Yosemite turned out to be way too difficult to get to without a lot more planning than I’d done, and a conversation with someone in the hostel kind of put me off the one-day bus tour option (roughly a third of the tour happens outside of the bus, at best), so I went with Muir Woods instead.
Still a bus trip, but a much shorter one, as it’s just across the bay.

It was all scenic, which is what I was there for.
There were a number of tracks you could follow, with estimated times for each, and we’d been told that we could just make the third bridge up the river and back in the time available.

Yeah, I think I walk fast, ’cause I could have done it twice.

I mean, I didn’t do it twice.
I wandered up to the first bridge, checked out various groves of Coastal Redwood along the way, checked my watch, figured I’d go for the second bridge (on the assumption that their map was more schematic than I’d thought), checked the time there, and realised that their times were calibrated for the zimmer-frame crowd.

So I looked at trees, basked in the cheap showyness of nature, …

…, enjoyed the shade and the cooler air, …

…, and took a walk in the woods.

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I made it to the meeting point for the bus in plenty of time, which was a good thing.

• The folks I’d reserved the ticket with marked the wrong place on the map – It was a block further back.
  Fortunately they also wrote down the street number.
• Their system for buses involves you being given little laminated boarding passes of various colours, related to the tour.
• There is nothing to indicate which bus corresponds to which colour; Instead, the drivers just call out.
• Across a four-lane road, because the buses stop on the side opposite to where people were told to wait.

The phrase “fucking shambles” comes to mind.

On the plus side, a sea fog had rolled in, and we drove through it as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge.

After Muir Woods, the bus stopped at Sausalito so … Well, so that people could wander around and spend money, I guess.
In hindsight, I should have taken the option of taking the ferry back to San Francisco through the fog, but I took a tad too long to investigate the option, and missed the boat, as it were.

So I took a picture of this elephant instead.

Back in San Francisco, the fog had crept closer to shore, which made for some fun photographs, such as this one, taken from inside an Applebee’s.

And these, taken on the walk back to the hostel.

By later in the afternoon, it had snuck around behind us too, so the Fort Mason headland was encircled with fog.
If nothing else, it was atmospheric and kept the temperature down.

And then there’s this thing.