Sonya's Blog - Day 307 - Land's End

Sonya’s Blog - Day 307 - April 24th - Land’s End

I wanted to visit Land’s End. It is a park in San Francisco that is run by the National Park Service. The main trail follows the coastline and there are fantastic views of the Golden Gate. I had also done my research and Kizmet was allowed to come with us on the hike, so that was a bonus. We had to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge in order to get to the park, so that was pretty exciting. Blake wanted to bike to the bridge and across it, but we couldn’t figure out a decent bike path system to get us there. We drove some of the route, that Blake had mapped out, but it took us up crazy hills and into neighbourhoods with no thru roads. With the freeway, it is hard to know if you can get across it, or under it, somewhere and get to where you need to be. We couldn’t figure it out and none of the mapping apps (Google or Apple), show the path systems in cities, they always take you on the streets. If we are going to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge, we will need to drive there and park.

We found some parking and started on our hike. It is a pretty park, on the edge of the land that juts out into the Pacific Ocean. First we hiked towards the Sutro Baths.

This was an area that was developed by a wealthy businessman Adolph Sutro in the late 1800’s. It was a large, indoor saltwater swimming pool complex that opened on March 14th, 1896. It was pretty massive and Sutro also had a rail line built to service the area. The baths closed down in the 1960’s due to high operating costs and burned down a little after that, the cause of the fire was arson. The rail line ran along the cliff edge, where we were hiking today, but severe landslides in 1925 destroyed the track and it ceased operations. Here is a picture of the Sutro Bath ruins:

We then walked towards Eagle Point to get some pictures of the Golden Gate and some views of the San Francisco Bay. I was surprised to see so many dogs being walked off leash, so I stopped to ask a lady if it was an off leash area. She said yes, it was. We took Kizmet off leash for a bit, but she kept running ahead, so we had to put her back on. I guess if I had known the trail better, I would have been more comfortable, but we didn’t. It was a very pretty walk, here are a few pictures:

We headed back to the truck, as we were all getting hungry. We decided to drive to Golden Gate Park and find something to eat around there. This is a massive inner-city park with lots of museums, gardens, lakes and green spaces. It took us awhile to figure out where we wanted to be, but we found parking with no problems. We then walked a short distance, to a deli, and got some falafels for lunch. We then wandered around, trying to find somewhere in the park to eat. This took a long time, but we finally found a bench and ate. We were all pretty hungry by this time, as it was quite late in the day.

We wanted to see more of the park, but it is really large, and we were all tired from walking, so we decided that we would drive around the park. There are two main arteries that take you through the park. On one end are the beaches and water and the other end has the museums and gardens. It is a very pretty park. It even has a bison paddock:

We were all ready to call it a day, after our drive around, as it was getting pretty late. We stopped at Trader Joe’s, on the way back, to get a few things for supper, but there was about 8000 people in the store. I am probably exaggerating, but there was a lot of people. The line-ups went down the aisle ways and it was hard to move around. I wanted nothing to do with that nonsense and decided we could make do with what we had. Nobody was very hungry, anyhow, due to our very late lunch. Well Kizmet was hungry, but we have lots of her food.

We got back to our RV and all started doing our own things. I wanted Isaac to post some of his blogs, so that he could catch up a bit. After awhile we had a simple supper and then watched the movie Splash. I haven’t seen it since the 80’s, but it was pretty cute. Well Darryl Hannah is not a great actress, but Tom Hanks, John Candy and Eugene Levy were all good.

Sonya