Some friends and I were sitting amid an improbably lush rooftop garden in London Terrace when the host said he had contemplated moving from Texas to San Francisco before settling in Manhattan. It was the most benevolent of late summer evenings in New York and yet the conversation turned to a wistful retelling of trips to that golden city by the Pacific.

It is not just that it is unoriginal to love San Francisco, but that there is so much with which to be besotted. Adopt a sequential approach to discovering San Francisco, however, and the place seems more manageable. On one trip you wonder at how easy it is to get away – just a couple of hours after a long flight, and the red Beetle you are in is doing lazy figure of eights above the Pacific on the road towards Big Sur.