San Francisco

We left San Francisco unsure we had understood it, and after three nights of trying hard, the fault may have been ours. It was January, a few days added on to a work trip, and we had heard so much about the place that we did the sights in earnest, and mostly on foot. The city's answer to its hills was the cable car, which has run since 1873 and still climbs Nob Hill and Russian Hill. Ours was to keep walking, up streets that do walking no favours. We came home suspecting that San Francisco has to be lived in to be appreciated, and that we would go back, but with someone who knows it well enough to show us what we missed.

Cross the Golden Gate Bridge by bike, and only once. The route leaves Fisherman's Wharf along Crissy Field and goes over the bridge to Sausalito, about eight miles, and the ferry back takes about half an hour. Down at the Wharf, the sea lions have been hauling out on Pier 39's K-Dock since 1990, big old ones, sprawled as if the pier had been built for them. The block of Lombard Street between Hyde and Leavenworth zigzags down through eight hairpin turns in 600 feet, a solution to the hills we could have used more of. The Painted Ladies, a row of Victorian houses, face Alamo Square from Steiner Street, and Chinatown is for a slow stroll, in through the Dragon's Gate and up Grant Avenue.

September and October bring the warmest, sunniest days of the year, as the fog eases. Summer is, perversely, the coldest season: Karl the Fog, as the fog is nicknamed, can keep the sun off for days, and it is still the busiest and most expensive time to come.

Where to stay comes with one warning. The Tenderloin, roughly fifty blocks known for homelessness and open drug use, sits in the middle of Downtown and Union Square, between Union Square's shops and the Civic Center, and we stumbled through it by accident. It was sad and slightly scary, and we feel bad for finding it scary, because it should only have been sad. Downtown is still central and well connected. The part of town we liked was the Mission, where the restaurants and bars draw a younger, more local crowd, and where we ate well: excellent tacos at a couple of the famous taco places, whose names did not make it home with us, though the memory of the coffee did.