Lots of fun attractions in SF's Golden Gate Park

Music Concourse; the 1017-acre park is similar in shape to, but 20% larger than, Central Park in NYC; with 24+ million visitors annually, the park is the third most-visited city park in the US after Central Park and the Lincoln Memorial

The 3-acre Japanese Tea Garden is the oldest public Japanese garden in the country (1894); ironically the first Chinese fortune cookies were served here at the Japanese Tea Garden in the 1890s

Bison have been kept in the park since 1891 when a small herd was brought here in an effort to breed them; in 1984, Mayor Dianne Feinstein's husband purchased a new herd as a birthday present for her (the older bison today are descendants of this herd)

My mom and I drove to the West Coast and visited the Conservatory of Flowers in the summer of 1985; that road trip marked my first visits to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, LA and San Francisco

The Dutch Windmill, completed in 1903, is one of the largest in the world and was designed to pump water to irrigate the park; I had been told there were lots of homeless living in the park but, despite lots of time here, I never saw any

De Young Art Museum; there was separate admission charged at each venue in the park - the Japanese Tea Garden, Conservatory of Flowers, SF Botanical Garden, De Young Museum, CA Academy of Science as well as parking fees

The park opened in 1870 on what had largely been sand dunes; by 1879, 155,000+ eucalyptus, Monterey pine and Monterey cypress trees had been planted

The SkyStar Observation Wheel rises 150 ft and was Installed in 2020 as part of Golden Gate Park’s 150th anniversary celebration; mostly closed to traffic, the park was popular with cyclists, runners and walkers looking to escape the city congestion

Lloyd Lake; after the 1906 earthquake, the park was used by the US Army as a site for tent encampments to house the thousands left homeless; many areas of the park are closed to traffic so there was lots of walking required

The Drum Bridge at the Japanese Tea Garden is thus named because when reflected on the water, the full circle shape it creates resembles a drum; they were designed to slow people down and let barges in too

Congress and the President approved the National AIDS Memorial Grove Act in 1996, which officially set aside the de Laveaga Dell land in Golden Gate Park as the site for the first AIDS memorial in the nation

The Conservatory of Flowers was one of the first municipal conservatories constructed in the US and is the oldest remaining municipal wooden conservatory in the country

There's a nice rose garden but nothing was blooming in October; 100,000+ young people converged in the park in 1967 for the Summer of Love with Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and George Harrison all playing free shows

October was not the ideal month to visit the San Francisco Botanical Garden; founded in 1937, the 55-acre arboretum is known for its magnolia species, high elevation palms, conifers, and cloud forest species from Central America, South America and SE Asia

The Conservatory of Flowers was small but had interesting species like this slipper orchid; the conservatory was completed in 1879 and is the oldest building in the park (I can remember visiting here in 1990)

I remember playing tennis tournaments here starting in the 1980s; the facilities have all changed since then and there were even people playing pickleball

If you didn't have time to visit Muir Woods, the San Francisco Botanical Garden has a nice grove of redwoods; the park is often used as a staging site for large events including the several SF Marathons that I ran

The CA Academy of Science has a 2.5-acre living roof with 1.7+ million native plants; the soil of the roof is 6 in deep, which reduces storm water runoff by more than 90% and naturally cools the interior reducing the need for AC