Location: San Francisco Area
Attractions: Doran Regional Park, Golden Gate Bridge, Pier 39, Alcatraz

After packing up and saying goodbye to the place we called home for the last 4 nights, we set our sights on Bodega Bay. Our travel buddies had been there before, but we were awestruck at the beauty of the ocean, cliffs and beaches. We stopped at Doran Regional Park for a short hike and just slowly walked along the trails and soaked in the sunshine and beauty surrounding us. This was the first time we really saw sunshine on the trip and we were loving it.

The experience was quite incredible. The fresh ocean air is just something a Midwesterner like myself just can’t enough of. There were beautiful blooming purple flowers and rubbery plants lining the dirt trail. We could see some deer on the prairie next to us in the distance. A peculiar tree stuck out from some shrubs. The sounds of seagulls and the ocean crashing into the cliffs added to our delight. This spot vaguely reminded me of our trip to Cliff’s of Moher.

We continued down the coast on our way to our hotel for the night and decided to stop at the Golden Gate Bridge so we could see it in all of its glory. We spent quite a bit of time walking around enjoying the vast greatness of this massive bridge built way back in 1933. The iconic reddish orange color and huge suspension cable can be seen from miles away. I’ve heard the best place to view the bridge is from Battery Spencer but we didn’t want to make the hike up there. Besides… we still hadn’t explored the city of San Francisco and we were pretty excited to check it out.

We navigated through the busy streets and found our hotel. We parked in their garage and headed down to the piers to do a bit of shopping, checked out the sea lions at Pier 39, and find a bite to eat before our tour of Alcatraz. We surprisingly had a bit of a tough time finding a place that we REALLY wanted to eat. We weren’t wanting to spend a small fortune for dinner, but did want some good seafood. After looking at a handful of menus around pier 39, we landed on Bubba Gump. We got in line to be seated and watched Forest Gump on the T.V. screens surrounding us while we waited. We were seated by the windows overlooking the marina with Alcatraz Island in the background. We got to watch boats worth more than our house cruise in and out of the marina and ordered some fish tacos and some Bourbon Street Mahi Mahi. They were both delicious.

The timing worked out perfect. We finished up eating and headed to the dock where we would be picked up for our tour of Alcatraz. I was super impressed by the Alcatraz tour. The National Park Service spent some money on some audio production and an audio tour that I thought was really well done. It was a little weird because people just silently walk around like zombies listening to the audio about the history of the prison, and the stories of the men who worked there and were incarcerated there, but the place is cool and the audio production was really well done. Some of the cool stories that stuck out were the escape attempts, the reasons criminals were at “The Rock”, and the life the guards and prisoners lived.

When we were returning back to San Francisco, there was a gorgeous night sky in front of us. The moon was reflecting off of the bay right over the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge and San Francisco was all lit up next to it. The ride was very peaceful.

Once we got back to San Fran, we were spent. We decided to walk back to the hotel and chill out there. We stayed at Hotel Zephyr, which was really cool. It had a ton of games both outside and inside. Pool, table tennis, shuffle board, board games, and all for free. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the energy to do any of it. We went back to our room and got some rest.