The Golden Gate Park

Today is to be our last visit to SFbefore we move on to Monteray. We drove straight through the main part of the city and took Fell St towards the Golden Gate Park but made a short detour along Ashbury to Haight St, to see (but to us quite normal) Haight-Ashbury, made famous by strange myths from the Flower Power Days of the the sixties. Now it is just a row of eclectic (which I now know means either expensive or touristy) shops.
We entered the park and drove through for quite some time before finding the Japanese Tea Garden (JTG), which we had come specifically for, or somewhere to park as there were so many people there. It is a very large park, we passed a number of formal gardens, the Rose Garden, the big amphitheatre and the De Young Art Gallery, where we stopped for a morning drink, before getting to the JTG. The gardens themselves were beautiful with lots of twisty little paths, hills, valleys and ponds which gave lots of different views in a very small space. We laughed a lot when a man taking a photo stepped backwards off the small bridge and fell straight into the water. He must have got so cold as it was quite a chilly day. We wandered through for an hour or so then stopped for a cup of Japanese tea and a Japanese snack, very interesting.
After our visit to the JTG we had a picnic in the park then drove on down to the coast and to Lands End for another lovely view of The Golden Gate Bridge, before coming home through some abysmal traffic, via 2628 Steiner St, the home of Mrs Doubtfires family.