Day 10 - San Francisco Sightseeing

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Day 10 San Francisco sightseeing, Distance Travelled - about 15 miles in cabs, trains and on foot!

Woke up late to the welcome sight of sun and no sea mist so views were spectacular and it was 'relatively' warm compared to our arrival.

After a quick shower in the excellent site facilities we called a cab and headed for the BART station at Colma again. This time we were prepared for the ticket machine and got the right platform and within 30 mins we were standing outside Embarcadero station, close to the waterfront. We had missed the early morning massive fun run (I guess the equivalent of the Great North Run or London Marathon) but there were still a few stragglers on the route being followed patiently by the clean up crews and bollard collection vans.

We choose to walk the waterfront road from Pier 1 round to pier 39 as it was such a lovely day. In their day the massive piers ( or docks) would have been the main route in for people and goods to SF but these days they host pleasure cruises, tug boats, cruise ships and entertainment venues. Pier 39 is the main entertainment area and is packed with shops, restaurants and great views of the bay. It also has its own resident California sea lion population dozing on the boat docks at its side. We ate lunch on the pier at the Pier Market seafood restaurant, luckily for me they do chicken and steak but Sharan cracked open a couple of crabs with a nutcracker in a way and with such venom that it brought tears to my eyes.

After lunch we headed back to pier 33 for the Alcatraz tour departure. Luckily we had booked in advance on the net as today they had signs everywhere saying they had no availability for the next 3 days but we were able to walk straight in to our shiny 'hybrid, Eco friendly' ferry.

The trip to Alcatraz is only about 10 minutes and you land in the same dock that prisoners used to arrive in 50-60 years ago. After a briefing on the pier from one of the park rangers you climb up some fairly steep slopes to the main jailhouse area where you pick up your audio tour headset.

The audio tour is narrated by ex guards and ex convicts and takes you on a prescribed path through the whole facility. I found it fascinating and you could really imaging what a dark, bleak place this was with up to 200 of the countries worst prisoners housed at any one time. The quote above the door said something like "if you break the laws, you go to prison, if you break the prisons laws, you go to Alcatraz!'

I was surprised to see that all the prisoners were housed in effectively one huge block with 3 'streets' of cells, 3 floors high. There was a small library, dining room and exercise yard but that was it. The cells were tiny and you were able to sit/stand in some and have photos taken, Sharan wouldn't fall for the old trick of being locked in one!. You could also see the solitary confinement cells, hospital cells and the three cells from which the real guys featured in 'escape from Alcatraz' film escaped from, complete with the chiselled out air vents and pictures of the dummy heads they left behind in their beds.

You also got to see the guards quarters and Inwas surprised to see they also lived on the island with their families and kids! We saw the visiting room where the visitors talked through a hole in the wall to the prisoners who were on the other side of the wall in the corridor just outside their cells...they never left the block, even for that. It was a fascinating trip and highly recommended.

On our return to the mainland we picked up one of the hop on/hop off open top buses that tour the city. It actually does a 2 hour tour of all the main atrractions but our sole destination was the Golden Gate bridge for today but we had a two day ticket to see more of the city tomorrow. By now the sky had clouded over and it had become quite cold...the open top bus didn't offer a lot of protection from the weather so some of us (no names) missed most of the sights as they sheltered downstairs. By the time we got to the very windy bridge lookout site it was bloody freezing and even the hoodies we had brought were no protection so after some very quick pics we waited in the gift shop window till the next bus turned up.

We returned into town on the open top bus (sitting downstairs) and headed for the 'North Beach' area, also known as little Italy, passing by some of the sites on the bus that we will return to visit tomorrow. By chance the bus dropped us outside a very nice, large Italian restaurant called the Rose Pistola on Columbus Avenue. It was warm, with a live jazz band, bar, sold Peroni and had the San Francisco 49ers game playing on TV...what more could you ask for? .so we headed inside and thawed out at the bar and then not wanting to suffer any more frostbite, headed for a table. Once again the food was very good although pasta dishes were quite small, but that just left room for a big chocolate desert so it wasn't all bad.... Triple gym sessions when I get back!

Armed with directions on how to get back to the station from our waitress we headed out into the night on foot and were very surprised to see just how quiet the streets were in this area at 10p.m. Earlier on the bus tour we had a number of film locations pointed out to us...Streets of San Francisco, Bullit car chase scenes, the towering inferno building, the diner from American graffit etc. etc. and one of the sites was where Will Smith filmed scenes from the Pursuit of Happiness. The homeless hostel and surrounding areas are very much as in the film, packed with people sleeping and queueing for a bed for the night and I continue to be surprised at just how many people are sleeping rough on the streets here. The tour guide suggested it was still the 'hippy spirit' living on but I'm not so sure...

After a lot of walking we seemed to be no closer to the station so we finally got hold of the cab and jumped in. It was driven by a very nice young guy who hardly spoke any English (he was from Turkmenistan!) and I wouldnt really be surprised if he didn't even know he was in San Francisco...he had never heard of the district, let alone the road we needed to go to and when I told him it was just off US 1 ( the equivalent of the M1 in the UK) he told me there was no such road in San Francisco! (it's only a small 8 lane highway, easy to miss!). In the end, rather than find another cab, I switched on data roaming on my phone and provided him with a sat nav to get back to the RV park. When we pulled in, I think he thought we were in a lorry park....he couldn't believe that we lived in these big white vans and that they even came with beds or a toilet...at one point he looked like he felt sorry for us and was going to take us to a hotel...it was a bit like being driven by Borat! Having convinced him that we weren't living in a lorry, he went off into the night...in the wrong direction, so we'll probably catch up with him in LA in a weeks time.

Great day in San Francisco today, I don't think there's much else 'touristy' we can do after tomorrow, but the bits we have seen have been good...

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