We had a loooong but wonderful fifth day of travels. We started early - an 8AM hotel pick up, and a 9AM San Francisco city tour with Tower Tours. Our bus driver, AKA Driver, was amusing and informative, as all good tour drivers should be, and was excellent at navigating the city streets. He managed to turn the bus around by some miracle twice in Golden Gate Park - he didn't know the park was closed for some walk or something and tried gallantly to get us through! Kudos to him!
Our tour included a drive around Fisherman's Wharf, with Driver pointing out some well-known San Francisco landmarks, including the cable cars, Boudin Bistro, In and Out Burger, Ghirardelli Square, etc. We then travelled through the city streets and Driver showed us the Transamerica building, many Victorian houses, the Presidio, Lombard Street, Lombard at Hyde (the winding road), China town, and Van Ness (HWY 101 and also where they blew up the large mansions to stop the fires that started after the 1906 earthquake).
We then headed to the Golden Gate bridge which was mostly shrouded in fog, but it did clear a bit while we were there. Ian and I walked onto the bridge for the requisite tourist shots. Driver then drove us across the bridge (which was a surprise for me and I was really quite thrilled as I was afraid we wouldn't get to drive over the bridge - we had come through Oakland rather than San Francisco on our way down to San Jose. Silly to be so excited about this, I know, but I was!)
We tried to visit Golden Gate Park, as mentioned before, but found the roads in closed. So we drive by the beach instead - beautiful area for walking if you can stand the crashing waves, fog, and cold wind!
We drove up Twin Peaks for breathtaking views of the city and hardly any fog (just a bit around the Golden Gate Bridge, surprise surprise!) Then we saw Alamo Square, City Hall (sooo beautiful! It would be neat to do a tour there sometime), and along the way Driver was very good at pointing out houses and buildings owned by celebrities and famous wealthy families (the Greatful Dead House, Danielle Steel's House, Francis Ford Coppola, Robin Williams, the Fairs(of the Fairmont Hotels), Bill and Hillary's accomodations when they are in town . He also pointed out locations were movies or tv shows were filmed, such as Full House (actually, this was filmed in Hollywood, but the house where it was "set"), Party of Five, Mrs. Doubtfire and Dirty Harry.
We definitly highly recommend a San Francisco city tour if you're coming to the city and don't have a lot of time to explore!
After the city tour we were dropped off at Pier 33 for our Alcatraz tour. We grabbed a bite to eat and Ian had a beer and then we got on the boat for the short but windy and choppy ride over to the Rock. We did the audio tour, which is fantastic - you really feel Alcatraz come alive and you can imagine yourself there witnessing events on the island. There's a short video as well which is quite informative on the history of the island, from a military post and prison, to a federal prison, to the location of aborginal demonstrations in the 60's, to the current tourist attraction and park (you should have seen all the gulls nesting on the parade grounds!)
Upon returning from Alcatraz, we had a bite to eat at Pier 39 (not seafood, sadly, as the lineups were atrocious) and wandered around exploring the touristy shops. Ian found me a wonderful pair of sea otter socks!! I've never seen such a thing and if you were ever one of my students (which of course none of you are) you would know I LOVE sea otters!!
We stood in line for our turn on the Cable Car ($5 one way) and just took it along Hyde to Jackson St. (we hung off the side and froze our little fingers off) and then we walked from there to our hotel. We MUST get some pictures of this hotel before we go!!
More exploring of San Francisco to come!
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