So here we are...

Having arrived in San Francisco we are pretty knackered. Not only is it truly a long haul but the time zone difference of 9 hours meant that our body clocks were properly out of tune. That's how you know that you're about to have a great holiday!

The hotel at which the conference was to be held turned out to be near, let me see, other hotels. Yes, that's about it. If you were interested in seeing other hotels, you were in the right place. If you were interested in seeing San Francisco however, you'd need to make a 45 minute commute by train. So that's what we opted for.

Powell - Hyde cable car with Alcatraz in the background

The train took us into down town San Francisco where we got on a cable car to get to Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco must have the coolest public transport system this side of the 50's. Cable cars, the kind that run on rails down the middle of the street, deriving propulsion from a cable under the street will carry you over the steep hills of the city. A very cool Art Deco era tram will carry you around the piers on the north-eastern side of the peninsula and the municipal bus network that criss cross the city are all low emission or electric buses.

Victorian houses, these ones known as the "Painted Ladies"
set against a backdrop of down town San Francisco

So we spent the day exploring the city by public transport and by the various routes of the hop-on hop-off bus service which gave us a pretty decent overview of the 49 square miles that is San Francisco; From Fisherman's Wharf to Japantown, from the financial district to the Presidio, from the Tenderloin to Sausalito.

Over the next few days, Déwald would be attending the AnDevCon III conference while Heidi would be exploring the city in more depth, scouting out the hotspots so that Déwald can join her again in the evening.

This blog post would turn into a short story if San Francisco were to be described in all its glory but suffice it to say that we had a blast and would have loved to be able to spend more than just a week on this magnificent peninsula.

We never really got any good pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge
but hey, this is a post about San Francisco...