Let's Go Places: San Francisco part 2 of 3

 

Let's pick it up from where we put it down last time.  It's the weekend, smack in the middle of my California trip, and we're going on a deep dive of San Francisco.  Our weekend journeys will take us to the wharf, prison (calm down, that just means we're doing a tour of Alcatraz), and then we'll find an unexpectedly apt way to tour the city.  We're also going to see if I can figure out how to take a bus.

Saturday morning - let's go to the wharf!

My body stayed on Eastern time for the entire trip, so I continued my streak of waking up between 4 and 5 AM and going to bed between 9 and 10.  That meant that I had a good long stretch each morning to drink coffee and contemplate life before going out into the world.

On Saturday I took a brief stroll out into my neighborhood and dipped into Golden Gate Park for a bit, and took note of how many bus stops there were.  I knew that it was possible to get anywhere for a few dollars, but I wasn't quite ready to give up the security of Lyft yet.  Mid morning I got myself a $25 ride out to the Wharf.

The only scheduled item on my agenda was a tour of Alcatraz, and I had a good bit of time to walk around until then.  There wasn't much to do, but there was a lot to see.

After strolling around for a good while, it was time to circle back.  I made kind of a long stop off at Pier 39, which is where the sea lions hang out. 

I didn't know this until I googled it just now, but the sea lion hangout started after an earthquake in 1989.  In the aftermath a sea lion showed up on the dock and then all of his friends joined him and they've been hanging out there ever since.

Wait, I have a tour to get to.  I pulled myself away from the siren song of sea lion barks and walked to the pier for the Alcatraz tours.  It was crowded but well organized.

We set sail for the island.  The tours start at set times, but once you're on the island you're allowed to stay until the last ferry leaves.

Like I said, I always go into these tours blind so that I can learn in real time.  And learn we did!  

The Alcatraz tour is self guided, but it just so happened that a park ranger was giving a free tour of the island, so I jumped on that.  He walked us around and explained the history of how a sweet little island that used to be like all the other sweet little bay islands became The Rock.

There are a few islands in the Bay, and Alcatraz was originally identical to the others, with a gradual sloping hill.  The military set up a fort there back in the 1850's, and they needed to alter the landscape to suit their needs.  They dynamited the sides of the island into harsh cliffs to discourage unauthorized visitors.

Alcatraz is a very handy lookout point, but it's not an ideal place to live.  There is no fresh water source, and on the other-end-of-things there is no place to route sewage.  It would take another century for those things to became dealbreakers.  

It turns out that what is bad for humans is great for birds.  Birds don't need fresh water, but their predators do, so these islands are ideal avian hang out places.

Alcatraz was a fort for a good long time, and at some point a military prison was added to the island.  Over time the prison became the main attraction.  Technically it is possible to escape and swim to the mainland just a mile away, but the devil is in the details and the escape success rate has always been historically low.

By the 1930's the military was out and the federal prison was in.  The phrase "not in my back yard" came to mind, and that's exactly what the citizens of San Francisco thought of Alcatraz.  Let's just say that there were some PR issues over the years.  Eventually the cost of importing water and disposing of sewage in an acceptable way became the prison's undoing and operations ceased in the 1960s.  At various times after the prison closed, there were Native American occupations of the island, and after that was settled the NPS purchased the island and turned it into a historic site.  The water/sewage issue makes the operation very expensive, but the tours are hugely popular.  There's just something about that rock.

The guided tour of the grounds ended, and we started the self guided prison tour.  As you enter, you're routed into a line to receive a headset with an audio tour.  I was skeptical of this because my only past experience with an audio tour was at another historic prison, and the it was deadly boring and confusing to follow, so I abandoned the canned program very quickly.

[Where's the link to my tour of the prison with the boring audio tour?  Lol, it's on my list of posts to write someday.  The prison was the Ohio State Reformatory, which you have not heard of but you have seen it in a couple of TV shows and movies, most notably in The Shawshank Redemption.  If you are anywhere close to central Ohio you should go there ASAP.]

Anyway, there were a ton of people on the tour being routed through a line, and the question was not whether I wanted a headset or not, but what language I wanted the tour to be in.  I took the headset because everyone else did.  And it is a good thing that I did, because the tour was very easy to follow and there was a ton of great information.

The tour ends in the dinning hall and kitchen.  My favorite part of that was the knife block.  The silhouettes of all of the knives were painted on the board so that the guards had an easy way to track which knives were unaccounted for.

Now that the tour was over, I wandered around the island for a bit.  For all of the difficult history, it is a beautiful place.

I took in the sights for a while and then hopped the ferry and returned to the mainland.  Julie recommended the Musee Mecanique, which is on the wharf, so I headed in.

I only had one quarter and I spent it on an old show of 3-D photos of SF back in the day.  It turns out that I chose poorly.

After that I wandered around for a bit more and then caught a Lyft back home.  After resting up I explored the 'hood a bit more, and then I had a wild Saturday night.  Specifically I walked to the nice grocery store for sushi and spent the night watching Youtube videos before hitting the hay at 10.

