Super Frisco!

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I must start this blog with a message to my lovely brother-in-law John: you simply have to bring my sister here. She will adore it. I am writing this just a few short minutes after sailing back out and under the Golden Gate Bridge and I have definitely left, at least a part of, my heart in San Francisco. Everyone had told us we would be cold here but this was a perfect day: around 60 degrees, not a cloud to be seen, bright warm sunshine all day long. In fact it was so nice we left our jackets on the ship. Mind you, getting off the ship was a bit of a faff today. US Customs insist that every single person on board has to go through immigration and they tell you that for days in advance. But about 9 Americans on board just assumed that law didn't apply to them. It did. Very much so. So 9 people delayed over 3000 people by nearly an hour. The tannoy messages were getting rather more clipped until in the end they broke the unwritten rule and gave the cabin numbers out. That seemed to do the trick. Public humiliation is obviously a very effective technique of last resort!

But get off we did and we headed straight for a wonderfully clackety old open topped bus and went on a marvellous 2-hour tour of the city. And fell in love. The architecture, especially in the historical district, is so beautiful. We went up and on to the Golden Gate Bridge. We went up and down the very hilly streets. We saw where the rich and the poor live. We saw the fancy glass sky scrapers and the perfect clap board houses. It was just brilliant. All of it.

After that we headed for the very buzzy area of Pier 39 and found a great sports bar where we indulged ourselves with the most chocolatey of chocolate milk shakes and a bison burger. In the UK we might get one sport on the TV of whatever bar we've chosen but here, every screen showed something different: baseball, basketball, karate, ice hockey, American football. And the laws are very different here so dads would be in with their very young kids and it felt really good. And, of course, the service was fantastic.

But we were still only half way through the day so we did a bit of a ride on one of the wonderfuly trolley buses. Walked a bit to the cable car station. Took one look at the queue and decided not to bother. It was one of those Disney queues where they fool you into thinking you're getting close when you're actually not. So we wandered back along the waterfront and found that other Frisco phenomenom: the group of wild sea lions who have set up home on one of the piers. They look great out on a rocky crag like we saw in Mexico. But here there were lots of them (I counted well over 100) and they're really close to you. So you get the complete experience and that involves the stench! Oh my goodness. For animals who live in water, you might think they'd smell OK but boy do they hum. We just took a few photos and moved on fast!

And we moved on to a boat - after all we'd been off boats for about 5 or 6 hours by this time! The trip we made took us out to the Golden Gate Bridge again which we sailed under and then did a circuit around Alcatraz island. It really is a mean and moody looking place with a mile and a half of freezing Pacific water between it and freedom. Only 3 prisoners ever escaped and as they were never seen again, they don't know for sure if they drowned in the bay or actually made it to freedom.

Then we took one of the Cunard trips to do a night-time tour of the city which included a walking tour through China Town. This is a big area of the city and we made a stop at the last factory in America where they still make fortune cookies by hand. We also made a call to a tea shop and tried a delicious spiced hibiscus tea. And finally we drove out to the Bay Bridge. This is one of those old fashioned 2-tier bridges so we drove out on the lower level and back on the top one. There are a couple of islands half way along the bridge so we made a stop there for a really lovely view of the city.

And now we're back on board and have finally kicked off our shoes in our lovely stateroom. It really is beginning to feel like home. We'll need to dig deep though tomorrow morning if we are to maintain our gym regime. We certainly gave playing tourist a lot of gusto today. And it was a lot of fun.

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