Riding GoCars in San Francisco

Last summer I had the opportunity to spend a week with my friend Mary in California.

We did it all! We rented a convertible, started in San Francisco and drove down to LA. We hiked, did a wine tasting tour in Napa and Sonoma, drove down Highway 1, went to some fancy dinners, went on a hummer tour of Catalina Island and so much more.

This was to celebrate our 40th birthdays which are 2 weeks apart. So I planned some things for her and she planned some things for me. One activity that Mary planned for me was a day of GoCars.

Not, go karts, but GoCars. They’re basically little trike motorcycles with seats that you drive through a city and it gives you GPS directions and an automated tour. Now, I know this may shock you with videos like my 12 foot cliff jump in Vermont out on the interwebs, but I’m a big scaredy cat with big anxieties. I have to really psych myself up for anything remotely exciting. And driving around on the hills of San Francisco for a day on a motorcycle trike that’s only 2 feet off the ground definitely qualified!

But when I tell you it’s one of my favorite things we did… I mean it. It was so fun.

Was I terrified? Absolutely. Was Mary really sorry at first thinking she’d booked something that was miserable for me? Yes. But as I got more comfortable it just got better and better. I still did it scared, as with most things in my life, but when I look back? I loved it and want to do it again in every city they offer it. I had such a great time.

She got a great deal on an 8 hour day so we didn’t have to worry about not seeing the whole city. There are two routes that you can take and we had enough time for both. You can stop and park up anytime to see and do things. We therefore had lunch, stopped at the original Ghirardelli Store, “saw” the Golden Gate Bridge and much more.

We started with the shorter blue loop and then went back and completed the red loop after returning to the GoCar garage to gas up!

You can’t go wrong on the GoCars, but you’re supposed to try and stay on the route since it’s not really designed for all of San Francisco’s huge hills. They show you a safety video and kind of put the fear into you about staying on the route if you can so that you don’t end up in trouble on the hills. That being said, we even drove down the curviest street in San Francisco – Lombard Street – without any issues.

Here’s a short video of what it’s like in a GoCar in San Franciso.

Part of the fun was being able to stop. We found a few great little spots and Mary is a master at finding free parking, so we pushed our little GoCar into the spaces and wandered first around Ghirardelli Square and then we went for a walk up to the Golden Gate Bridge.

As you can see, the weather wasn’t on our side – we didn’t know about “Fogust” and the summer fog that descends on San Francisco in July and August each year. But we made the most of our time and were determined to “see” as much as we could.

If you can spare the expense, or find a great deal like Mary did ($273 for the day), then it’s totally worth doing a GoCar for a day around San Francisco. You can definitely still enjoy it for only a few hours, but we loved the flexibility of being able to go all over and have time to get out and explore. Overall, I highly recommend the GoCar experience and can’t wait to go again. So thanks to you, Mary, for giving me the adventure of a lifetime while we were in San Francisco – it was a highlight for me!