Girl’s Weekend

My cousin Julie and her friend Ashley go on a girl’s trip every year. Last year they went to San Diego and this year they decided to come and visit me!! I was so excited. When I lived in Utah, I would go to dinner almost every Sunday at Julie’s house. I really miss her and her adorable kids.

Julie and Ashley got into town on Friday morning. We spent Friday walking around San Francisco. Our adventure started out by seeing a flash mob in Union Square. It was REALLY cool. We also did some shopping in Union Square and walked around Chinatown. We got pedicures and ate gelato in the park. We explored Telegraph Hill and Coit tower.

Flash Mob

Julie & Me

After our pedicures

Telegraph Hill- Ashley & Julie

My favorite thing we did on Friday  happened to be dinner. Yelp is huge in the Bay area. It is a website where people can go on and rate restaurants, businesses, etc. It’s usually pretty accurate. Dave and I have had a lot of luck finding new places to eat based on Yelp ratings. I found an Italian restaurant on Yelp for us to try out for dinner. It was quite the experience. It was a quaint little restaurant with an authentic Italian flare. The food was good, but the entertainment was the best part. There was a man named Vince at the restaurant. We think he was the owner, but he was quite the character. Within two minutes of sitting down, he came over, told us the daily specials, offered us free dessert, and did a magic trick. He would often get distracted by customers who walked that he knew and would leave our table. He would always come back a few minutes later with another magic trick- some of them were completely mind boggling. He had a very short attention span, but managed to do an excellent job entertaining every table at the restaurant. We figured out one of his numbers trick, but I am still stumped on all of his card tricks. We had planned on going to a chick flick after dinner, but we were at dinner for over 3 hours because Vince was so entertaining. The most ironic thing is that no one on Yelp had even mentioned Vince and his magic tricks, but it definitely made our dinner experience.

Vince- The magician, possible restaurant owner, waiter, etc.

Me trying one of his balancing tricks. He balanced the forks with a toothpick off the wine bottle, but I balanced them off of my ring.

Friday and Saturday were some of the warmest days in the past 7 months that we’ve lived here. They were perfect days to spend outside. The girls stayed in a hotel in San Francisco the whole weekend. Dave came up and joined us on Saturday. We had such a fun time and I’m glad he could make it.  We started out by going on a tour of Alcatraz. I have vague memories of visiting Alcatraz when I was about 14. It was neat to go back 10 years later because I had definitely forgotten a lot about the history of Alcatraz.

On the ferry

Alcatraz Island

Inside the prison- Listening to the audio tour

It was a bit spooky inside the cells.

The prisoners had a great view of the bay! This is probably what they were thinking too.

My favorite part of the weekend was our next adventure. We biked across the Golden Gate Bridge. This was incredible and so much fun! It was 16 miles round trip which sounds quite long, but it was enjoyable the entire time. We rented bikes on Fisherman’s Warf and got started. Here are some pictures along the way.

This is a bit crazy. The guy that’s posing (or whatever he’s doing) in the background of this picture tried to steal someone’s camera out of their pocket a few hours later when we were downtown. The guy who’s camera he tried to steal punched him pretty hard in the face so he didn’t get away with the camera, but thank goodness we didn’t have him take the picture. Who knows what would have happened.

So beautiful!!

The rest of the day was spent walking around Fisherman’s Warf, eating fish & chips and clam chowder in bread bowls- yummy!, shopping, and visiting Ghirardelli square 

On Sunday, we spent most of the afternoon walking around Golden Gate park and visiting the beach. The park is gigantic and there is a ton to see. It is somewhat like a mini Central park in NYC. It was pretty chilly so we took a bus tour which was a cool way to see the park. We didn’t really take any pictures on Sunday because it was too cold outside. Thanks for coming to visit Julie and Ashley! It was a great weekend!