3 Days In San Francisco With Teenagers, Part 2 – In Search Of Painted Ladies and Hippie Vibes

San Francisco is synonymous with the Hippie counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s, hosting the a ‘gathering of the tribes’ on Hippie Hill in 1967 which initiated the Summer of Love, attracting over 100,000 young people to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in the city. Whilst not everything about the Hippie movement was romantic, it has left a lasting memory of ‘flower power’ fashions – long hair, sandals, flowing dresses, beads, tie-dyed clothes, and psychedelic colours. On our visit to San Francisco with teenagers, they hoped to experience some hippie vibes.

Take a Love Bus Tour in a VW Camper Van

As one of the main activities on our time in San Francisco with teenagers, we booked a 2-hour Love Bus Tour through Viatour, in search of some Hippie vibes. Our Love Bus Tour was in a retro 1970s VW Camper Can hand-painted in psychedelic patterns, driven by Albert who played funky tunes and passed on stories about the city as we explored.

General sightseeing on the Love Bus tour

The sightseeing on the first part of our journey on the Love Bus Tour was more general, rather than hippie focussed, as we headed off in the same direction as our bike ride yesterday. The new sights we discovered, included:

• The Palace of Fine Arts – built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in the Marina District of the city, this venue has a Greco-Roman design with stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge.  It is now used for weddings and parties but is understandably pricey.
• Statue of Yoda – outside of Lucas films HQ in the Presidio.
• Fort Point – at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, Fort Point was built in 1853, during the Gold Rush as part of the defence system for the city.

Albert parked up the Love Bus in front of Fort Point with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background for a photo opportunity, and to watch a group of surfers catching waves under the bridge, which seemed like an unlikely spot to get surf but was providing them some good waves. Meanwhile, in the distance, a whale made a bonus appearance in the Bay, spouting water through its blow hole every couple of minutes and turning over in the ocean. How wonderful!

From Fort Point, our Love Bus Tour headed over to Baker Beach, which is a nudist beach at one end and the exclusive Sea Cliff residential area (the houses are worth tens of millions here) at the other end of the beach. We passed the lovely cliff-top park at Lands End Lookout which offered tree-lined coastal walks (to explore another time), before arriving at Ocean Beach. It was interesting to see how close this major surf beach was the centre of the city.

The next part of our Love Bus Tour was through Golden Gate Park which we entered from the bottom edge. The drive through the park showed us just how large it is – 174 acres bigger than Central Park in New York. Amongst the main attractions of Golden Gate Park are the DeYoung Museum, a Japanese Tea Garden, baseball park, windmills, boating lake, coyotes and even bison.

The hippie section of the Love Bus Tour

At the top of Golden Gate Park is an area called Hippie Hill, which was the main site of the enormous Summer of Love gathering in 1967, drawing 100,000 people to the park, including hippies, beatniks, people of all ages and those of an anti-war sentiment. “Peace not war man!”

Our Love Bus exited Golden Gate Park into the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, which is the epicentre of the hippie vibes in San Francisco (although just the commercialised aspects of it today). As we drove along Haight Street, Albert pointed out homes previously inhabited by famous people of a hippie persuasion along the way. To be honest, it was all quite quick passing through in the van, but we were intending to return to the area later, so just sat back and enjoyed the ride, listening to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair) by the Scott McKenzie on Albert’s radio.

Drive down Lombard Street on the Love Bus Tour

Next, Albert took us around the Pacific Heights neighbourhood and pointed out the house from movie Mrs Doubtfire. If you’ve seen the movie Pacific Heights starring Melanie Griffiths, Matthew Modine and Michael Keaton, then you’ll be able to picture the wonderful Victorian houses filling this area.

Then the Love Bus drove past Billionaire’s Row – a three block stretch between Divisadero and Lyon Street full of Russian Oligarch houses (according to Albert), some of the most expensive houses on the Bay. They really were in a stunning location on top of the hill overlooking the whole city and Bay area.

There are 44 hills in San Francisco and as you tour the city, it certainly feels like it – nothing is flat, and few things are straight. This includes Lombard Street in the Russian Hill neighbourhood, a unique street featuring eight hairpin turns running down a narrow steep hill for one block. It is claimed to be “the crookedest street in the world”. You can only drive down the Lombard Street.

