Welcome back to my series about our 10-day gallivant down the west coast, Tourin’ Over California! You can read day 1 of this series here. Today, on our first full day in the city, we head to a few popular San Francisco sights, including Walt Disney Family Museum and the famous Golden Gate Bridge!
DAY 2 – SEPTEMBER 13, 2018
This was our first full day together and we were beyond excited to get started! Our first destination was very special too – we were headed to the Walt Disney Family Museum!! We hopped out of bed bright and early (which was easy because we were used to east coast time!) and called a Lyft to pick us up. Lyft/Uber was SUPER popular in San Francisco and we never had to wait more than a few minutes for our car, which was so nice! After a quick little ride we were in the Presidio, which was beautiful and offered perfect views of a certain bridge:
Soon we were at the museum!
They also had a special exhibit while we were there about Walt’s Nine Old Men, the group of animators who worked on various works throughout Walt’s lifetime.
We got there right before it opened and walked around outside a bit while we waited. We got some more stunning views of the bridge and got more excited to see it later! Soon it was 10am and we rope dropped the museum opening.
We clearly all had the same idea in terms of taking pics of our tickets:
We decided to do the Nine Old Men exhibit first at the advice of the person who sold us our tickets. This turned out to be a good decision because there was NO ONE else there and we had the place to ourselves! Unfortunately there were no photos or video allowed in the special exhibit, but we all really loved it. Each of the Nine Old Men had a specific room devoted to their works, with video interviews running on a loop of people talking about their impact and style. It was so well done and really cool. We learned a lot about each of the men and it was really interesting to see their individual styles and contributions.
They also had a really cool spot in this part (where we were allowed to take a few photos) where you could make your own storyboard or flip book! Of course we took part and enjoyed the activity.
After the special exhibit we headed back over to the main museum! It opened with a few highlights – Walt’s Oscars (including the seven little ones he got for Snow White):
And a recreation and photos of his Disneyland apartment:
It was so cool to see this since I had gotten to go inside the apartment earlier this year on the Walk in Walt’s Footsteps tour at Disneyland!
After stepping inside the museum started at the very beginning, from Walt’s childhood. It was cool to see stuff about his early life. It then went into his start in film industry and there were a lot of cool artifacts, photos, and diagrams. I highly recommend watching the vlog for this part to get a feel for what the museum was like – it was a very intimate look at Walt’s life and I actually learned a lot.
There was a lot of stuff about Walt’s move to California and getting his start in Hollywood.
This was incredible – a whole room of animation panels for Steamboat Willie:
There was SO much information about everything you could think of related to Walt, and tons of cool memorabilia:
I love this bit about Walt and Mickey:
This was super cool and aesthetically pleasing – the various paint colors used by animators when designing the characters:
There was also a LOT about Snow White, of course:
In this area they also had a multiplane camera on display, which is a special type of camera developed to create depth in 2D animation. It uses different panels with transparent parts and was used on multiple Disney movies starting with Snow White and ending with The Little Mermaid. It’s an awesome innovation and it was so cool to see it in person, especially since only 3 of these cameras used by Disney still exist in the world! It continues down into the gift shop (it’s multiple stories tall!) and you can see it at 6:31 in the vlog, but I also have some photos later in this post.
There was a beautiful room we went through that showed lots of concept art, models, and designs for all the old school Disney movies. It was hard to get photos but you can see it at about 6:43 in the vlog.
About halfway through it opened up to these floor to ceiling windows, with the most beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge:
At the end of the hallway was also one of the original benches from Griffith Park, where Walt thought of the idea for Disneyland – there’s another one of these at Disneyland Park but it’s roped off so you can’t sit on it like this one.
The next room was AMAZING. The whole place opened up into this HUGE room, and it was all about Disneyland!!
I love that quote about Disneyland being like a piece of clay – something to keep in mind when they change things in the park that we don’t necessarily agree with!!
One of my favorite parts of the whole museum was the model of Disneyland:
It was MASSIVE and took up most of the room. It showed every little part of Disneyland and you could see all the different rides and ideas… it was truly stunning.
I don’t think the photos really show the full scope of how incredible this was! You can see it in the vlog starting at about 8:10 to really get an idea of the size and how awesome it is.
I could’ve stood there looking at it all day!
In this room to go along with the history of Disneyland and attractions they also had a lot of cool things about the 1964 World’s Fair:
As well as an original Autopia car:
This was definitely my favorite room!
Moving forward they dug deeper into a lot of classic attractions and technological advances that Walt helped create. One of those is audio animatronics! To demonstrate them there was AN ACTUAL TIKI ROOM BIRD ANIMATRONIC!!! You could control all the movements and make him puff his chest, open his mouth – it was amazing, truly:
This is the kind of thing that makes me LOVE the fact that we vlogged this trip because it’s something that translates so much better on video than in photos. You can see us controlling the bird starting at 9:25 in the vlog!
Also after the Disneyland section was a lot more info about similar projects and things done for Disney Parks, including some panels about our beloved Florida Project!
As we neared the end of the exhibits, it finished up with a very sad room about Walt’s death. It had lots of illustrations and articles that were shared after he died and it was very somber and sad!
And then we were at the end of the museum! It ended with a cute gift shop and like I said before, the rest of the multiplane camera continued down here:
It was so cool to see it even more up close!
The gift shop was cute and had lots of really neat Disney historical items and other cool pieces of merchandise. We didn’t end up buying anything but we were definitely tempted, especially by some of books!
Overall, all three of us absolutely LOVED the Walt Disney Family Museum. It was a really awesome look into Walt’s story, including his shortcomings and challenges he faced. It’s really interesting to note that the museum is actually not run by the Disney company – rather, it’s funded and operated by the Disney family, as the name suggests. In my opinion this gave it a very different vibe than other things produced by the company itself. The whole place was just a really cool look at his life, both as Walt Disney, the entertainer, and Walt Disney, the person. We were able to get through the whole place in a little under 4 hours but I know some people spend even more time there. If you’re a Disney fan that happens to be in San Francisco, put this on your list of must-dos!
