Our hotel was a few blocks to the north of Market Street, on the boundary between Chinatown and the originally Italian area of North Beach, where the CBD’s concrete monoliths gave way to more traditional Victorian tenements and terraces. The snappily-named Hotel North Beach was a grand old dame in the midst of a transformation into a slicker, more modern form, but some remaining period features like a wooden telephone booth and an old, boarded-up reception office on the first floor landing gave it an offhandedly noirish feel. The lack of an en suite in our room dated it in a less endearing way but still, it was a reasonable enough place for a few days. I entertained notions of the place in its interwar heyday, its poky rooms home to Chandleresque dupes and femmes fatales stealing furtive visits to the communal bathrooms as the footsteps of the house detective disappeared around the corner.

But I digress.

For the rest of that first day and night after we’d checked in we pottered aimlessly around the city centre, expecting that we’d stumble on some quintessential SF tourist attraction that we’d recognise instantly. The odd thing was that we failed to see anything familiar at all, and I’m still not sure whether this was just our ignorance or whether it’s something more intrinsic to the city itself. Yes, there are a few iconic, self-contained edifices like Alcatraz or the Golden Gate Bridge which are intimately associated with the place, but I can’t help but think that the city’s real attractions are more nebulous: entire neighbourhoods like Haight-Ashbury, Nob Hill or Pacific Heights, or even just the geography of the place, the steep, narrow streets of Bullitt and Vertigo. Market Street and the city centre in general are sadly a little anonymous because of this. Grand, but bland.

In the event, we grabbed an enormous slice of pizza and a pint of foamy lager in a little pizzeria at the edge of the CBD and perched on stools by the open window, watching the last few office workers head home out of the city. At a loss for anything obvious to do, we pottered around randomly and eventually came to rest in a cinema to watch District 9 and had an early night.

The next day I was a little more enthused, having spent a bit of time in the morning reading up on some of those tourist attractions we’d singularly failed to find the day before. Ash wanted to do some shopping so when she headed south for Market Street I walked north to the Coit Tower, a monument to San Francisco’s firefighters up on Telegraph Hill, then over to Lombard Street to take a few pictures. The top of the street’s zig-zag section was packed with tourists perched precariously on walls and railings, trying to get a good photo, and coincided with a cable car stop which brought more people every few minutes. Rental cars carrying still more sightseers formed a solid procession down the street itself, edging gingerly down through the sharp bends, and the whole thing was dangerously close to a critical mass of cliché. I half expected us all to spontaneously combust in a messy tourist explosion.

Walking back to meet up with Ash I stumbled on the small but perfectly formed Cable Car Museum, and we set off together to see if we could get on a tour out to Alcatraz that afternoon.

We could not.

Today was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend and each and every one of the half-hourly tours was booked solid until Monday. Put out, we walked up along the quayside Fisherman’s Wharf instead, a row of piers which had achieved tourism enlightenment: whatever they had once been famous for, there was absolutely no trace of it left; instead, it was occupied entirely by things like Disney stores and coffee carts. The only indications that it might once have been renowned for its fishing trade was the preponderance of seafood restaurants and the fact that it happened to be right on the bay.

Happily, we found a cheap-ass water taxi tour which took us all around the piers of Fisherman’s Wharf for something like four bucks each. (It reminded me of taking a €1.30 commuter gondola across the Grand Canal, where the gondoliers roll their eyes in exasperation when half of their passengers turn round and take the same gondola straight back to the other side, just so they — and by ‘they’ I mean ‘we’ — can tick it off their Venetian to do list.) The little boat puttered out towards Alcatraz, then edged slowly round the pontoons of Pier 39 where the sea lions congregate in a smelly, honking mass, and finally dropped us off right back where we started. We grabbed a couple of overpriced drinks on the balcony of one of the innumerable seafood restaurants and watched the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge. The day had been successfully turned around.

The next day Ash wanted to visit Haight-Ashbury, a bus ride away to the southwest. It was filled with vintage clothes shops and ‘smoking’ emporiums hawking bongs, figurines of reefer-smoking aliens, and bongs shaped like reefer-smoking aliens. It was all a bit tawdry, and was one of the first places we’d come across other than the deep, dark woods of backcountry Oregon where I felt just a little unsafe. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but there was an undercurrent of poverty and edginess (and not the good kind) which made me a bit jumpy.

We called it a day after an hour or so and took the bus back to the hotel. Sitting in the room, we debated what to do: neither of us was particularly entranced by San Francisco thus far and we had nothing more exciting planned for that evening, and after humming and hawing for a while we decided to leave that day. From all I’ve heard people say about it, SF is a great place to live in but the few touristy days we spent exploring it weren’t enough to keep us there for another. We checked out, picked up the car and headed south on the 101 through a grey, misty afternoon. The cloud eventually cleared, and we drove on under a wedge of blue sky which crept up from the horizon until we caught the tail end of a sunny evening. It was good to be moving again.

* See, I couldn’t even muster a marginally witty title. That’s how little I know about SF.