San Francisco

I’m currently typing this entry on the train to Los Angeles. It’s been an interesting day. We left Pacific Grove, Monterey this morning and caught the shuttle bus to the desert town of Salinas to catch the train to Los Angeles. A nine hour journey. A good chance I thought to catch up on documenting our travels. Things on the road don’t always go to plan. Our train has been delayed by six hours due to a derailment, pushing the Los Angeles arrival time back to about two, three o’clock in the morning. Not ideal in our book, we were a bit scared about arriving at 9 pm never mind 3 in the morning. Luckily we had a chat with Donna at the ticket desk who helped us out and booked us on a different train scheduled to arrive in LA at 9:45 pm. Good enough. After a 3 hour bus ride through the vineyards of California we are finally on a train heading to Los Angeles. So I need to jump back a few days before all this happened and San Francisco.

Our two year old guide book informed us it was more convenient to fly into Oakland than San Francisco. Enabling us to catch the Air Bart and connecting Bart train at the Oakland Coliseum which would have us in downtown San Francisco in 15 minutes. Of course San Francisco had now updated it’s transport system from the airport and it would now be more convenient to land there and commute into downtown. After a squashed ride on the Air Bart and the help of a presumed homeless lady to buy a couple of tickets to get downtown we arrived at our hotel. Thankfully only half way up one of the notoriously steep hills of San Francisco. In our room we are greeted by a nice view of a brick wall and the fire escape. We’re only on the third floor so cant see past the next building. The first night we just had our usual walk round to find our bearings and check out the local neighbourhood, find a place to eat.

Friday 22nd June.
Our two year old guide book did help us out this time, following it’s advice to book tickets for Alcatraz in advance. The tours were sold out for the next few days so we were pretty relieved to have followed it’s guidance this time. It’ was only a ten minute boat ride to the island so not long enough for Emma to get sick but the boat rocking from side to side did it’s best to unsettle her. Alcatraz was simply great, a fantastic experience and quite beautiful in parts. Outside that is, not the cells which were cold and small. The audio tour allowed us to wander at our own pace and informed us about the prisons history and the attempted escapes. We continued to walk around the viewable areas of the island, keeping our eyes open for the bird crap. It’s a bird sanctuary now after all.

Saturday 23rd June.
The other place we wanted to see in San Francisco was the Golden Gate Bridge. Morbidly it’s one of the most popular places to commit suicide, we didn’t see any jumpers, well only a couple of knitted ones. It was a beautiful clear day, we walked to the middle taking pictures as we went. By the half way point we decided to turn round and returned to buy some souvenirs in the gift shop. We hung around took a few more pictures of the impressive structure then headed back downtown, saving our legs on the old cable car which took the strain on the steep ascents of the San Francisco neighbourhoods.

In the afternoon we took a trip down to the Castro district which turned out to be completely bonkers as Em put it. It was gay pride weekend, so this predominantly gay neighbourhood with bustling and made it difficult for us to find our way round to some of the really nice cafes and gift shops. An experience non the less. Returning to downtown we went for a drink at ‘Cafe Zoetrope’ located within the Sentinel Building, home to Francis Ford Coppola’s production company. The cafe features memento’s from Coppola’s career. We sampled a glass of Francis’ own wine served to us by bartender Peter who let us stand behind the bar. With his rose tinted glasses he was a real throwback to the seventies and looked like he had just walked from the set of The Godfather. Great wine by the way.

Cheers for reading, next up Monterey.