After we left the museum we had one more thing on the itinerary before our lunch in the beautiful Presidio. Our next stop was a small one but it was close to the museum (we walked there in about 15 minutes) so we decided to pop over and check out…
The Yoda Fountain!
This is literally exactly what it sounds like – a fountain of Jedi master Yoda.
I first read about this on a blog post about traveling in California while doing research for our trip. The fountain is simple and cool by itself, but what makes it even cooler is that the building right behind it is some kind of office for Lucasfilm! AND you can go inside the lobby and look around! We popped in quickly for a look which you can see on the vlog starting at about 14:20:
It was awesome and full of tons of Star Wars memorabilia – but of course it’s also a working office, so we were careful to be quiet and respectful.
This was a quick little stop as we weren’t there more than 5 minutes or so, but we were all happy to have stopped inside because it was really cool!
By now though, we were also all extremely hungry so it was lunch time! We had picked a cute little place for lunch that was also walking distance from everything, called the Presidio Social Club. For our meal we decided to split this cute appetizer of grilled cheese toasts with tomato soup (an old favorite of the group):
And we didn’t intend to do this again but we all ended up getting the same thing! This was becoming a trend. We all ordered this delightful mac & cheese:
It was so good! Our lunch was a great stopping point before our next destination which we were all so excited about. We called a Lyft to come pick us up because this one was NOT walking distance! It was time for us to head to the most iconic sight in San Francisco: the Golden Gate Bridge!
We got dropped off right next to the “visitor center” (which was just a gift shop) and headed out to find a good photo spot. There was really a sense of solidarity between all the tourists taking photos for each other – it was quite cute haha. We found a spot that was nice, but crowded and pretty windy, so it was hard to get really nice pictures without our hair blowing:
So we moved down a little farther down the walking path and found a MUCH better spot. We threw our bags in a tree and started taking photos… literally:
And it paid off for us to move because we got SUCH great photos!
Thank you Portrait Mode!
Once we had our fill of photos there, we headed back up toward the bridge itself, where Sarah and I convinced Ana to walk over despite her fear of heights! We walked for a few minutes on the actual bridge and it was super cool to see the whole city from that view.
It was SUCH a beautiful day and our Lyft driver told us it was actually a great day to come because the skies were so clear! He said normally it can get really foggy, to the point where you can’t even see the bridge in the background of photos…so we were very glad to have gotten a lucky day!
After checking out the gift shop and surrounding area it was actually already time to head to our next MEAL where we were having dim sum for dinner! I know it feels like we just ate, but we actually spent a lot of time at the bridge and it was important that we got to dinner early, because we were going to a very popular restaurant that research told us normally fills up quickly. Our next stop was the adorable Dumpling Time!
According to reviews, Dumpling Time has been so popular since its recent opening that there are regularly lines out the door as soon as it opens for dinner each night! We decided to rope drop it and got there about a half hour before its opening…and there was still a group ahead of us! Luckily when they opened the door at 5pm we were second in line and by the time we got inside we were hungry again.
So a little note about dim sum – I had dim sum with my family on my first trip to California and I absolutely HATED it. I also cried because I didn’t wanna eat it. Keep in mind I was 10 at this time so my palate and tastes were not as refined as they are now. So we joked that hopefully I wouldn’t cry this time we ate dim sum haha
We got inside and had a look at the extensive menu (click the photo to see larger):
The idea is that each dish comes with a few servings, so you get a bunch of different things and then everyone at the table can share and split the bill at the end. So many things sounded great! Here’s what we started with:
Shrimp toast – this one was delicious! They had pieces of shrimp on top and within and a really delicious sauce on top.
Open faced shrimp and pork dumplings – pretty good as well, and a good one for us to start with:
Pork bao – these were some of my favorites! They’re so fluffy and fun to eat.
And chicken gyoza – this was Sarah’s favorite! It’s like a crispy fried dumpling…so good.
We loved everything so we ordered more! Here’s some shrimp dumplings with rice wrappers, which were actually my least favorite because they were hard to eat… the shrimps kept slipping out of the wrappers! They were Ana’s favorite. And then in the back just some spring rolls:
Finally for dessert we had my favorite of all of them, some egg yolk buns!
Again these were really fluffy and filled with a delicious custard-like eggy inside! I loved them the most. Dim sum this time was a hit and thankfully there was no crying!!
After dinner we had planned to make one more stop which was to a cute little Japanese bakery in Japantown, so we called an Uber and much to our delight the driver had a DOG!!!!
Meeting this sweet pup was almost enough to take away the sting when we got to Japantown and found that the bakery we wanted to go to was CLOSED!! Normally we are so good about planning things and taking note of open and closing times so we were really surprised to have slipped up about it haha. But we took it in stride and just walked around for a bit before heading back to our hotel. Even expert planners make mistakes sometimes 😉
Once we got back to our hotel we were so worn out from our day of adventuring that we decided to call it an early night and get some rest! We settled in and hung out for a while before turning in for the evening and getting sleep for our activities the next day 🙂
Our first day in the city was a success I’d say! The Walt Disney Family Museum was really a highlight and something we were all really looking forward to, and of course the Golden Gate Bridge was beautiful. And all the food we ate on this day was so fantastic! It was such a good day and we still had so much more ahead of us. I hope that you enjoyed this post and the vlog. If you did and want to stay updated for my future ones, I’d love if you’d subscribe to my youtube channel or follow my blog by entering your email on the sidebar! Thanks so much for reading and watching as always!
xo
