Chapter 7
I’m the Stair Master

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We found the search for dinner to be a little frustrating because we wanted to take advantage of San Francisco’s excellent food scene; but we were in Fisherman’s Wharf, so we were mostly surrounded by tourist traps.

After going back and forth with our thoughts several times, we finally decided to just embrace to tourist vibe of the neighborhood and try out the enormous Boudin Bistro—after all, we knew we loved Boudin bread from the bakery at DCA!

Tracy was swayed by the Lobster Macaroni that she saw on the menu as we hemmed and hawed while looking at different reviews on our phones.

And honestly, I haven’t a clue what I got. I know the bread was as delicious as anticipated, however.

After we ate, we walked back to the street and saw another historic cable car passing by. This time, though, we didn’t ride it.

Instead, we walked to our next destination: Ghirardelli Square.

I’ll admit it—this whole evening felt like we were just walking through Pacific Wharf at DCA. But it was weird to think that these buildings were the originals, on which the theme park versions were based.

We had gotten used to San Francisco feeling like one giant ghost town whenever night fell, but the feeling was amplified as we wandered the deserted Ghirardelli Square. There was barely another soul in sight.

We still needed to digest before we would be ready to eat some ice cream, so we sat by this fire pit for a while.

When we finally decided to go into the Ghirardelli shop, we were the only customers. I couldn’t tell if they were excited to have someone break up the monotony or annoyed that they actually had to prepare our frozen treat.

I think the sundae we ordered was a seasonal special, so I have no easy way of looking up exactly what it was. All I know is that it was delicious!

After leaving Ghirardelli Square, we had the opportunity to hop aboard another unique method of public transportation in San Francisco—one of the historic streetcars.

This particular model was from the 1950s.

We were just looking at a map and trying to figure out the best place to get off, so we unloaded at the stop that looked like it should have been relatively close to Telegraph Hill.

What we soon realized, however, is that we needed to ascend this behemoth to get back to our neighborhood.

Too steep for an actual road to go up, this portion of the hill is known as the Filbert Street Steps. We honestly didn’t realize what we were getting ourselves into as we started to climb up this 284-foot hill. There are about 400 steps ascending the hill on this side, and we climbed them all. Oddly, the wooden steps are still flanked by houses, meaning it’s actually possible to live just off this set of stairs. We immediately wondered how one goes about moving into one of those houses (I can’t imagine carrying a suitcase up that far—let alone pieces of furniture).

When we got to about the halfway point, I took this picture of the steps we had gone up.

We still had all of these to go, however.

We were really huffing and puffing by the time we reached the top, but the stairs ended right by Coit Tower and left us just a short distance from our AirBNB. About halfway up the hill, we started seeing “lost cat” flyers posted on telephone poles saying that Kitty Tom had gone missing. From that point on, we kept yelling “Kitty Tom” every few minutes, just in case he happened to respond (alas, he never did).

When we got back to our apartment, our leg muscles were seriously burning. We honestly hadn’t set out to have this unique experience on the Filbert Steps, but I’m glad we did! Plus, it tired us right out so we were quite ready to hit the hay.

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