Category: A week in California

Second day in SF! A very varied city, that would take months to discover even partly.
Away from the bay, I walked through South of Market, the Financial District, China Town, Nob Hill, Mid Market (Civic Center) and South Market again.

Although San Francisco is also famous for its fog, Thursday being a rainy day I stayed in Palo Alto. But there were still a lot of great things to discover! 2016 having been an exceptionally wet year after 5 years of severe drought, everything is impressively green.

We started with a walk in the neighbourhood, which is very quiet considering the emplacement of it (10min from the train station and 10min from the Stanford campus). Then a little walk in The Dish, an Environmental Restoration, Habitat Conservation and Recreation area belonging to Stanford University.

If you get the chance to take a walk on the Stanford campus – I can only recommend it to you (and it’s even better by bike)! Beautiful gardens, buildings and delicious french crêpes.

And if you’re tired of the urban life, 15min by car and you’re in the foothills park, enjoying nature and wildlife.

The SF Bay Trail is a 500-mile trail for walkers and cyclists that runs around the SF Bay. Part of it goes from he AT&T Park to the Golden Gate Bridge, permitting to see a great deal of the city without leaving the shore. That was my first day’s plan in SF. I left from the Caltrain station and followed the coast up to Fort Mason passing along the piers and Ghirardelli Square (which used the be the headquarters of the “famous” chocolate factory) and then came back through some of the famous steep streets and Telegraph Hill.

The trip from Albuquerque to San Francisco takes approximately 27h30 by bus, passing through three different states and two main cities; Phoenix and Los Angeles. It is a long trip but also an opportunity to see beautiful landscapes and meet people from all kinds of backgrounds (e.g. former detainee, family moving to a new life, Jamaican moving from Mexico to the US, people visiting family, students full of energy and ideas,…)
Unfortunately, sometimes buses get problems… That’s when you have to wait a few hours in a small city called Modesto. But even though Californian people will tell you that’s lost in the middle of nowhere, at least a film has been set there; “American Graffiti“!