{"id":10358,"date":"2026-08-16T11:49:44","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T11:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/?p=10358"},"modified":"2026-08-16T11:49:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T11:49:44","slug":"san-francisco-ish-july-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/?p=10358","title":{"rendered":"San Francisco-ish July 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>San Francisco gets a bad rap. It&#8217;s an amazing place with near perfect weather and a ton of stuff to do in the area and the surrounding area. In the last 1.5yrs I have gone to the San Francisco area three times for fun (https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/?p=10103, https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/?p=9968) and this time I brought my family because I enjoyed the solo trips so much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why the San Francisco area is great:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>The weather was perfect, sunny and upper 60s low 70s every day.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Very easy to get around with lots of options: there are buses, light rails, cable cars, waymos, taxis, walking, bikes, scooters, and, rental cars. The city is built for walking, bikes, and, scooters.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There are a ton of family activities, from free to paid.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There are factory tours\/visits like the Jelly Belly factory or Dandelion Chocolates.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The nature around San Francisco is amazing and not well visited because no one goes to San Francisco to visit Henry Cowell State Park to see redwoods, they go to Redwoods National Park. Same is true for Yosemite, Sequioa, Kings Canyon, and so on.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In the city, there are a lot of fabulous to eat, tons of options were available for us at reasonable prices.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Sure, there are some very obvious negatives: the homelessness is absolutely stunning, there is drug use out in the open, and, a handful of the city parks\/playgrounds required a city employee to watch the ground so kids \/ families could play in peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But, for us, the pros far far far outweigh the cons. We had a ton of time exploring the surrounding area and I had an absolutely fantastic time going to the Golden Gate Bridge area every morning before the sunrise to watch the fog \/ nature in quiet solitude.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There were a ton of surprises this trip:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Waymos are extremely polite drivers. When I turned on my blinker to get into a lane the Waymo would give way, not slam on the gas to close the gap. Never did a waymo cut me off or take a right from the far left lane. We thoroughly enjoyed riding around in waymos and I really preferred driving around them vs. the inattentive, speeding, distracted, rude, human drivers.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It is entirely possible to see the Milky Way on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge park \/ preserve area. One morning I went up to Hawk Hill and was surprised to see not only the Milky Way but also a moon-set over the Pacific. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever seen a moon-set, it was quite beautiful because it happened well before sunrise.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The Golden Gate Bridge area was extremely safe in the early mornings; I saw at least one park \/ bridge enforcement officer every morning. I was there early, some mornings I was there around 3AM local time. The wildest thing I saw I saw at the Golden Gate Bridge in the early morning was an entirely tame racoon ripping thru a garbage can. It did not care about me and I could not shoo it away.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The massive difference in attendance for local\/state parks versus National Parks \/ Monuments: we visited a handful of state parks filled with redwood trees and peace \/ solitude. We visited Muir Woods National Monument and we had first entrance time slot. In no time at all the park filled up with tons of very loud people. The redwoods, mountains, and, streams in the state park are awfully similar to the redwoods, mountains, and streams in Muir Woods but there are no people. This reminded me a lot of Vegas: no one goes to Vegas to go hiking and there are a lot of beautiful areas to see \/ hike. The amazing state and local park areas around San Francisco just aren\u2019t well visited \u2013 to our benefit since I don\u2019t go out into nature to listen to someone\u2019s shitty spotify playlist.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>There just aren&#8217;t that many places in the US where urban stuff, mountain stuff, ocean stuff, kid stuff, and, quiet solitude are all available within a hours drive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We stayed in the Nob Hill area and it was amazing to find out we had access to three donut shops within walking distance from us. Back to the homelessness: it was fine for me to go out in the early morning to get donuts but don&#8217;t think I&#8217;d like anyone else in our family do so. That said, I have a fairly simple test to figure out if an area is safe: are women in the area, by themselves, and, running for fun \/ exercising? This test has helped me out a lot over the years, and, around our hotel there were tons of women out and by themselves in the early hours. So, either there are a bunch of incredibly stupid women in San Francisco, or, it&#8217;s quite a bit safer than it looks at first pass. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first time we went to San Francisco long long long ago we did it entirely wrong. This is well before Google Maps existed and we did some of the typical tourist things on a pretty tight budget but we had no idea what was available because we weren&#8217;t good at traveling. This time, I had already visited the area twice by myself, and, we had access to Google Maps \/ Claude to get ideas on what to do. There was a lot of doubt by some of the travelers that San Francisco would be fun or neat. By the end, we were all in agreement: we&#8217;d love to come back. San Francisco is now on the list of &#8220;fantastic places we&#8217;d return&#8221;. The list is pretty short: Boston, Portland, Charlotte NC, and, maybe Florida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A bit unrelated: on the way over we flew directly over Yosemite, it was super cool to see Half Dome from the plane!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All in all, 10\/10. Would go back. Enjoy the photos!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Chris W.  <\/p>\n\n\n\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>San Francisco gets a bad rap. It&#8217;s an amazing place with near perfect weather and a ton of stuff to do in the area and the surrounding area. In the last 1.5yrs I have gone to the San Francisco area three times for fun (https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/?p=10103, https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/?p=9968) and this time I brought my family because I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10386,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":6695},"categories":[7,2,109,110],"tags":[19,132,45,43,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10358"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10358"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10385,"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10358\/revisions\/10385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/word.christopherwagner.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}