Hiking!

Yesterday we went to the movies and ate sushirritos and drank all our fancy raffle wine, so today we had to do something less gluttonous to compensate. We started the day off at our friends' house with delicious homemade scones for breakfast, which doesn't sound healthy but then we spent the next seven hours hiking with them so it all works out.

First we went to Mount Davidson, which is the highest point in San Francisco. My favorite part about the walk up was these crazy hot pink flowers that were everywhere

A bunch of flowers, and Sam's back.

Closeup of the cool flowers.

Ben's favorite part were all the really tall trees that were covered in ivy almost all the way to their tops.

Ben admiring a tall ivy-covered tree.

We knew that Mount Davidson had a cross on the top, but from the pictures we thought it would only be person-sized.We were both surprised and impressed when we reached the top, and found out that the cross is actually HUGE:

Jeff at the base of the giant cross.

The top probably would have offered some really impressive views of the city, but the fog had other plans for us. We still got to have a lovely picnic, though, so all was good.

Foggy view

Picnic!

We caught a bus over to Golden Gate park, and went up the tower in the de Young museum. By that point a lot of fog had cleared and there were pretty good views of the city, but it was hard to take photos because of the backlighting.

We walked across the park, and along the way passed some buffalo.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Ben's "buffalo face"

On the other side of the park and North a bit were the Sutro Baths,or rather what used to be the Sutro Baths and are now just cool-looking ruins you can climb on.

From there we kept walking up the coastal trail, which afforded a really nice and only partially fog-obstructed view of the Golden Gate bridge.

 

We were trying to end at this place we had heard had a neat "rock maze," but when we finally found it we were a bit disappointed.

Sam looks on while Ben attempts the labyrinth.

Also, somewhere along the way we encountered Dorcas Street, and took a picture with the Dorkuses.

Our hike was largely planned using a book Sam and Jeff had on the secret stairways of San Francisco, which led us to lots of cool places, but also resulted in me having a dozen different versions of this picture on my camera:

Also, I'm not standing up for at least the next 24 hours.