We hiked through Muir Woods, a beautiful Redwood Forest north of San Francisco. We’ll let the pictures speak for themselves!

If you’d like to take a quick interactive tour, click on the photo below. Don’t forget to ‘look’ up!

Of course, all that hiking made us work up an appetite! We stopped at Bar Bocce in Sausalito on the way home for an early dinner. They had an outdoor patio with a beautiful view! We tried an order of fried artichokes. We weren’t sure if we’d like artichokes since we’ve never had them, but since we’re so close to the Artichoke Capital of the World (Castroville, CA), we felt like we had to try them. They were deep fried, crispy, and delicious … but we’re still not sure if we like artichokes! For dinner we got a great pizza!

There is so much history in the Haight we decided it might be best to come up with a plan for seeing as much as we could. We came up with a list of places we wanted to visit, then mapped them out on Google maps to find out the best way around. It might sound like overkill, but it worked for us and we feel like we really experienced the area.

We started at Hippie Hill on the edge of the Golden Gate Park, where many of the 60’s & 70’s rock music icons like Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead used to have impromptu concerts in the park. Janis Joplin was known to sit under a certain tree and play her guitar. The tree is now dubbed the “Janis Joplin Tree”!

We visited the former homes of a few musicians.

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Plus the former headquarters of the Hells Angels.

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And did a little shopping and sightseeing.

Saw some fantastic murals.

From there we walked to Toronado Pub for a beer. Some in the area call this place the ‘Best Dive Bar’ in San Francisco.

From there it was on to see The Painted Ladies and dinner at Horse Feather!

After taking a break for a few days, John and Juliet offered to take us back out and see more of the city, some of the places typical, some places a bit off the beaten path. John drove in this time and we went ‘all over the map’!

After a quick stop at the Stonestown Farmers Market we went to the Sutro Baths ruins. This historic bathhouse was built in 1894 and was destroyed in a fire in 1966. It was interesting to walk thru some of the old foundation and thru some of the tunnels that used to feed ocean water into the building’s baths.

Another place John and Juliet took us to was a Holocaust Memorial that overlooks the Golden Gate Bridge. We found it simple yet tastefully done.

Next up was Fort Point National Historic Site, a Civil War era fortress. The Golden Gate Bridge was actually built OVER the fort. It’s a really neat and unusual perspective to see the bridge from underneath rather than most views you see from ‘bridge level’ or above!

Now that we’re hungry after all that walking around – on to lunch! One good thing about seeing the sights with San Francisco natives is they know the best places to eat! We stopped at Cha Cha Cha in Haight-Ashbury. A Caribbean restaurant with AMAZING food and the best sangria we’ve ever had!

A must see item in San Francisco is Lombard Street, the “crookedest street in the world”. We not only saw it, we drove down it (well, John did – with us along for the ride)!

We really try to stay away from chain restaurants, especially when we’re traveling, but, shhhh … we harbor a rather embarrassing love of … Taco Bell! Yeah, we know it’s not authentic, and we do love authentic Mexican, but somehow it seems to fill a certain fast food craving for us. 😊

So, while we were staying in Pacifica, we HAD to go to the famous Million Dollar Taco Bell. It’s a Taco Bell Cantina meaning it sells alcohol, including Margaritas! They call it the Million Dollar Taco Bell because of its location, right on the beach off of Route 1, which has to be worth WAY more than a million dollars.

The food was the same as you get in any Taco Bell, and the margaritas were premixed, frozen drinks that they add alcohol to, but it was still fun to go there. And what a view!!

Oh – and we picked up some Taco Ball swag while we were there!

What a beautiful city! We were fortunate to be able to book 2 weeks at San Francisco RV Resort in Pacifica, about 15 miles outside the city. The park is small and tight but the location is right on the oceanfront overlooking the Pacific! San Francisco is known as the ‘Foggy City’ and it lived up to its name often. We saw a lot of fog, but when it was clear, we saw some amazing sunsets! One evening it was so clear, we could see the Farallon Islands 30 miles offshore!

