Sunday, August 16, 2009

California Day 4: Biking the Bridge


Day 4 took us back into San Francisco to do the very touristy thing of biking the Golden Gate Bridge. Having struggled to make it out of the car park, we spent some time at Lori's Diner to eat fries and milkshake (not a good combination). We ended up at Blazing Saddles to rent some bikes, where I found out riding a bike is harder than it looks. I ended up on a tandem with a more experienced cyclist - what fun we had (although not as much as the group who had rented the three person cycle)! We cycled across the bridge up to Sausalito where we had a short snack (a cheeseboard) before catching the ferry back to San Francisco. Unfortunately, due to the size of the queue of cyclists trying to get on it, we were unable to get on the ferry that took us back to the place we rented the cycles from and ended up taking one to the ferry terminal which was allegedly five minutes down the road. I'm not sure how you were supposed to get there in five minutes but it certainly was not by bike. The ferry did, however, give us some impressive views of the city and Alcatraz island.



In the evening we ended up having dinner at the Cheesecake Factory because everywhere else was closed. The Cheesecake Factory offers a lot of dishes, but surprisingly for the amount of choice, I struggled to find anything I wanted on the menu before I settled for a spaghetti bolognese. The portions here were huge (they offer you a box to take home anything you have not eaten) and we received some typically brilliant American service from the waiter. A couple of people braved the cheesecake for pudding despite the large portions, although I do not believe we were able to finish these off between us. We got home a bit early anticipating an early start, as we had to pick up the 4x4 we had rented on the Internet from San Francisco Airport in the morning.

2 comments:

JPH said...

What in the wide, wide world of sport were you doing renting bicycles from a place called "Blazing Saddles"?

Louis said...

It seemed like a good idea at the time..?