After we had lunch we went down to Fisherman's Wharf to hire some bikes. Bike riding over the Golden Gate bridge and around the wharf is really popular in San Francisco, we saw hundreds of other people doing it.
Realised when we got there that I hadn't ridden a bike in about 15 years, so had to have a practice in a back alley before venturing onto the road. Down by the waterfront there are bike paths, so you don't have to go onto the road. The drivers in San Francisco are crazy. They seem to be pretty good with giving bikes heaps of room, but they ignore red lights and are always beeping at each other.
We thought we might ride over the Golden Gate bridge, but it was really windy and the bridge was covered in fog, so we wouldn't have been able to see anything. And I had this irrational fear of being blown off. I was almost being blown off my bike just riding the footpath. So instead we rode around the waterfront and stopped before going over the bridge.
Since we didn't go over the bridge we had heaps of time to spare. We decided it would be nice to bike to the Golden Gate park and see that instead. It didn't look that far on the map, so we didn't think it would take that long. Turns out our map they gave us wasn't to scale, so it took us about an hour and a half to ride there, most of it uphill.
After that we got completely lost, and ended up in a random, scary part of San Francisco. Plus there were no bike lanes, so we had to walk our bikes until we found footpaths we could ride on. We were really freaked out, weren't sure we'd make it back to the hotel! It took us about 2 hours to find our way back to Union Square and dropped our bikes back off at the bike rental place there. We had to pay an extra $20 to do it at a different place, but was so worth not having to ride another hour back to Fisherman's Wharf. Not so sure we're cut out for bike riding...
Had a great time up until we got lost, so I think overall it was a good day!
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