Oakland

We came to the Bay Area to see San Francisco and ended up sleeping, eating, and lingering in Oakland — and by the end I was quietly convinced we’d chosen the better city. Our first morning we walked out to Lake Merritt, the tidal lagoon that sits improbably in the middle of downtown, and found half the city already circling it: joggers, drummers, a man doing tai chi, families spreading out blankets. The whole place had a Sunday-in-the-park feeling on a Tuesday. Oakland, we learned fast, knows how to simply enjoy itself.

Lake Merritt and the Grand Lake

The lake became our anchor. It’s a three-mile loop, strung at night with a “necklace of lights” that reflects off the black water, and we walked it more than once just to feel the pulse of the neighborhoods around it. On the eastern side, the Grand Lake district gave us a splendid old movie palace, a farmers market that sprawled under the freeway, and a bakery where we queued twenty minutes for pastries and regretted nothing.

At the boathouse we watched people take out little sailboats and pedal boats, gulls wheeling over them, the downtown towers catching the last of the light. Lia said the lake felt like the city’s living room, and that’s exactly it — a shared space with no pretension at all.

Murals and the Uptown Streets

Oakland’s walls talk. We spent an afternoon simply wandering Uptown and the surrounding blocks, where enormous murals climb entire buildings — portraits, jazz musicians, tributes to the neighborhood’s activists and dreamers. The city has one of the richest street-art cultures I’ve seen, born partly of struggle and worn as a badge of pride.

We ducked into an old theater district full of restored Art Deco marquees, then ate our way through a few blocks — Ethiopian injera, then a Vietnamese sandwich, then ice cream — because Oakland’s food is genuinely one of the best reasons to come. Nothing here is trying to impress a critic; it’s just cooking done right for the people who live here.

Redwoods in the Hills

What almost no one tells you about Oakland is that you can walk among old coast redwoods without leaving the city. We drove up into the hills to Redwood Regional Park, and within minutes the traffic noise vanished into a cool, ferny corridor of towering trees. It’s hard to believe such a hush sits so close to the freeways below.

We climbed to a ridge and got the reward the hills always give — the whole bay laid out below, San Francisco small and pale across the water, the Golden Gate faint in the haze. Standing there, sweaty and happy, with redwoods behind us and the whole bay in front, I understood Oakland’s confidence. It has nothing to prove.

Getting There

Oakland sits directly across the bay from San Francisco, linked by the Bay Bridge and, more usefully, by BART, the regional rail system that whisks you between the two cities in about fifteen minutes. Oakland International Airport is often cheaper and less hectic than San Francisco’s, with BART running right to it. From downtown, most neighborhoods around Lake Merritt are walkable, and BART reaches the main districts, but a car helps for the redwood parks up in the hills. Traffic on the bridges can be fierce at rush hour — the train almost always wins.