And we’re back for more of the most beautiful city in America! Perhaps a controversial statement, but I don’t think anybody could argue that it’s not at least in the top 3.

Anyway, there’s no unifying theme of this article other than the fact that all of it takes place in San Francisco. This is just a collection of cool things in this city that I want to share with you. Plus a photo dump at the end. So without further ado…

Marshall Beach

We’ll start our saga on a beautiful November morning, with a couple of my buddies and their two dogs. They both live in the Richmond/Sunset areas and bring their dogs here together a couple of times every week. That detail is important to me because it really illustrates to me the beauty of living in San Francisco—the following pictures will look like a postcard, but this is just a day in the life for people who live here.

Marshall Beach is a narrow little strip of sand nestled between the sea-side cliffs of the Presidio and the Golden Gate channel. Baker Beach is perhaps the more obvious destination because it’s easier to access (there’s a picture of it in the gallery below from a distance), but Marshall Beach is much closer to the Golden Gate Bridge. The trade-off is that it’s a steep hike down to the sand, but I’m sure it’s nothing you can’t handle. 😉

Japanese Tea Gardens

Up next we’re going to jump into San Francisco’s famed Golden Gate Park. Consisting of a whopping 1,017 square acres of green space right in the heart of urban San Francisco, Gold Gate Park is substantially larger than New York’s Central Park, and there is quite a lot to do inside its boundaries. In addition to tons of scenic green space and many miles of walking trails, it’s also home to museums, botanical gardens, monuments, windmills, an aquarium, a planetarium, a very random herd of bison, AND the Japanese Tea Gardens. I could easily do a whole article only on the contents of Golden Gate Park. Maybe I’ll do that next time. But for now, I’ll I can offer you of the park itself are these few shots…

Now let’s make our way over the Japanese Tea Gardens. Though it was originally constructed as part of the World’s Fair in 1894—which makes it the oldest public Japanese garden in the U.S.—it has undergone some evolution since then. Today the garden's 3 acres are something of a tourist destination, well-known for beautiful Japanese-style landscaping and a wealth of sculptures and structures in the Buddhist and Shinto religious traditions. Sitting at “center stage” there is a Japanese tea house where you can go order tea to bookend your wanderings.

The timing of this visit was funny because I had been at another public Japanese garden a mere 2 articles ago, in Seattle. You can revisit that article here. To compare these two gardens, San Franicisc’s is likely prettier, more complex, and definitely larger, but it was also packed with people, which made the experience a bit less “zen” than I would have liked. But then again, Seattle was putting some strict limits on how many people could be in the garden at once due to COVID, so maybe it’s not a fair comparison. The bottom line is that I recommend them both.

Anyway, depending on the time of year, admission into SF’s Japanese Tea Gardens costs between $10 and $12, but you can find a full price breakdown here. Here are some pretty pictures I snapped from my wanderings.

The Full House House

Did you ever watch the TV show Full House back in the day?

Full disclosure: I did not. And I had no clue that this show was set in San Francisco until “The Full House House” came onto my radar as a place to visit here. Indeed, the house where this show was supposed to have taken place can be found at this address: 👇👇

1709 Broderick St, San Francisco, CA 94115

It’s in kind of a random spot between Laurel Heights and Japantown, but once you find it, it’s on an unexpectedly pretty street, in a row of houses that all look almost exactly the same.

The timing of this article happens to coincide with the death of Full House dad and America’s collective-favorite 1990s father-figure, Bob Saget. It sounds like the front of this house has become something of a shrine to him in the days since his passing, with stacks of bouquets of flowers and local fans coming by to pay their respects. It’s sad that he’s gone, but this is a cool gesture that is happening right now. It reminds me of Viretta Park Kurt Cobain Memorial in Seattle from just a few articles ago.

Anyway, here’s the opening created from Full House so you can see this place in context. Fun fact: apparently Full House only shot in San Francisco a small number of times. The rest of it was all in a studio in LA. But it’s become part of the SF folklore nevertheless.

The Painted Ladies (@SUNSET)

And we’ll keep the “Famous-SF-Houses” theme going here with the Painted Ladies. The Painted Ladies are a row of historic Victorian and Edwardian houses on the western side of Alamo Square that were given distinct paint jobs starting in the 1960s. Honestly, I think that if you needed to pick a place to drop somebody where they would get the most complete San Francisco experience from a single vantage point, this would be that place. The view here just packs an incredible amount of beautiful iconic things into a single frame.

The pictures that have been taken here are stunning. But the crazy thing is that all of these gorgeous visual elements will feel well worn by the time you’ve walked through the city a couple of miles to get here. The beautiful, architecturally distinct houses are everywhere in this city. In fact, between 1849 and 1915 alone there were 48,000 of these houses constructed in San Francisco, and that number has only grown since then. Likewise, scenic urban vistas are also everywhere because this is the hilliest city in America. And the city is also packed with beautiful parks with distinctly Californian-Mediterranean greenery. The magic of Alamo Square is everywhere in San Francisco, but the view of the Painted Ladies really just aligns a lot of these visual elements into one small frame. And it’s definitely striking to see in person. I hiked over here at sunset to catch some extra color, and SF did not disappoint.

MORE ASSORTED STREET PICTURES

This concludes the “attractions” portion of the article, but I took a lot more miscellaneous pictures of this place that I also wanted to share. I have been doing this blog for like 8 years now, so I am really only just now arriving at the point where I am running out of things to cover in certain cities. My first articles on San Fran were relatively early in the lifespan of this site, so I would probably do things differently if I were to write about those same things now, but the fact remains that—for the time being—there’s a lot that has already been “checked off the list” here. In other cities that might deter me from taking as many photos or visiting as often, but not here. In San Fransisco, I don’t need an angle. I am happy just to exist here, and walking around it always feels like I shame to leave my camera behind, so here’s a photo dump from my wanderings this time around.

That’s it for now! Soon we’re going to pile into a car and drive up north, where I will get my first taste of “wild” California, BUT before we do that, there’s one more San Francisco article in the queue. Up next we’ll be taking a deep dive into Haight-Ashbury and learning a bit about its storied past. Get ready for some vibes.