San Francisco is a very beautiful place that makes people want to leave their hearts there. It’s just as easy for tourists to leave their hearts outside of San Francisco. When people take one of the best day trips from San Francisco, they can enjoy beautiful views of the ocean, rolling hills with wineries, cute towns, mountains, and more. Most of them are only a couple of hours’ drive from the city by the bay.
8 Best Day Trips from San Francisco
1. Berkeley
Many things make Berkeley famous. It is home to the University of California, Berkeley, which is the oldest state university in California, and it is also known as a very liberal place. In the 1800s, Spaniards moved into the area, but it was named after George Berkeley, an Irish Anglican bishop.
People also know Berkeley for its role in the hippie movement in the 1960s. Many hippies moved there from San Francisco, which is close by. The best spot to see San Francisco Bay is at the top of Lawrence Hall of Science at UC.
2. Sonoma Wine Country
Sonoma County is a wine lover’s dream, with more than 400 wineries tucked away in the hills and valleys that start from Pacific Coast Highway No. 1 just north of San Francisco. It’s not as popular with tourists or as well-known as its neighbor, Napa Valley. There are beautiful and rough beaches along the coast, and some of the most beautiful farmland in California can be found there.
Hwy 12 (Sonoma Hwy) goes from Sonoma to Santa Rosa and then to the western part of Sonoma County. It is lined with wineries at both ends. At some wineries, you can meet the people who make the wine, and at others, you can learn how to cook and pair food with wine.
3. Half Moon Bay
Half Moon Bay is a great place to get away from it all because it is only 30 miles (50 km) south of San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Highway. On one side are woods, and on the other is the Pacific Ocean. The old downtown area is a nice place to walk around, and beaches and parks are also good for biking and horseback riding.
Another thing you can do outside is play great golf on two grounds. People from all over the world come to the city’s pumpkin event every October. You can buy locally grown food like fruit, beans, or artichokes at a roadside stand.
4. Monterey Peninsula
The towns of Monterey, Carmel, and Pacific Grove are on the Monterey Peninsula. From there, you can see the Pacific Ocean in all its beauty. For John Steinbeck’s book Cannery Row, Monterey was the setting. It is only 115 miles south of San Francisco.
Carmel is famous for its golf courses and for having Clint Eastwood as its mayor. However, with 20 world-class golf courses on the peninsula, it is not the only place with them. People also like to sail, ride bikes, watch whales from Monterey Bay, eat fresh fish at high-end restaurants, and visit art museums and galleries.
5. Yosemite National Park
Yosemite is one of the most popular national parks in the United States. You can visit it on a day trip from San Francisco, but you might want to get up early because the 165-mile (265 km) trip takes about 3 1/2 hours to make one way.
This year, Yosemite National Park turns 125 years old. The park is best known for its waterfalls, like the Nevada Fall, which drops almost 600 feet, and the beautiful rock wall of El Capitan, which rock climbers love. People can see big sequoias in Yosemite, but they have to walk two to three miles to get there.
6. Napa Valley
To get to Napa Valley, people can drive in less than 90 minutes, or they can take a tour if they’d rather not drive after tasting the wine. There are hundreds of wineries in Napa Valley, which includes Yountville, St. Helena, and Calistoga. People come from all over the world to visit.
Hills covered with vines make for a beautiful background for wine tasting. Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon are the most popular wines, but dozens of other types are made to make the experience better.
7. Sausalito
Another city on the bay where people often leave their hearts is Sausalito. There are cute shops, art studios, coffee shops, and an old wharf in the historic old town area. If you go to the wharf at night, you can see San Francisco’s bright lights across the bay.
Tourists can go to the Marine Mammal Center and take cooking or pottery lessons. From San Francisco, it’s fun to get to Sausalito. People can take a water taxi, or a boat, or ride their bikes across the famous Golden Gate Bridge.
8. Muir Woods
John Muir was an ecologist who started the environmental group the Sierra Club. Muir Woods is named after him. It is one of the few places left where you can see the coastal redwoods in all their beauty, even when the fog rolls in off the Pacific Ocean. They are over 600 years old and some are over 200 feet (60 meters) tall.
Because there aren’t many parking spots in the woods on summer weekends, the Park Service suggests that people take a shuttle bus to get around. On the Pacific Coast Highway, 12 miles (19 km) north of San Francisco is Muir Woods. The walking and biking paths in the park are both paved and not paved.
