I recently went on a girls’ trip with Autumn (@grlwithbangs), Nicole (@nicoleliolie), and Kaitlyn (@kallme.kaitlyn) to San Francisco and it was such a blast! I’ve only been to SF once or twice before this when I was younger so everything was pretty new to me!
Day 1:
We drove from Long Beach to San Francisco – if you aren’t familiar with this drive you can do it a few ways. In order to get there by lunchtime, we took the inland route on the interstate 5. We made a couple pit stops, one of which was a photo-shoot on the side of the road rocking our GRLFRND Denim in the middle of nowhere haha but it’s chill. After lunch, we stopped by the Mosiac steps overlooking the city and explored around in my car. We then got settled in at Hotel Fusion where we were staying and started getting ready for dinner. The hotel was in a touristy area but the staff weren’t all that friendly and our room was a little cramped. But hey, I guess that’s San Francisco – everything is squished! We decided to go to trendy Asian restaurant/bar Hakkasan (yes the same one in Las Vegas but this one people actually eat at and there isn’t a dance floor). The girls and I decided to have a little fun and once we had a drink or two our fake British accents came out for about two hours on and off but we were convinced we had the bartender, waiter, and restaurant staff fooled. FYI we didn’t haha. The waiter came and apologized at the end of our meal (he thought he was being rude in his response to my vegan questions haha) and ended up bringing us some complimentary sorbet because of it! It was so nice of him!
Day 2:
We ate breakfast at this cute vegan café called Nourish. Autumn had picked it out and I had no idea it was vegan so when we showed up I got super excited! I had a yummy green juice and a breakfast toast sampler. The rest of the day was jam-packed – I felt like we did so many activities. We went to Chinatown, saw the Painted Ladies (from Full House), and went to Haight & Ashburry- the mecca of hippie town and LSD. We stopped at two places for lunch – Veganburg for Autumn and I and a café across the street for Kaitlin and Nicole. Probs the best vegan burger I’ve ever had. They also had loaded fries that were bomb – 10/10 would recommend. We later visited the Palace of Fine Arts, which was pretty much just a beautiful park, small lake, with huge palace-looking structures. We had attempted to go see the Golden Gate bridge after but traffic was so bad and I made a wrong turn which cost us about 30 minutes to an hour so we decided to save the bridge for day 3. Nicole has some cousins about an hour outside from SF, so they came to have dinner with us at Boudin at Fisherman’s Wharf. As we were finishing up dinner, two of my old Industrial Design classmates from college got seated at the table behind us with a friend of theirs. Such a small world! I had actually been messaging one of them earlier that day to meet up but as you can tell from our busy schedule that it was difficult. We let them finish dinner, parted ways with Nicole’s cousins, and the four of us went back to our hotel. My college buddies came over after and had some drinks at the downstairs bar, Club Fusion, with Katilin and I. Supposedly SF doesn’t have much of a club/bar scene, but low-key it was rager down there! Overall, it was such a fun and busy day exploring the city!
Day 3:
We checked out of our hotel and went to the Golden Gate Bridge. We didn’t actually cross it; we just went to a nearby coastline park to hangout for a little and get some photos. We were really looking forward to finding some swing that overlooks the bridge but we were already running late on getting home and it would have been a mile or so hike to get to so we decided to save it for the next trip. We also kind of messed up for breakfast today. We were all doing some research on our phones and I found this cute café to go to in the financial district. Not only was trying to find parking that wasn’t $25 the most stressful and time-consuming thing but once we did find parking and walked 15 mins to get to this café they were closed. I guess businesses aren’t open on July 3rd for the holiday the next day. So we ended up doing the most basic option there is and just grabbed some breakfast items at the nearby Starbucks. We then started on our drive back home to Long Beach. Because of recent mudslides the route on the coast home is closed around Big Sur, so we drove as long as we could on the coast until we had to cut over inland. We had to stop a few times for photos (of course) haha but it was a nice (but long!!) drive home.
I think next time I’d like to make it a four-day trip, or maybe fly if we’re going to do it in three – we all felt a bit rushed to see everything. Overall though, this trip was so much fun and I can’t wait to have more girls’ trips like this in the future.
