The single most important thing to understand about things to do in San Francisco on a weekend is that the city does not have one weather. It has roughly four, arranged in bands running west to east, and the difference between the Outer Sunset and the Mission on a July afternoon is routinely fifteen degrees and the difference between overcast and cloudless. Every weekend plan that fails here fails for the same reason: it was built as a list rather than as a sequence.
Fog burns off at different hours in different districts. Ask Karpo what it is doing where you are heading before you leave.
Morning belongs to the east side
Between about eight and eleven, the western half of the city is usually under marine layer and the eastern half is not. This is the window for the Mission, Potrero Hill, the Dogpatch and Bernal Heights — the sunniest neighbourhoods in the city, reliably, and the ones where sitting outside in the morning is actually pleasant. Dolores Park catches the sun early and the slope faces the right way.
It is also the correct window for anything involving a queue. The bakeries and brunch places in these neighbourhoods fill up hard after ten-thirty and the difference between arriving at nine and arriving at eleven is often an hour of standing on a sidewalk.
Midday is for the parks, in the right order
Golden Gate Park is three miles long and the weather at the eastern end near the Conservatory is frequently different to the weather at Ocean Beach. If the fog has not lifted, work the eastern end — the museums, the Japanese Tea Garden, the botanical garden — and save the western half. On Sundays and Saturdays a long stretch of John F. Kennedy Drive is closed to cars, which turns the middle of the park into something closer to a European city park than anything else in the United States.
The Presidio is the alternative and it is underused. It has genuine forest, a coastline, a good open-air food gathering on weekends, and the approach to the bridge from the park side is far more interesting than the approach from the parking lot. It also tends to sit right on the fog boundary, which means you can often walk out of it in twenty minutes.
The afternoon window that people miss
Between roughly two and five, the western neighbourhoods usually clear and briefly become the best part of the city. This is the correct time for Ocean Beach, for the Sunset's Irving and Noriega Street corridors, for Lands End and the Sutro Baths ruins. Getting the ordering right — east in the morning, west in the afternoon — is worth more than any individual recommendation on this page.
Lands End specifically rewards the afternoon light. The trail runs along the cliff from the old baths toward China Beach with the bridge in view for most of it, and it is one of the few genuinely dramatic walks in the city that does not involve climbing anything.
Evening: pick a neighbourhood, not a destination
San Francisco's evenings work best when you commit to one district and stay in it, because the hills and the transit make hopping across town expensive in time. The Mission gives you the densest concentration of bars and restaurants. Hayes Valley is the civilised version with the symphony and opera nearby. North Beach is the old-school one. The Richmond is where you go if you want to eat extremely well and not queue.
One structural note: last call is two in the morning statewide and kitchens in this city close early relative to other large American cities. A ten o'clock dinner reservation is a real constraint here in a way it is not in New York or Los Angeles, and planning to eat before nine will save an evening. Bars keep going long after the kitchens stop, so the sequence that works is an early table and a late drink rather than the reverse.
Getting across town without losing the afternoon
Transit here is better than its reputation for east-west travel and worse than its reputation for anything involving a hill. The N and L lines run out to the Sunset and the ocean and are the correct way to do the east-to-west sequence described above. Muni buses along Geary and California cover the Richmond. What does not work is assuming a rideshare will be quick on a weekend afternoon — the same fog that makes the plan necessary also makes the bridge approaches slow.
Cable cars are a ride rather than transport and should be treated as one. If you want the experience, take the California Street line rather than the Powell lines: it is the working commuter route, the queue is a fraction of the size, and it climbs the more dramatic hill. The Powell turntable at the bottom of the hill can absorb an hour of your day for no particular gain.
What to hold in reserve
Every weekend plan here should have one indoor option held back for the moment the weather turns, because it will. The museums in Golden Gate Park, the ferry to Sausalito on a clear day and back on a foggy one, the Ferry Building on a market morning, a long lunch in Chinatown. Keeping one of these unspent is the difference between a flexible weekend and a wet one, and the museums in particular are far more pleasant on the day everyone else has gone to the beach.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #ThingsToDoSF #SFWeekend #GoldenGatePark #Presidio #LandsEnd #DoloresPark #OceanBeach #MissionDistrict #KarlTheFog #SFGuide #BayArea #WeekendPlans
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Ask Karpo first
Ask Karpo what the weather is doing in the specific San Francisco neighbourhood you are heading to, what is open there this weekend, and whether it is worth swapping your morning and afternoon plans.
