San Francisco hiking

I had such a happy last weekend in SF with a visitor from nearby!

Megan came up to see me on Friday night. We kept it chill on Friday, just grabbing a couple drinks and catching up on all the important things. But it wasn’t a late night - we had a big day planned for Saturday!

Since we’ll be hiking for many days in New Zealand in just a few short weeks, we decided that getting some hiking and endurance practice was a good idea. Our plan was to walk over the the Golden Gate Bridge (about 2 hours from the hotel), across the bridge, and then through the Marin Headlands. As with the best adventuring, it didn’t go exactly like that!

Even though we had lots of chatting the night before, there was still much to discuss, so as we started out from the hotel, we weren’t 100% paying attention to our path, and we definitely didn’t take a direct route toward our destination. When we emerged from the buildings of downtown, we ended up much closer to the Oakland Bay Bridge than the Golden Gate Bridge. So we decided to just stick alongside the bay and make are way along the water to get to our destination.

 

It turned out to be a great decision, because of course it was beautiful.

And there was LOTS going on that weekend. As we soon learned, it was Fleet Week, which meant that lots of ships were in the bay and there were general festivities going on all weekend. One of the biggest festivities was an all-day airshow. The Blue Angels were there, as well tons of other cool planes and demonstrations.

We made our way along the bay, through Fishermans Wharf, the Marina Green, and Chrissy Field.

Finally, we made the last climb up to the bridge!

Our walk across the bridge felt great after being in the city! The breeze was perfect - not too strong - and there was so much going on in the bay, the 1.2 mile walk didn’t feel like anything!

We’d planned to hike more through the Marin Headlands after we crossed the bridge, but our morning detour meant we’d spent more time and energy than we’d planned to start our hike! So we just had a break and a snack before heading back across the bridge. We just so happened to time our walk back while the airshow as kicking off properly, so there were lots of jets flying over as we made our way back.

Back in the city, people were camped out wherever they could fit on rooftops to take in the show!

All up, we ended up walking about 13 miles during the day, so we decided on an early dinner in the Mission. And we were heads down, lights out by 9:30!