San Francisco, USA

Day 3 (Fiji Standard Time) of our four-day transit back home, today from Nadi to San Francisco.

The flight didn't depart from Nadi until 10:15pm so we had all day to do much of nothing. We were able to get late check-out at 5pm for $100 FJD which was great. We spent most of the day in our air-conditioned room because we weren't adjusted to the 31C or humidity.

We had one last ferry ride from the Doubletree to the mainland and then a taxi to the airport. We forgot that we had been in the Fiji Airways lounge previously (we had upgraded at check-in for the flight from Nadi to Sydney). It was pretty crowded in the lounge, there were two large flights to LA and SF around 10pm, and I'm guessing most people had the same idea as us, to hang out at the lounge for most of the evening.

Our flight boarded and departed on time. We were able to get a few hours sleep 'overnight'.

Day 3 (Pacific Standard Time)

We arrived in SF around 12:45pm, after a pretty smooth 10+ hour flight. We also gained 18 hours by crossing the International Date Line so arrived nine hours before we took off. We had to clear US immigration and customs before rechecking our bags for the last leg home. Originally the NAN-SFO-YYZ flights had a nice connection, but before we started our trip, Air Canada changed the SFO-YYZ flight to leave an hour before we arrived. So we had 23 hours in transit in San Francisco. I had booked a hotel in Union Square rather than staying at the airport.

We had to wheel our luggage (in a $8 USD cart!) from T1 to T2, where the United / Air Canada desks were. We asked directions from a very helpful airline agent who guessed that we just came off a long flight and would prefer to walk to T2 rather than take the inter-terminal bus.

Unfortunately Air Canada couldn't take our checked bags until the following day. So we would have to lug six suitcases into town. Hopefully this wouldn't affect my Uber rating!

It was a beautiful day in San Francisco. We were lucky cause the previous week the entire coast of California had had torrential rains and flooding. Our hotel people gave us suggestions on where to eat and tourist for the afternoon. We had lunch at E&O Kitchen, just down the street from our hotel. By the time we were done it was almost 3pm, and we realized we were back in the northern hemisphere with early sunsets. So we went back to the hotel to grab warmer jackets for dusk.

We walked through Chinatown and then down Columbus Ave, where the restaurants changed to Italian. We continued down Columbus to Fort Mason for a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island. Fort Mason is popular with joggers and almost everyone passing by stopped to take pics of the sunset. It was one of the better sunsets we'd seen on our trip!

We took a different route back to our hotel, down Polk St and then back across Sutter St. It was a pretty good whirlwind tour of San Francisco! It looks like a pretty cool place to visit with lots of character. We didn't have much steam left, but wanted to stay up a little longer to try to get back to our time zone, so we stopped in at the Irish Bank for a drink, and then called it a night.