Hotel Scouting Weekend
Tom and I headed up to San Francisco on Saturday to look at a hotel that had been featured on the radio, and that I had contacted about group rates for all the guests on the wedding weekend. We stayed at the Hotel Mark Twain, on Taylor between O'Farrell and Eddy, around the corner from Glide Memorial Church.O'Farrell, you say? That should have been my first clue. One block further West, and the neighborhood is suddenly more "upscale". One block further North, and things don't look so shady. The hotel itself is very nice, it's been remodeled recently, and I don't feel like our guests would be mugged if they went outside at night, but it's still not the best part of town. We did feel safe walking back to our hotel at 11pm, and it's about 4 blocks from the Powell Cable Car turnaround and BART, and about 3 blocks to Union Square. Very walkable!
Our room was very cute, remodeled since they took the pictures on the website. We had a nice tour of the hotel by Kevin, the Sales Manager, who is offering us rates of $99/night - almost unheard of in downtown San Francisco! So here's my dilemma: find a hotel in a little nicer neighborhood for $25-$50 more per night, or take this one, in a fairly decent although not fancy neighborhood?Tom and I did some scouting around later in the day on Saturday and I have a couple more options I'm inquiring about: the Cartwright Hotel, which is in a nicer part of town but 5 blocks from the cable car line and transit, but only a block off Union Square - rack rates start at $135 so I might be able to get close to $100/night, and the Maxwell Hotel, which is upstairs from Max's On the Square (Mom and Dad and I go there whenever they're in town for a conference) and is 1 block from Union Square and 4 blocks from the cable car and transit - rack rates there start at $127/night. Please let me know what you think! I've made inquiries to the sales manager at those 2 hotels, and I hope to get a room block reserved by the end of February.
Just so you know, we are trying to help our guests reduce their costs by making sure you don't need a car for the weekend. Parking in SF is very very expensive ($30/night on average), and SF is small enough that you don't really need a car to get around to the touristy areas. Our plans for the weekend include a picnic in Golden Gate Park on Saturday afternoon, and there is a city bus that goes from Market & Powell straight to the meadow. Chinatown is within a couple blocks of Union Square, and you can easily get to Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf via the cable car. For the day of the wedding, we are planning on renting a tour bus to shuttle our guests from the hotel to the wedding, and then to the reception in Sausalito and back to the hotel. I don't want anyone who's had "a really good time" at the reception trying to drive back across the Golden Gate Bridge, which has no center divide.
Back to our weekend - Saturday evening we took BART across town to Tom's dad and stepmom's house, where we had dinner with them and Tom's half brother, Connor. It was good to see them and celebrate the engagement - we hadn't seen them since the weekend before we got engaged!
The only really bad part of our weekend was the crank calls. We got called at 3:00, 3:15, and 5:00 am and nobody was on the line. Tom called the front desk but nobody was there, so he left the phone off the hook the rest of the night. We couldn't find the thermostat either, so Tom got really hot and then really cold during the night.
Sunday we slept in, had breakfast at a great little hole-in-the-wall diner next door to the hotel, got our car out of the garage and went to Fisherman's Wharf where we played tourist, went to a couple museums, and had dinner at Pier 39 to celebrate Valentine's Day. I took a couple pics of the sunset with my new camera.
