A Few Hours at the Hotel
Saturday, 4 Mar 2017, 7pm.
After visiting the Contemporary Jewish Musuem this afternoon we walked around the Yerba Buena Gardens in SF and tried to locate a small sculpture garden shown on our maps (we think it was moved/temporary shut down due to everpresent construction in SoMA) before checking in to the hotel.
My photo of the Intercontinental Hotel San FranciscoThe actual hotel, as seen in the picture I made here, does not look terribly different from the stock photo/artists's rendering I linked in my entry a few posts back. The main differences seem to be that actual SF has electrical wires over the streets for the citi's fleet of electric buses, and the weather is seldom perfect like in the rendering.
Today's weather has included brief glimpses of beauty, though. In general it has been overcast and glary but occasionally a small window clears in the clouds and we can see blue overhead, like in the photo above.
This is all a bit surprising as weather forecasts the past several days have been calling for rain all wekend in SF. We worried it might be another mostly rained-out weekend trip like our driving trip to SoCal two weekends earlier. We stuck to the trip plan, though, because weather can change. Especially in SF. And a bit of rain isn't the end of the world. Last time I was at this very hotel in Dec 2014 "River in the Sky" chaos caused flooding and shutdowns and forced me to bail out of that trip. Compared to that, this weekend's forecast seemed mild. Crummy, yes, but not severely so.
There's an old saying in San Francisco that if you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes. (Alternate ending: walk 5 blocks.) From the time I took the picture above until after we'd checked in and arrived at our room on the 26th floor, it started to rain. Then the rain stopped. Then it got foggy. Then the fog mostly cleared. Then as dusk fell it started to rain again.
View from our hotel room San Francisco's South of Market Area (SoMA) skyline at dusk
We waited out the worst of the rain while making plans for the evening. We'd had lunch late so we weren't interested in dinner right away. We've booked tickets at a comedy club for 10pm. We'll leave in a moment to get dinner near the theater prior to the show.
After visiting the Contemporary Jewish Musuem this afternoon we walked around the Yerba Buena Gardens in SF and tried to locate a small sculpture garden shown on our maps (we think it was moved/temporary shut down due to everpresent construction in SoMA) before checking in to the hotel.
My photo of the Intercontinental Hotel San FranciscoThe actual hotel, as seen in the picture I made here, does not look terribly different from the stock photo/artists's rendering I linked in my entry a few posts back. The main differences seem to be that actual SF has electrical wires over the streets for the citi's fleet of electric buses, and the weather is seldom perfect like in the rendering.
Today's weather has included brief glimpses of beauty, though. In general it has been overcast and glary but occasionally a small window clears in the clouds and we can see blue overhead, like in the photo above.
This is all a bit surprising as weather forecasts the past several days have been calling for rain all wekend in SF. We worried it might be another mostly rained-out weekend trip like our driving trip to SoCal two weekends earlier. We stuck to the trip plan, though, because weather can change. Especially in SF. And a bit of rain isn't the end of the world. Last time I was at this very hotel in Dec 2014 "River in the Sky" chaos caused flooding and shutdowns and forced me to bail out of that trip. Compared to that, this weekend's forecast seemed mild. Crummy, yes, but not severely so.
There's an old saying in San Francisco that if you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes. (Alternate ending: walk 5 blocks.) From the time I took the picture above until after we'd checked in and arrived at our room on the 26th floor, it started to rain. Then the rain stopped. Then it got foggy. Then the fog mostly cleared. Then as dusk fell it started to rain again.
View from our hotel room San Francisco's South of Market Area (SoMA) skyline at dusk
We waited out the worst of the rain while making plans for the evening. We'd had lunch late so we weren't interested in dinner right away. We've booked tickets at a comedy club for 10pm. We'll leave in a moment to get dinner near the theater prior to the show.