s Wharf. We split a turkey and Havarti sandwich so we wouldn’t be too full right before our dinner reservations for 5:30 PM. Man I wish I liked fish and clam chowder though because the sourdough bread bowls filled with clam chowder looked delicious!

4:45 PM | The last couple of trips to San Francisco we have made our way down to the Marina Green to walk along the sea shore with views of the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, so it’s kind of become tradition for us now. There is usually free parking out front and we have never had trouble finding a spot. Have I mentioned how perfect the weather was? There was a slight chill in the air, but other than that we couldn’t have asked for better weather during our short trip.

5:30 PM |Dinner reservations at A 16. A16’s cuisine has a Southern Italian influence to it without being generic “Amerian-ized” Italian food. We started off with the burrata and crostini appetizer because we have been obsessed with burrata since Giacomo’s in Boston (I’ll get to that when I review our Boston trip!). We weren’t overly impressed with this appetizer because of the over bearing salt. We split the salsiccia pizza and added a fried egg because most everything is better with a fried egg. The pizza comes out uncut, with scissors on the side. I can say with most certainty that I have never cut a pizza with scissors, but this won’t be the last time. Delicious food and great service!

7:45 PM | We made our way back to the Eastern part of the city to catch the sunset behind the Golden Gate Bridge at  Crissy Field. There was a jetty we were able to walk out on to catch the sunset. But we made our time short because it was pretty cold and there were a lot of other people trying to catch the sunset as well.

9:00 PM | We attempted to grab dessert at the new Milkbomb, but after waiting in line for 20 minutes waiting for a donut ice cream sandwich, we found out they sold out of all the donuts. So, we decided to hit up the popular San Francisco Bi-Rite Creamery for good old fashioned ice cream. Despite the 58°F temperature outside (which is basically freeing to this Southern California native), I thoroughly enjoyed my honey lavender ice cream. Travis got his ice cream sandwich (with the traditional cookies instead of donuts) with ricanelas ice cream.

10:30 PM | We made it back to our hotel. We stayed at the Marriott next to the Oakland Airport to shorten the commute to the airport in the morning for me.

That’s it, our day in San Francisco!