San Francisco Day 5

We started out our day by eating breakfast as Sears Fine Food. They are famous for their silver dollar pancakes...so, that's exactly what we got (there were 18 pancakes).

After breakfast we hoped on a cable car and rode down to Ghirardelli Square. We walked around, checked out some little shops, and sampled some chocolate (the Ghirardelli Peanut Butter squares are sooo good!).

After our chocolate fix, we hailed a cab and headed to North Beach. The North Beach area/neighborhood is the San Francisco's "Little Italy." I pulled our my handy dandy Frommer's book and we did a self guided tour. We weren't as impressed with this self guided tour as it was more of a historical tour (look at this building on the right...it survived the fire of 1906.....check out the lobby of this building - it also survived the fire of 1906, etc.) and it also took us through the seedy strip club area. When we'd had enough of the history lesson we decided to have lunch at Calzones. We sat on the sidewalk and shared some garlic french fries and Italian pot stickers. It was delightful.

After lunch we traveled by foot to Washington Square - it's a park in front of the Saints Peter and Paul Church. One cool fact that we learned was that this is where Joe DiMaggio married his first wife and then later he came here with wifey Marilyn Monroe to take wedding pictures (they got married at City Hall because he'd been divorced). It was a beautiful church.

After visiting the church, we hoofed it up this STEEP hill. This is the picture from the bottom.

And this is a picture from the top of the hill. I guess I worked off my pancakes and chocolate. :)

At the top of the hill was Telegraph Hill. This is where the famed Coit Tower is. We payed $5 each to ride up in a tiny elevator to see a 360 view of San Francisco. We were up there all of 4 minutes. I probably wouldn't recommend doing this unless you just HAVE to snap a few pictures from that high up.

After visiting the Coit Tower, we decided that we really could go for an Irish Coffee. Frommer's recommended visiting The Buena Vista Cafe. This place was AWESOME. If nothing else, plan a trip to SF just for a Buena Vista Irish Coffee. It was perfect timing because the fog was just rolling in (can you spot the Golden Gate Bridge?).

The first sip warmed us right up. We got the recipe and we plan on trying to make our own at home.

After we finished our coffee's - we were standing outside trying to decide what to do next. I was feeling artsy and took this picture. I think it's neat because I look skinny. HA! Can you see the cable car?

We decided that we would take part in the Celler 360's Wine 101 class. It's basically, just a free wine tasting. We tried ALL of these wines.

Not really, we tasted 4 wines. This was us at the end of the class.

After the wine class, we were craving some sushi, so we headed over to Sanraku. This was another Frommer's suggestion and we thought it was just OK. It was considered to be an inexpensive place...but it was probably equivalent to the most we've ever paid for sushi in Atlanta (and not nearly as good). While we were waiting for a table, Mike spotted a man wearing a badge that said "All Access". Mike asked the man, who he caddied for and he said "Geoff Ogilvy...how'd you know I'm a caddy?" Mike then pointed to the man's badge. It just so happened that The President's Cup (a golf tournament) was taking place in San Francisco and Geoff Ogilvy's caddie was eating at the same place as us. The next day we saw the same man on TV, standing just a few feet from Tiger Woods. Pretty neat, huh?