left my heart in san francisco {marin headlands}

Dress: Suno via The RealReal (available in white here!); Sunglasses: Celine

Over the past few weeks, I've gotten a lot of questions about whether or not I'm excited to move (a million times yes!), what I'm looking forward to the most about New York (wandering around Central Park in the spring) and if I'll be able to handle the brutal winters out there (unfortunately, the jury is still out on that one).  

But the most frequently asked question? 

What will I miss most about San Francisco? 

This one usually makes me pause. There's so much I'm going to miss, it's hard to distill my answer into just one reason. We're spoiled with great weather. There's never a shortage of amazing, new restaurants to try out. We're at the heart of Silicon Valley, where crazy, big, outside-the-box ideas are born (and encouraged!). Heck, we're home to these guys. 

Over the past five years, my list has gotten pretty long with reasons as to why I love living in this city. And ultimately, I think I'll end up returning (someday) for a lot of those reasons. But at the end of the day, I'd have to say it's not necessarily the city I'll miss most (although I will miss it dearly), but the ease to which you can escape the city at a moment's notice. Wine country to the north. Highway 1 stretching along it's side, running the great coastline of California. Big Sur. Monterey. Carmel. Tahoe. Yosemite. Muir Woods. All tangibly within reach, tempting you to hit the road on a late Friday afternoon with nothing but a weekender bag and an improperly folded map and get lost for a few days. 

I've confessed my love for Jack Kerouak here on the blog before, and I'll do it again now, because I think this quote of his sums up San Francisco and her wild, beckoning call much better than I ever could:

"It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness of the late afternoon of time."

San Francisco, thanks for letting me enjoy you in all your smoke and goldenness. I'm forever grateful. 

Photos by Anna-Alexia Basile