Happy Wednesday!  As I mentioned, one of my sisters was here visiting this past weekend.  I have two sisters, and I love them both, luckily we are all very good friends too.  They both live in other states, my sister that is close in age to me is up to her eyeballs in end of school activities, but my oldest sister came out to visit!

One of my favorite things to do when people visit me is to play tourist where I live.  We all grew up close enough to visit San Francisco for a day, evening, or fun outing.

Luckily, I still do.  I never get tired of playing tourist in “the city”.  If you have never been here, San Francisco is an amazing city to walk in.  But, you have to like hills. Yep, plenty of hills.  In fact, some of the hills are so steep that the cars have to park at 90 degree angles.  (the fern is covering up the 90 degree on the sign)

I love to “gawk” at the beautiful SF homes.  San Francisco has some of the most beautiful neighborhoods, and some of the most beautiful homes.  Some are old and historic, some are modern, and many of them are the beautiful Victorian “painted ladies”.  The neat thing is, many of them are all jumbled together in affluent neighborhoods.  We spent most of our time walking all around Russian Hill. This is where the famous “Lombard” street is, the crookedest street in the world.   If you want to know why they call it Russian Hill, you can read that HERE. And it isn’t because there were Russian Settlers here!

Some of the homes we loved:

Russian Hill Homes:

A beautiful little path on Russian Hill:

The views from here are amazing too:

my home is over those hills wayyyyy out there in the burbs

Presidio area homes:

I tried to get someone to move that Prius, but I couldn’t find the owner.  Messed up my picture!

Another thing I love to do is walk up and down some of the famous hills through the city owned “park” area.  Yep, there are parks that are about 5 feet wide, but just run through the hills.  There are usually many ways to get around the hills by steps, and the homes that dot the hills have the most beautiful gardens that can be enjoyed as you walk by.  (Or snooped around over the gate if you were my sister and moi).

There are also some HUGE mansions in San Francisco.  One of the most famous mansions is the“Spreckels” Mansion.  If you are curious, you can read about the history of it HERE.  Someone kind of famous has lived there for many years.  The romance novelist Danielle Steele.  The home is huge, and there is a gate right off a very busy street.  Because I have an “au dessus de la moyenne” (obsession) with who lives inside these huge homes (and I desperately want someone to invite me in for a tour of the inside!!), I will spend a bit too much time gawking at them and waiting to see if someone comes in or out.  I was extremely “inélégant” to actually go to the gate and take a picture of….the driveway???  Ce que les mauvaises manières ! (I can only imagine what the people inside thought of me, the tacky tourist in the blue minivan….)

I also saw this sign, apparently there are French Cat lovers in this area too, crazy cat lovers.

We had so much fun exploring San Francisco by foot,  which in my opinion is the best way to explore a city.  One of the most interesting things we happened upon was this business.  I was especially taken with the name.

We took a few more pictures after we both fell over laughing, but those are for private viewing only.

And on that note, this tour Est fini !