San Francisco - Day One (5/26/09)

“Attention passengers”, the voice of the airport concourse public address system said. “Today’s flight to San Francisco is being delayed, as a screw and bracket assembly is required to repair a window on the flight deck.” Great. We’re all being held hostage by a parts kit that probably cost $1.29 to manufacture. I won’t publicly say the name of the airline in question, instead choosing simply to say that it rhymes with “Malaska”.

Two hours later, a little after 2:00 pm, we were out of the gate and on our way to start a three-day whirlwind tour of San Francisco. In retrospect, I guess that if we avoided a cockpit catastrophe at 30,000 feet because of a leaky window it was worth a couple of hours and a few turns of a screwdriver.

The Galleria Park: great hotel, great location
Fortunately the remainder of the flight was smooth and uneventful. We made our way to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) terminal at the San Francisco Airport for a half-hour ($5.35) ride to the downtown Montgomery Street Station. A word about BART: They’re frequent, they’re fast and they’re cheap (at least until the transit authorities raise fares to try and get out of the financial mess that every place in California is in). We really wish that Seattle would have gotten the hint in the 70s and 80s and been proactive enough to have done something like this. Imagine an elliptical route from Everett to Tacoma that goes around Lake Washington...

The first order of business at Montgomery Station was to purchase a couple of three-day Muni (local bus/train passes) for $18 each and a $3 detailed map. The map is well worth having even if you think you know where you’re going. The Muni system is excellent but along with it comes a lot of detail and the map is a must have.

Our hotel, The Galleria Park, was located an easy block and a half from the station. It was particularly easy because we only brought carry-on luggage with us. The Galleria Park is in a perfect location, in the Financial District at 191 Sutter Street. It’s an older property but has been recently updated, is clean, and the staff was awesome. And it was a bargain as we used our Entertainment Book to land a rate that was less than $100 a night. The only knock? The rooms are quite small as they tend to be in older hotels, but for us it was an extremely minor point.

The brick oven in action at Tommaso's
We walked in a northwest direction along Kearny Street and found the San Francisco Brewing Company. This is a fairly small brewpub that looked like it was frequented by mostly locals. The India Pale Ales we ordered were thirst quenching but didn’t quite have the same hop levels and body that we’ve grown accustomed to at home.

It was on to dinner. We were looking for a reasonably priced Italian restaurant that was in the good graces of the locals and served excellent pizza. Prior to leaving, we searched yelp.com for such a dining establishment and we found it in Tommaso’s in the North Beach part of town. We shared a Caesar salad (average at best) but were more than rewarded with one of the best brick oven pizzas we’ve ever had. Simply topped with sauce, cheese, basil, oregano and garlic, we ate it all and had a happy walk back to the hotel to call it a night in anticipation of the trip to Alcatraz Island the next morning.

Day two coming up...

BowlingWidow in front of the restaurant after dinner

It Ain't Easy Bein' Cheesy

Okay, so maybe I stole the title line from that famous feline philosopher, Chester Cheetah. But unlike Chester I'm not hawking Cheetos. This was better. Way better.

It was a nice Sunday afternoon and we were able to get most of our outdoor chores done yesterday before and after watching what was a great Preakness horse race on TV. As BowlingWidow was quick to point out, a "girl" horse won that particular race for the first time in 85 years.

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A scene from one of the many tasting lines at the Cheese Festival

This weekend was the annual Seattle Cheese Festival at the Pike Place Market in Seattle. It's a tradition that has only been going on for a few years but we hadn't been there yet so we jumped at an impromptu chance to show up.

If we learned one thing today it's that cheese is very popular. Particularly when they're giving out free samples. There must have been 50 cheese makers there, ranging in size from Tillamook to the tiny Samish Bay Cheese Company in Bow, WA. And they came from as far away as the state of New York (Yancey's, from which we bought some really tasty extra sharp cheddar).

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Some favorites: we couldn't stop ourselves from buying them

I can't begin to rattle off all of the different types of cheeses but they were all there: Gouda, Dubliner, Gorganzola, Parmigiano-Reggiano, Asiago and so on. There were cheeses with Merlot in them as well as one with a wasabi/horseradish combination.

After sampling around 25 cheeses each and purchasing a few of our favorites, we concluded the afternoon with a pint of ale at the nearby Pike Place Brewery.

Yeah, it was a pretty good day.