San Francisco

Kyle and I spent the weekend in San Francisco with his family a few weeks ago (May 12-15). Kyle’s sister, Chelsie, plays rugby for BYU and they were playing in the quarter finals at Stanford. We all went along, minus Hailey (she stayed with my parents), to cheer them on and enjoy the sights. It was really fun to get away and see somewhere new.

   View of San Francisco while driving across the Bay Bridge, Xandu Gallery, random pier, entrance to Chinatown, downtown San Francisco, the Bay Bridge

We flew out Thursday evening. I got so excited as we neared the airport. It was so cool to see the city from above. It’s silly, but I didn’t realize how much on the water San Francisco is.

Friday BYU played, so we spent our day with the Rugby team. Unfortunately BYU lost their game, ending their season. But we’re still super proud of them! It was fun to be there for the girls to support and cheer them on. The Women’s Cougar Rugby team is a club team for BYU, which means they don’t receive any funding or assistance from the University. They’re working hard to draw more attention to themselves, in hopes of getting some acknowledgement from BYU. I’d say making it to the Final Four is a pretty big deal, don’t you think?

Stanford is an amazing campus. It is huge. We got lost driving around it. There were also so many people on bikes! We’re used to BYU, which is a pretty decent sized school, but the campus is so compact so you don’t see as many bikes throughout campus. Stanford also has awesome athletic facilities. They were all in the same area and looked to be very well kept up. They even had a stadium solely for rugby. That was awesome.

We spent the rest of our weekend in San Francisco.

Friday evening close to dusk we drove over to the Golden Gate Bridge. We parked down near the water and hiked up to the bridge. It was super crazy windy and cold, but… we were in San Francisco, so we had to walk across it. I seriously thought I was going to blow off of it, especially with the cars driving by blowing even more air my way. It is a pretty impressive bridge. It’s not nearly as long as the Bay Bridge, but still pretty cool.

          I should have taken my hood off for the picture, but it was so cold and windy. Oh well. 

Saturday we hit up Union Square and did some shopping. Brittany and I fell in love with H&M and drooled over the fabrics at four story Britex Fabrics. Right behind Britex Fabrics Kyle discovered the Xandu Gallery, which he recognized as being a Frank Lloyd Wright building.

Xandu Gallery 

After Union Square, Kyle and I stayed and walked around the city while the others went back down to Stanford to pick up Chelsie and friends. Kyle and I walked, and walked, and walked. We started in Chinatown and walked through that mess, came upon the Italian part of the city, found a park where a yo-yo competition was just ending, made our way over to Lombard street (the crookedest street in the world) and eventually met up with everyone else at Pier 39.

Lombard Street, Renae, the crazy steep hill we hiked up to get to the crooked part of the street, Kyle who was kind enough to entertain me by walking up the crazy hill to see the crooked part.

I have to say, those streets in that city are crazy. Seriously, so steep. It’s a little scary getting to the top of one hill, only to realize you now have to go down it. And how in the heck do people parallel park on those hills!? Also, I wonder if the people who live on Lombard street get tired of all of the dumb tourists who have to drive down their street, just to say they’ve done it? Like us… we ended up coming back on Sunday with everyone else and drove down it.

Anyway, we then ate at the overly priced Hard Rock Café after watching the Sea Lions sunbathe at the Pier. Afterwards, we treked over to Ghirardelli Square and had some ice cream for dessert.

On Sunday we visited the California Academy of Sciences. That place was pretty cool. We spent most of our day there. They are a natural history museum, planetarium, aquarium, and rainforest all in one. We saw lots of crazy fish, watch penguins being fed, saw a movie in the planetarium, looked at birds, butterflies and other creatures in the rainforest dome (the humidity in there brought me right back to last summer in Texas), saw lots of lizards and snakes in their temporary exhibit, and went up to the roof and saw the garden they are cultivating.

Lizards, cuttlefish in the aquarium, and crazy windows on the living roof 

Lastly we stopped briefly at the ocean beach. Just to say we did. We were all tired, and it was windy, so no one wanted to go play. I told Kyle I wanted a picture of us on the beach, to show that we at least went and saw it. This is what he took:

Punk. I got him out of the car and tried to get a picture of us standing on the beach in the sand. He took this picture:

Punk again. Eventually I got this picture:

See look! We went to the beach!

So we pretty much had an awesome time. We especially loved seeing new sights and spending time with these people: