Where was I? Day 4 - Yarn and the Golden Gate Park

Not sure what happened there, sorry for the big gap! On Thursday, we had left of Chinese food for breakfast from little boxes. Then, we walked down into town to catch the bus out to Castro where the yarn shop I wanted to visit was.

On the way, we walked past a park with people doing Tai Chi. This seems to happen every morning in every park in San Francisco!

When we go off the bus, we walked down into Castro past the Delores mission which is pretty much the first bit of San Francisco.

After I had bought all the yarn, got back on the bus over to the Golden Gate park. This park is huge! And full of stuff! The first thing we saw was a Dahlia garden. It was actually a roundabout in the middle of the car park. The dahlia is the state flower of California and there are lots of different varieties.

Nearby was a conservatory full of tropical plants and a special exhibition of deadly very day things.

This is a Bat Flower!

We walked down through the park toward the place we planned to go for lunch. Had a Groupon for a sushi place just outside the park. When we got there, it was closed! We were not having a great experience with our vouchers. However, there was another place nearby and it was a total win. Behold the Bento Box of Joy!

After lunch we went back into the park, thought the Garden Of Enchantment. This was not as enchanting as it should have been!

We went to the California Academy of Sciences which is a Science museum with an aquarium, a planetarium and a rainforest. It was fantastic but the entry fee really made us appreciate our free museums here in the UK. The planetarium has a unique design with the dome on the side instead of above so you don't have to lean back. This is an impressive feat with lots of digital projectors around the edge that have to all match up.

 

We got to the aquarium in time for Penguin feeding. This is Pam, the penguin keeper!

We were allowed to touch the starfish.

After the museum, we went to the Japanese Tea Garden for tea and a sit down.

We got the bus back to the hotel and got dolled up for Cocktails at the Top of The Mark, a fancy bar at the top of the Intercontinental Hotel. It was a bit out of our league but the cocktails were amazing! Luckily we got there early as later on there was a jazz band playing and they were charging people to get in.

We had an amazing view of the city sky line and you can see our hotel in this picture. It's the short building at the bottom of the solid white building.

Now I've written all this down, I realise how much we were squishing into every day but it was totally worth it!!

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