San Francisco has a great public transportation system. Since the park is about 3 miles from a BART station, it was easy to take the BART into downtown and then get around town on buses, trolly, or cable cars (unfortunately, the cable cars were down for maintenance most of the time we were there).

We were really lucky to meet John and Juliet, who are from San Francisco and were staying at the same RV park. They were kind enough to go into the city with us and show us their San Francisco.

Have you ever seen a spiral escalator? (We hadn’t.) Nordstrom’s in Westfield Center has one! While we were there we had an early nosh at the Nordstrom cafe.

Then it was on to Ghirardelli Square.

From there we walked down to the waterfront area which includes Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39.

Located on Fisherman’s Wharf is Musée Mécanique – an antique arcade game museum. The museum owns over 300 mechanical machines and is one of the largest privately owned collections in the world. Believe it or not, most of them are still functional!

Finally, we stopped on the way back to the BART station to get some really good burritos in The Mission District.

Another big wine area in California. Unfortunately, the wines here seem to run to dry reds, which aren’t what we prefer. We still managed to fit in a few wine tastings!

We also found some very good live entertainment at Clos LaChance Vineyards! Of all the luck, we missed a Doobie Brothers tribute band playing there by about a week – BUT – we have the REAL THING coming up soon in Fresno!

Other than that it was quiet week, with a few day trips, including one to San Jose and a drive up the California coast.

We took a drive south on California 1 from Marina Dunes to Big Sur. If you’re ever out this way, it is DEFINITELY worth it to take a drive along the coast!

On the way back we stopped in Carmel-By-The-Sea to have dinner at Clint Eastwood’s restaurant! With a name like Hog’s Breath Inn we were surprised to find the menu wasn’t mostly barbecue.

While we were staying in Morgan Hill we were pretty close to San Jose, so we took a day trip to visit a few sites.

Coincidentally, about the time we were there the house that Tom Johnston of The Doobie Brothers had previously lived in was listed as a historical landmark – we just had to walk by!

After that we went to the Winchester Mystery House. The house was built by Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Winchester of the Winchester rifle fame. We had seen a fictionalized movie years ago about the building of the house and the eccentric owner. We watched the movie again so we’d remember it when we went there. The movie itself was filmed on a set and not in the house; after visiting the house we can see why, the rooms are way too small for all the equipment that would be needed.

One of the things we really missed from our house was our ‘picture wall.’ We had worked on it for years and collected pictures that were truly meaningful to us.

We decided to create a new ‘picture wall’ in our current home! The problem is, we have VERY limited wall space. Candi found these magnetic frames from Amazon and filled the fridge door! We’re really happy with the way it turned out, and it will be easy to swap out the pictures in the future!

We also added a couple of other personal touches to the rig to make it feel more homey. When we were traveling thru Utah we found an amazing bronze sun in the Sorella Gallery outside of Zion National Park. Candi fell in love with it, and Mike owed her a birthday present – so voila. Happy Wife, Happy Life – and a great piece to put on a wall to spruce the camper up.

Over top of the pantry door is this strange little light panel. It really looked ’empty’ until Candi got the bright (pun intended!) idea to apply some vinyl lettering to it! It says it all!

Another Thousand Trails park as we make our way to San Francisco. San Benito RV Park is a very large park with a lot of really nice sites. It’s our favorite TT park so far!

We were happy to be able to stay here for three weeks and take it easy before we get busy on our travels again. It is pretty remote with the nearest grocery store being about 15 miles away in Hollister. There’s also a weekly Farmers Market in Hollister on Wednesdays that was nicer than we expected! We got some delicious strawberries that they told us were picked that morning … and made great margaritas with them that night.

Tres Pinos is about 6 miles away and has three restaurants. Hmmmm, we were there for three weeks, and there are three restaurants, that CAN’T be a coincidence, right?

We tried The 19th Hole Steakhouse and Saloon first. It was good, but we thought it was way overpriced (although restaurants in California pretty much all seem expensive to us!).

Next up we went to The Inn at Tres Pinos. It was also expensive, about the same price a The 19th Hole, but we liked it better and thought it was more worth the price.

Finally, we went to Flapjacks for breakfast one morning. It was fine for a breakfast place, but nothing to go out of your way for.