Sunday - let's ride the bus!

My only plan for Sunday was the vague idea that I wanted to explore downtown.  I had a few ideas of things to see, but I needed a more specific plan.  I turned to the internet and hit the gold mine that is San Francisco City Guides.  They have 70 different FREE (donation suggested) tours of anything in the city that you could possibly care to see.  I scanned the list to figure out which of the tours had my name on it.  The clear winner had someone else's name on it: Alfred Hitchcock's San Francisco.

Now that I had my morning planned, my next move was to put on my big girl pants and figure out the bus.  I downloaded the app and figured out that it was a straight shot to get from the corner bus stop to pretty close to where the tour was.

Hey look at me trading in $30-$40 Lyft rides for $3 bus rides!  Damn I'm good.

I decided to get off the bus a few stops early.  I'm not going to say that it was a mistake, but it was an interesting experience.  If you remember, I noted that there is a huge homeless population in Sacramento.  It wasn't a problem, it was just that it was unusual to go more than one city block without seeing a homeless person.  So far I really hadn't seen much homelessness in SF, apart from a few people around the grocery store the night before.  All of the homeless people were indulging in the #1 homeless past time of being invisible.

I had gotten off the bus about a mile away from the tour, and the first few blocks were Homeless Central.  No one interacted with me, but they were also not in the business of being invisible.  I realized that I was in their home.  And their bathroom.  No one was actively using the bathroom, but the past evidence was there.

With each passing block the neighborhood became nicer.

Huntington Park was the meeting point for the tour, and it was downright luxurious.  There were plenty of shaded benches, the turtle fountain, a dog area, and a playground.

The fun part about waiting for the tour to start was people watching to figure out who was just spending a pleasant Sunday morning in the park and who was a Hitchcock nut like me.  There were a total of three (3) of us on the tour, and the other people were a British couple who were celebrating their 20th anniversary.  They'd gotten married in Vegas and went to SF for their honeymoon, and they were back to revisit.

The tour guides are volunteers, so they are people who love their city and the subject matter of the tour.  Our guide gave us a quick run down of Hitchcock's bio, and asked if we knew what his first American movie was that took him to California.  The three of us looked at each other politely and then said "Rebecca" in unison.  The tour was a delightful blend of the guide taking us to various locations and telling us the deets, and of the four of us     sharing our Hitchcock memories.

Our first stop was the apartment building where the Elsters lived in Vertigo.  The tour was about two hours long, but probably only a mile or two of distance, which took us through locations for Vertigo, Family Plot, and The Birds, with a strong emphasis on Vertigo.

The tour ended on Maiden Lane in front of this building.  My spidey senses were activated, because I knew that there was an FLW building in the area.  It was on the list of things to see that Julie had given me, and the guide at the Marin Center had also mentioned it.  I had been meaning to do a walk by, and now the tour was dropping me off at the very place.  San Francisco is a big city in a small world.

The tour was over and it was time to say goodbye to our guide and to the other couple.  

I wasn't sure exactly what my next move was going to be, but I knew it would involve food.  I'd had a hankering for In-N-Out and now seemed like an ideal time to do something about that.  But the closest one was back at the Wharf, so how was I going to get there?  I turned to the bus app and was delighted to see the answer.  In the spirit of full transparency, the first cable car that I got on was going in the wrong direction, and there was a crowd to get on the returning car, so I had to walk up a few stops for the crowd to thin out.  But I still got to take it for almost all of its route.

The first and only time that I've had In-N-Out was 20 years ago when I went on a work trip to LA.  I remembered that the stores were very crowded and that the food was extraordinary.

One of those two memories was accurate.  The shake and burger were like any other shake and burger, and I only ate a few of the fries.  Sigh, not everything can pan out.  I am now OK with the fact that In-N-Out does not exist where I live.

After lunch I strolled around and walked to the ferry building.  I had my eye on the Bay Bridge, but realized (accurately) that I didn't have time/energy to walk it, so that will have to wait until my next trip.

It was time to call it a day.  I got out my bus app to figure out my way home like the public transport pro that I now was.  How nice that there were buses stopping every few minutes according to the app.  Except that they were not stopping in reality.  I spent quite a bit of time walking from bus stop to bus stop.  

At one bus stop there were a few other people waiting to take the bus and a pandhandler.  He told us that the buses were not running on their regular schedule due to the Bay to Breakers race that had happened that morning.   No one seemed to be listening to him, and he made some choice comments that he'd only been riding the buses for 40 years here.

I walked up to the next bus stop and ha ha!  My bus was there and I got on.  And it was going in the wrong direction.  I finally accepted that I did not have the smarts to figure out the difference between what the app was saying and what the busses were doing.  The Lyft ride home was only $20.

That's a wrap on the weekend!  See you next time to close out the SF trip.  The stars of the show will be werk drama, Golden Gate Park, and more time with Julie!!!