Smoky San Francisco

Good morning, Friends! I’m back from my San Francisco adventure with my friend. My darling friend who was kind enough to deal with every single photo I took on this trip. If it’s one thing SF does right, it’s curated and artistic.

As many of you know, and I think it’s because of all of the celebrities affected this year, California is known in the PNW for fires. It’s been a tragic last few years for them. This season more than any other before. It was so bad that the Bay Area was hit with sever toxic smoke and almost everyone was wearing a mask. It changed our trip from being very active to trying to stay inside as much as possible. So, our first day we ventured out to Hyde Pier and the remainder of the time we stayed out of the city and stuck to the clearly Bay side.

Our trip started Rocky. Our flight was cancelled the night before we were supposed to leave. Luckily, we were both bummed to another flight but didn’t realize we were on different flights until we were headed to the airport! I’m an early arriver when it comes to the airport. We arrived at SeaTac with plenty of time but the security lines were outrageous. It took 35 minutes to get through security and my flight was already boarding. So, note to you: If there’s a flight coming up, get their earlier than usual. Even Clear and Pre-Check were backed up.

Once we got to SFO it was perfectly fine. The smoke was bad enough over the summer, see my summer post here, that we were accustomed enough to be cautious when we landed. Though it was a surprising 67* out and we had ditched our blanket scarves faster than you would not believe… we decided to explore the city before heading to the hotel. We went out to the Marina District and we were not disappointed. We parked right by Gharadelli Square and made our way through the chocolate shop and onto the pier.

I won’t lie, I wasn’t able to take a ton of pictures of myself on this trip. I ended up taking a lot of tourist photos, which I’m not sure many people will like so I’ll shorten this post up for you: The Hyde Street Pier was open and Free (due to the smoke) and we took full advantage of it! See below for photos from a hauntingly beautiful 1930s Ferry and another photo of my travel outfit (sans blanket scarf)!