These hills are killing me!! (AKA Day 4 - Part One)

Okay, so I think that anyone who lives in and constantly walks around San Francisco has to be in the best shape (and have the best backside). Not only am I hurting now, I was hurting when I woke up this morning (my left calve/ankle is ouch!!). I just had to say that.

Okay, so Monday morning I work up early (again) around 6:30 to finish planning and get started with my day. This was another only about 5 hour sleep night. I need to get some rest sometime here soon or I'm going to pass out at work on Thursday.

I had planned to get to Mama's (a place that had the best reviews for breakfast of any I had read) by 8, but it was more around 8:30 when I arrived - and it was closed. Closed Mondays apparently. It had the hours daily on the website, but I must have missed the "Closed Mondays" part. Irk! I still haven't figured out if I'm going to go there tomorrow morning (Tuesday) for breakfast or not. I want to try it, but I'm not sure it would be worth the time, money and wait. Since I had read there is usually a good hour wait here (with a line out the door), I had planned on being there until around 10:30. Since it was closed, I was able to get started early with the rest of my plans (and add some in, too).

Off I headed to climb the Filbert Steps to Coit Tower. You see, Filbert is a street name, and the hills become so steep that the drive ends and for walking, steps begin. This is why I'm hating the hills - so many steep ones - even going down is killer!

Well there's an idea of what the Filbert steps looked like. I continued up these until they started to go down again, and then walked up a street to take the Greewich Steps the rest of the way up to the tower (same story here about being a street). The Greenwich Steps were much nicer:

This is farther up the steps, so you can't see in this picture, but there are plenty of houses that stem from this stairwell. A mighty long way to climb to carry groceries if I do say so myself; however, they have a fantastic view of the bay and the landscaping isn't bad either. Again, with stairs, there comes posts, and another opportunity for me to play with the self-timer:

I finally made it up to the tower. It was cloudy out (well there weren't really clouds, but there wasn't sun either). I took some pictures of the view from the parking lot (I could see the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges), and of the tower itself:

I made my way down the Telegraph Hill and park steps to Lombard Street and started another steep climb to the "Crookedest Street in the world." This block of Lombard is apparently too steep for cars, so they made it into a zig-zag to accomadate. The houses that align it must be really expensive, as they looked it.

That's only until about 10:00am. Part two will be posted later :)