Us biking in San Francisco

We decided to take a short trip to California, to San Francisco since I used to live there and know for a fact that it is a bike friendly place as you can see below.

 We were being nosy at the Nursing Simposium at the Moscone Center in Down Town San Francisco.

Of course we could only take a short ride until our driver decided to ask us about our participation in the simposium. At that point we also realized that the rides were only for all those important nurses and doctors. We ended up having to abandon our ride, but he was nice enough to let us take the pictures and on our way we were.
The Simposium organizers sponsored short rides for the participants so they could see a bit of the nice downtown buildings and public spaces in San Francisco. It was however, nice to just walk with with such a nice weather.

This is when we finally arrived at the Embarcadero, where we saw all those Wall Street protesters. Many homeless people take advantage of the situation as we later discovered. As for us...well we decided to sign up for a couple of bicycles. Our trip was only going to be for three days and by foot - impossible. As you will see, the bikes allowed us to cover much longer distances in the shortest time. I can't wait for San Francisco to establish a share system where we don't have to give our life information to just sing out a bike.
Here we are stoping for a little break by the piers. It looked like they were giving something away, but in reality it was nothing but a lady selling empanadas and all the hungry office people trying to by them :)))

And away we go. I liked the bike lane along the piers and the water.


         

Perhaps the fact that we took the trip in November helped us see the city without much traffic and/or people.

Here I am locking up the bikes in front of the Old Saint Mary's Cathedral. What a lovely church. Why were were we here? well because there was a free piano concert and we decided to take advantage of it. Well the truth is that it was free, but a donation for the church or perhaps for the pianist was encouraged. We paid $10 for both, which still makes it an inexpensive concert. Taking into consideration that we couuld enjoy the true cathedral sound of the music and the piano was a huge grand... cheap, really cheap.

By the Golden Gate Bridge

This is Diana on the Golden Gate Bridge

And this is me on the bridge

Then on our way back, we took the bus coming from Marin County. It took us back to the Embarcadero where we returned the bikes. The buses are equiped with a very convenient three-bike rack.  When we saw it coming, we felt relieved since it was already 4:30 and we needed to return the bikes at 5:00pm.  There was no way we were going to be able to make it by 5:00 all the way to downtown. But then we noticed that there was a bike in front of the bus... what to do?

The blue uniform was a total coincidence :)

Well, to our surprise, the rack had just the room the two spaces that wee needed for our bikes.

This is me taking the bikes off the bus in DT San francisco.  Quite a nice trip.