That brought our Love Bus Tour to an end and so, once back to our starting point, we caught a taxi back to Haight-Ashbury to enjoy more hippie vibes on foot.

Note – you do get quite a lot of attention when you are driving around on the Love Bus Tour, so be prepared for bystanders to wave at the bus and take photos as you drive around.

Forget your diet with a lunch at Tartine Bakery

Tartine is a very famous bakery chain in San Francisco – there are 3 in the city, and we heard about them on the TV programme Somebody Feed Phil. We took a taxi to the Tartine Bakery outlet on the side of the Golden Gate Park and sat down to have lunch. It was all delicious, but heavy-duty food, lots of French pastries and bread products. Forget about diets when you step through the door of Tartine Bakery.

To walk off lunch, we headed into the top part of Golden Gate Park to visit the Conservatory of Flowers, a striking glasshouse fashioned on those in Kew Gardens, London – a touch of home in this beautiful city. The glasshouse was full of tall palms and lily pads.

Spotting Hippies in Haight-Ashbury

From the Conservatory of Flowers, we picked up Haight Street and re-entered the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in search of the hippie vibe on foot. To be honest, we could probably count on one hand how many people probably counted as genuine hippies, but there were a few.

Our first stop was at Amoeba Music, a huge independent music shop with an incredible selection of vinyl, new and second hand. I’m not sure how we managed to come out empty handed, perhaps because the choice was so great that it was a little overwhelming.

Haight Street is made up of all manner of shops – healing crystals, weed and vapes, vintage clothing and tie-dyed everything. There is even an Anarchist Collective Bookstore. The Piedmont Boutique has outlandish fashions (think sequins, faux fur and feathers) and features a pair of legs sticking out of the first-floor window!

Our walk through the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in San Francisco with teenagers, passed several houses and murals to spot along the way, such as:

• Jimi Hendrix’s Red House at 1524A Haight Street – where Jimi Hendrix lived for a few years in the 1960s.
• The Grateful Dead’s House at 710 Ashbury Street – opposite the original Hells Angels House at number 715 Ashbury Street.  The Grateful Dead band hired the Hells Angels to serve as their bodyguards (and alleged suppliers of drugs) and wanted them nearby.
• Janis Joplin’s House at 635 Ashbury Street – the first place she lived in San Francisco, but only for 4 months, with a roommate who later wrote a book about living with her in this pretty pink painted lady.

Make a picnic stop opposite the famous Painted Ladies (Seven Sisters)

From Haight Street we walked to the famous row of Painted Ladies (sometimes known as Postcard Row, or the Seven Sisters) at 710-720 Steiner Street opposite Alamo Square. Painted Ladies are Victorian or Edwardian Houses, which are painted to embellish their architectural details in a few different colours.

In total, it was a 30-minute walk from Amoeba Records on Haight Street to Alamo Square, and we picked up some picnic supplies in a local grocery, so we could sit in Alamo Square and admire the view of the houses. From Alamo Square, we walked to the streetcar stop to catch the F Line back to the hotel.

A note on Downtown San Francisco

My pre-trip research had suggested avoiding the Tenderloin area of Downtown San Francisco due to the level of homelessness and drug misuse on streets. As we were visiting San Francisco with teenagers, then we decided to follow this advice organise our itineraries to avoid this area.

We only ventured near Downtown San Francisco on two occasions, once to shop near the Powell-Mason cable car turnaround stop which was fine, and once on the F line streetcar which passed through Downtown when a young homeless man got on the streetcar and the driver started shouting at him which wasn’t nice to see (for the homeless man).

Dinner at Coqueta

There are endless and excellent options for dinner when in San Francisco with teenagers, so I’m sure that you’ll find something to suit your tastes and circumstances. We very much enjoyed our dinner at Coqueta on the Embarcadero, a modern take-on Spanish dishes including tapas, paella and sharing dishes. It was a warm and bustling atmosphere, a great end to the day.

Tomorrow is the last day on our California road trip, but will be escape Alcatraz?

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