Have y’all ever been to San Francisco? I believe I’ve told you that it’s just about my favorite place to visit. In fact, I want to live there. I will, just as soon as my Google ads start to pay off for me (or when I win the lottery—which will probably happen sooner!).

We just got back from a trip to The City (don’t call it “Frisco,” or you will sound like a tourist). If you are like me, traveling to a strange city gets me apprehensive. San Francisco is about as strange as it gets, and that’s why I love it! Yet, I get all discombobulated trying to figure out what to do and how to get around. I thought I’d tell you what we have discovered, just in case you decide you want to go there. It’s actually extremely easy, because there is such good public transportation.

We booked our flight and hotel through Travelocity for this weekend trip. I was pretty well pleased with what we got for our money. Even though you can find everything you want to know about San Francisco on-line, I suggest browsing a bookstore to find a good travel book about The City. It’s handy to have as you wander the streets.

We’ve learned to plan on visiting many more sites than we could possibly visit, so that we have plenty of choices depending on our mood and the capricious weather. We booked reservations for a play ahead of time, and we didn’t get our first choice—or our second choice—because our trip was planned at the last minute. I suggest that if you want to see a play while you are there that you go on-line and call ahead. You definitely want to see a play while you are there. Trust me.

Pack lightly! Remember that you will be dragging that luggage with you. We didn’t remember that advice this time. Mr. Tucker kept saying, “I might need this shirt.” Or, “Add those pants.” And, “I might need those shoes.” I kept telling him to stop, but he wouldn’t listen. We took more than 90 pounds of luggage for a two day trip! Before we came home, I packed everything we hadn’t worn in one suitcase and everything we had used in the other. I’ll let you guess which suitcase was lighter (hint: I got to say, “I told you so!”). San Francisco is a shopper’s paradise. If you need an item of clothing that you didn’t carry, you can buy it! You were going to do so anyway.

When you arrive at SFO, you still have to get into town, and it’s a long way. You could take a taxi (which would be pretty darned expensive). You can rent a car, because they have some really sweet deals. One trip, we rented a decent car for $25 per day. The problem was that parking cost more than that per day! Driving in San Francisco can be a nerve-wracking experience, too. If you decide that you need wheels so that you can travel outside of The City, you can always come back to the airport and rent a car for a day (or rent a car in town and pay a bit higher fee).

The best bet is to take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) into town, a ride of about 30 minutes. We don’t have anything like that here in Denton, Texas, so navigating it at first made me very nervous. There was no reason for me to be concerned. You can find out more about train schedules and such at http://www.transit.511.org. From the airport (from domestic terminals) take the free AirTrain to the “Garage G/BART Station.” There are machines at the station from which you can buy the passes to ride BART into town. To get into San Francisco will cost about $5.00 per person (you can add money to the card later if you need to do so). We each got a $10 pass, so that we had round trip tickets. Do figure out ahead of time at which station you need to disembark. Then, just feed that pass into the machine at the gate, grab the ticket when it spits it back and hop aboard. You can see from our faces that it wasn’t a horrible experience.

Two things to remember about those BART stations:

1. Don’t take the elevators in the downtown stations! Some of the street people seem to think those are urinals.
2. Ignore that fellow standing by the machine where you get your passes who is trying to act very helpful by telling you how to get passes and offering to make change. He doesn’t work for the transit system, he’s a panhandler looking for a tip.

This time around in San Francisco we did a lot of walking. I’m getting too old for that! Next time, we plan to buy weekly passes for the Muni, so that we can get around town on the buses. I’ve never gotten to ride a cable car, but it costs about $5.00. I’ll probably do that one trip, but I’d rather use that money to buy a large mocha!

We explored an area that was new for us: The Embarcadero District. San Francisco has lots of different districts (including Union Square, Russian Hill, The Castro, Telegraph Hill, SoMa, the Mission District, North Beach, Chinatown, The Tenderloin and more). Each has its own distinct “flavor,” and I love them all. But, The Embarcadero won my heart this time around. I’ll tell you more about “why” later in the week.

Technorati Tags: San Francisco, travel, BART, Embarcadero