The Sisters Bike the Bridge

Day 3 in San Francisco:

Walked about 15 mins to find another breakfast restaurant I’d read about called Brenda’s Soul Food Café – we found it – there was no line up – yay! It was a New Orleans style décor with jazz/blues music, perfect way to start the day.  We ordered a flight of beignets that is their signature dish – we assumed they’d be timbit sized beignets, however, to our surprise – this is what arrived!

We also ordered the most amazing French toast on earth – seriously.  Jennifer had said when we ordered “french toast is French toast”.  She ate her words, literally.

After a carbalicious breakfast, we walked back to our hotel, rented bikes from Blazzing Saddles for the day.  I was impressed with the service and friendliness of the staff.  Our plan was to see Golden Gate Park, cross the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and see Old Mill Park.  We were given a couple of options for routes, one being a more hilly challenging route.  We thought, hey we’re young, we’re fit, let’s challenge ourselves – while thinking it likely it wasn’t really going to be that challenging. 

All of a sudden, 4.5 hours later, bruised buns, burning thighs, and hungry stomachs, we arrived in Sausalito.  The hilly areas, were WAYYYY more challenging that we’d expected and we walked our bikes for half of the hills!! Luckily – it helped us feel much better about our carbalicious breakfast.

The ride was beautiful though, we saw a beautiful park, beautiful beach area, great views of the bridge and then of course the actual ride across the bridge.  Which in truth was rather stressful than enjoyable due to having to share the path with pedestrians and cyclists coming back in the opposite direction – so it was a game of bob and weave.  We drove across the bridge the next day at 9 am and it was much quieter, so I would recommend that if you decide to  bike across the bridge here, you do not go at primetime (it was about 2 pm when we did it) and go instead in the early morning or late afternoon.

Sausolito was a very cute touristy town, little shops, restaurants, built on a hillside. 

We had lunch at a restaurant called Spinnaker’s – which overlooked the water and had a beautiful view, however it reminded us of a 1980s cruiseship.  Food was reasonable, but nothing to write home about..therefore I won’t write about it. Lol J

What was noteable, was the icecream we had at Lappert’s icecream shop..I had a date caramel vanilla ice cream, and jen had a coconut, caramel, macadamia nut ice cream…uhhhh YUMMMM.  We were so excited that we forgot to take a picture – and if you know us, that’s really something.

We could have biked back or taken a ferry and biked back to the hotel – but we were all biked out – and shared a taxi back with another couple with our bikes racked up. 

We had to force ourselves to fight the fatigue and as our lower body had been receiving a decent workout with 6 hours of walking and 5 hours of biking, we felt our upper body was being neglected and went to the hotel gym for a short upper body workout.  We then ordered a glass of room service wine, got ready,  and grabbed a taxi to North Beach. 

 North Beach is a beautiful little spot to head to at night, Italians restaurants on every corner, great music, vibe, décor.  We walked around and checked out various spots before we finally settled on a restaurant called …  They were playing frank Sinatra music (my favourite!) and it was cute and cozy and looked like the owner was running the place.  We ordered Caesar salad, garlic cheese bread, lasagna and pesto ravioli.  The Caesar salad was good, dressing a little watery, but the cheesebread was sooo good.  By the time the lasagna arrived I was already full but we managed to finish it. Jen realized she didn’t love pesto as much as she thought she did and preferred my lasagna. 

After dinner we headed over to Café Vesuvio – very cute cozy bar. We sat upstairs overlooking the bar and ordered Mexican coffees, watched a bit of the Olympics and called it a night.  Our cab ride home was like a rollercoaster ride up and down hills – very fun!!   Time for bed to get ready for another eventful day – tomorrow we head to Sonoma!!