Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
dozen tours a day, from 10am to 2pm, all around town. You don't need to make
a reservation; just show up at the place and time listed online on its home page,
where the weekly schedule is kept up to date by the group's single paid employee.
Tours are free, but at the end, your guide, who will be someone who loves and
studies the city and wants to share that love, will pass around an envelope and
hope for a few bucks. Some of the cooler tours include a walk through the his-
toric Palace Hotel; City Scapes and Public Places, on which you'll discover hid-
den rooftop gardens and little-known financial museums downtown; a retelling
of the history of the Mission Dolores neighborhood, one of the city's most his-
toric; and Gold Rush City, which takes in the stomping grounds of the original
49ersers. Most of the city's great attractions, from Coit Tower to Fisherman's
Wharf, will have a tour dedicated to their explication. Tours are probably the city's
best bargain, and they're an inviting way to see some windswept places you may
not want to go to alone, including along the walkway of the Golden Gate Bridge
and the Fort Mason complex. Some 21,000 people a year take advantage of this
terrific service, and frugal city buffs could easily fill their vacations with two or
three a day.
My favorite paid walking tour in town is the never-boring
Local Tastes of the
City
555
(
%
415/665
-
0480; www.localtastesofthecitytours.com; $59; reserva-
tions required; 3 hrs.),
an extremely well organized adventure through artisanal
food providers in a city famous for its quality foods. The principal guide, Tom
Medin, also designed the tour. He has worked hard to befriend most of the ven-
dors and shopkeepers in North Beach, and you, as a guest of this tour, get to enjoy
the fruits of those years. When your tour drops into a store on the itinerary, he'll
frequently vanish into the back and emerge a few minutes later laden with plates
of fresh foods and baked goods produced by that place. Sometimes, you'll even be
brought into the kitchens to learn more, including one bakery with brick ovens
in continuous operation since the late 1800s. Among the stops: a focaccia bakery,
a chocolatier, a coffee roaster, and the famous Caffe Trieste, plus lots of inciden-
tal historical sights around North Beach as you go. For an in-depth face-to-face
with locals who have run their stores for years, usually following establishment by
their own ancestors, this tour is an excellent example of local entree that gives
access you'd never have on your own. Don't eat beforehand, because the price
includes tons of food and you'll almost certainly come away stuffed. The company
also does insider tours of Chinatown and 2-hour “Night Tours” (actually evening
tours) combining Chinatown and North Beach.
A very close second for my favorite paid tour is the intelligently produced
San Francisco Movie Tours
555
(
%
877/258
-
2587 or 415/624
-
4949; www.
sanfranciscomovietours.com; $47 adults, $37 seniors 65 and over, $37 kids 5-17;
reservations required; 3 hrs.).
Passengers board a comfortable rental-car-shuttle-
type van equipped with a TV and DVD player, and they're taken all around town
by a driver while a spunky movie-buff narrator cues up clips of movies—some 70
of them from 55 titles, all well-timed—that were shot exactly at the point you
happen to be passing. It's astonishing to see just how many popular films have
been shot here, and seeing the city this way is, far from being a cheesy gimmick,
actually a great way to orient yourself to its geography in relation to your prior
familiarity level with San Francisco. Lots of the sights are layered with an extra
slice of city history, such as the spot in Alta Vista Park where director Peter
