Nothing about San Francisco works better on foot than any other way of getting around, and its steepest, densest neighborhoods reward exactly the kind of slow wandering a car or bus can’t manage. Chinatown is the obvious starting point. Enter through the Dragon Gate at Grant Avenue and Bush Street, then work your way through Waverly Place (the “Street of Painted Balconies,” home to the Tianhou Temple, founded 1852) and Stockton Street’s wet markets, where live seafood and medicinal herbs are sold out of the same storefronts they’ve occupied for decades.

San Francisco crams an absurd number of postcard views into 49 square miles, and the fun part is that almost none of them require a ticket, just the right time of day. Start with the Golden Gate Bridge itself. Walking or cycling across is free in both directions, sunrise to sunset on the pedestrian side, even though the vehicle toll runs $10.25 to $10.50 southbound only. Go early morning or late afternoon for fewer crowds and better light, and expect it to be noticeably colder and windier here than anywhere three miles inland; summer highs at the bridge often sit around 55°F.

Discover Los Angeles on Foot LA is a driving city, but that’s exactly why its walkable pockets punch above their weight: pick the right neighborhood and you can cover a genuine slice of the city without ever touching a freeway. Here are four routes that each stay inside one walkable bubble. Downtown: Historic Core to Bunker Hill (2.5 miles) Start at Union Station’s 1939 Mission Moderne hall, cross to Olvera Street, walk Broadway down to Grand Central Market, then across to the Bradbury Building’s free sky-lit atrium.

The best romantic evenings in San Francisco happen at the edges: fog lifting off a hilltop, lights coming on across the bay, a small table tucked away from the crowds at Fisherman’s Wharf. Build a couple of days around a handful of these and you’ll have something the postcards can’t quite capture. Start with sunset on the water. Adventure Cat’s catamaran sunset sails depart Pier 39 or the Marina and run past Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate Bridge as the city lights come up, generally $65 to $85 a person for a 90-minute sail.

Sightseeing in Los Angeles An Art Deco observatory, a hilltop modernist campus, and a Peter Zumthor-designed art museum that only opened its doors this spring: LA’s headline sights change faster than most cities’ postcards, so check the numbers before you build a day around them. Griffith Observatory Free to enter, free to explore, with lawn telescopes and Tesla coil demos included. Planetarium shows run $12 for adults, $8 for kids 5 to 12, sold same-day only at on-site kiosks.

Romantic Getaways in Los Angeles A $1 bench seat at the Hollywood Bowl with a bottle of wine you brought yourself beats most $300 dinners in this city, and that’s before you’ve even hiked down to a sea cave at sunset. LA does romance quietly and specifically rather than with a single obvious “date spot,” so it rewards a little planning. Hollywood Bowl summer concerts Under Gustavo Dudamel, the LA Philharmonic plays this 17,500-seat hillside amphitheater every summer, June through September.

Give San Francisco more than a couple of days and it stops being a checklist trip and starts letting you build in a real regional loop. Five days is the sweet spot: enough time in the city itself, plus a couple of nights outside it. Spend the first two days in the city proper. Book Alcatraz early, since Alcatraz City Cruises sells out 3 to 6 weeks ahead in summer; the Day Tour runs $47.

Multi-Day Trips in Los Angeles LA punishes itineraries that hop between neighborhoods at random. It rewards the ones that group by geography and let one part of the basin fill an entire day. Here are three circuits built that way, one urban, one film-industry, one desert. Circuit 1: Coastal and urban, 3 days Day 1 stays in Downtown: Union Station’s Mission Moderne hall, lunch at Grand Central Market, a $1 ride up Bunker Hill on Angels Flight, then The Broad and Walt Disney Concert Hall, both free to enter.

Family Friendly Activities in Los Angeles Exposition Park alone can fill a full day with kids and it won’t cost you a dime to get in the door, before you’ve even touched a theme park ticket. Stack that with a Long Beach aquarium and a marionette theater that still hands out free ice cream, and LA’s family lineup holds up against anywhere in the country. Exposition Park: two free museums, side by side The California Science Center’s permanent galleries, World of Ecology, Creative World, and Air and Space, are 100% free with no ticket needed, and IMAX documentaries run $9.

Kids burn through San Francisco fast, and the good news is the city is built for it: short distances between big payoffs, plenty of free stuff to bail out to when the budget’s tapped, and almost nothing here that needs advance planning beyond picking your day. Start at the Exploratorium on Pier 15 , which is still the gold standard for hands-on science: over 650 exhibits covering light, sound, and optical illusions, plus the pitch-black Tactile Dome for an extra fee.

Day Trips in Los Angeles Get out of the basin and Southern California turns into four completely different landscapes within a couple of hours: a Mediterranean-feeling island, a wine-town coast, a mid-century desert resort, and a national park full of boulders. Pick a mode of transport as much as a destination, because two of these are genuinely easier without a car. Catalina Island, 60 minutes by catamaran Catalina Express runs high-speed catamarans to Avalon from both Downtown Long Beach and San Pedro, a one-hour crossing each way.

The Bay Area rewards anyone willing to rent a car for a day, and the payoff is huge: redwoods, wine country, and a rugged coastline all sit within about 90 minutes of the city. A real day trip means leaving San Francisco behind, so skip anything the guidebooks list that’s actually still inside the city limits. Muir Woods tops the list, and it’s also the one trip where a missed detail can wreck your morning.

Los Angeles Attraction Tours Four working studios in the LA basin let you onto the actual lot, not a themed replica, and they’re wildly different experiences depending on how many hours you have and how old the group is. Sort out the studio tours first, because getting the wrong one for your kids is the single most common attraction-tour mistake in this city. Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood (Burbank) The full Warner Bros.

Activities in Los Angeles Pedal an illuminated swan boat across Echo Park Lake at night, ride the shortest railway in the world up Bunker Hill, and watch a 60-year-old ice cream tradition close out a marionette show. LA’s best activities aren’t the theme parks, they’re the small, specific, slightly odd things scattered across a city that’s actually 88 separate cities stitched together. Grand Central Market, running since 1917 The Historic Core’s Grand Central Market on Broadway has packed 40-plus independent vendors under one roof for over a century.

Grab a jacket, because the fog rolling through the Golden Gate is about to become the star of your first afternoon. San Francisco packs an enormous amount of activity into 49 square miles, and the trick is figuring out which experiences are worth queuing for and which ones you can walk straight into for free. Start with the two big-ticket bookings, because both sell out. Alcatraz City Cruises , departing from Pier 33, is the only outfit licensed to run boats to the island; the Day Tour runs $47.