Day Fifteen -  San Francisco!

(Don't believe the date--this is the chronicle of June 12.)

We stayed in Fremont, California, because hotel rooms in San Francisco cost $400 a night, except for the expensive ones, but it was still our intention to see San Francisco on this trip.  Mary Frances had mentioned to Holly Pardel that we were driving through California; as luck would have it Holly and her husband Paul (aka PT) live a short distance from Fremont, and even had an appointment in Fremont yesterday related to their pet care business.  So we met for breakfast at Whole Foods in Fremont.  It was a delightful reunion with Holly and we really enjoyed meeting her husband, a very bright and upbeat guy whose business, in addition to pet care, is musical equipment maintenance.

Holly and PT Pardel

 During our conversation we mentioned our tentative plan to drive up to San Francisco, see some sights, perhaps go to Fisherman's Wharf.  "Don't drive, take BART," they said in unison.  BART is Bay Area Rapid Transit, and the end of the line for it was about a mile away from where we were sitting.  As had happened the previous day when a waitress in Truckee changed our trip with a suggestion, Holly and PT made a great day possible.  Hell, if we had just set off in the car, we'd still be looking for a parking space.

Mary Frances with the Pardels.

After parting, and promising to see each other again, we drove to the nearby BART station, and with a lot of help from the information manager, finished the unnecessarily over-complicated ticket-purchase system and wound up with two round trip tickets to the Embarcadero station in downtown San Francisco.  Once through the ticket wedge-gates, we saw another bank of them and assumed we had to go through those, too. But it turned out the second set was just for getting to another parking lot, so we used our tickets a third time to go through the wedge-gates the other way, found the escalator, and boarded the train for the Embarcadaro.

Mary Frances waiting for the right train.

It's farther to downtown San Francisco from Fremont than we thought it was; about 45 minutes via a train that seems to be moving at hundreds of miles per hour, especially in tunnels.  There are a number of stops-Union City, Hayward, Bay City, Oakland Airport and the like.  But it's pleasant traveling, much less stressful than driving, so we thanked Holly and PT again and again in our minds.  Shortly, we rode an escalator from the bowels of San Francisco to the surface, and began to walk the streets in search of Fisherman's Wharf, and more urgently, lunch.

On California Street, wondering why a half dozen trolley cars sat idle,
and never finding out why.

Our first, but not last, view of the Transamerica Building

There is enough strange architecture in San Francisco to last a lifetime.

 We walked several blocks in one direction, without finding a sign saying, "Hey, New Englanders, Fisherman's Wharf is this way, so we stopped at the Elephant and Empire Bar for a much needed drink, and the barmaid told us to walk  back the way we came, but farther.  Which we did, ending up at Pier 1, which was a bit away, mile actually, from Pier 39, popularly known as Fisherman's Wharf.  We started walking anyway, and did find the other item on our immediate list, a top-flight restaurant for lunch.  Mary Frances enjoyed  a cheeseburger, and I enjoyed a Dungeoness Crab sandwich, which was good--maybe a third as good as a Maine Lobster roll.

What was the name of that restaurant?

Mary Frances was just happy to be seated, and fed.

When we left the restaurant to continue our walk in the direction of Pier 39 (which signs along the sidewalk said was thirty minutes away--we didn't know if that meant on foot or by car) we met a young man with a rickshaw bicycle and a multicolored dreadlocks wig.  He recognized eastern suckers at once and negotiated a fee that translated to $100 an hour (for a fifteen-minute ride) to pedal us northward up the Embarcadero toward Fisherman's Wharf.  In conversation along the way with our cycle-jock, we mentioned the possibility of taking either an Alcatraz visit or a bus tour around the city.  Now, I've had bad dreams about ending up in Alcatraz since I was a kid, so we thought the city tour might be better.  Cycle-jock was way ahead of us.  He punched a button on his smart phone and next thing we know another young man came running up with his smart phone and the two of them traded a couple of words; now cycle-jock is chasing the running young man, and we wind up climbing a set of stairs to a tiny office on the second floor where a gentleman wearing a suit that cost maybe a third of what our car cost came up with two tickets for eighty bucks and told us to grab the bus at the corner.  We may have harbored some suspicion about the cost, but all three players were so charming we bought it.  Which was fine, because they turned out to be completely honest. 

Passing a clown on the sidewalk is pretty normal stuff in San Francisco.

Sure enough, at the appropriate corner was the Big Bus, one of a hundred or so tour bus businesses in The City by the Bay.  We climbed up to the open rooftop seating and set off on a two-and-half-hour tour (only thirty minutes less than Gilligan's Minnow.)

Atop the Big Bus.  The jacketed gal on the right is
 Alexandria, our likable, funny tour guide.

 

Oh, Larry Flynt, this doesn't appear to be your prime time.

Back to the Transamerica Building.  No longer part of Bank of America.

This old green building near Transamerica, the Phelan
 Building belongs to Francis Ford Coppola.

Statue at Union Square

  There is no shortage of artworks and/or graffiti in San Francisco:

Love, Dignity and Justice at 149 Mason Street

City Hall

More gold leaf on the dome than anywhere else, according to Alexandria.

California State Office Building.

Tilework in San Francisco.

If you should go to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair.

San Francisco is still San Francisco.

Hippies still patrol Haight-Ashbury

Haight-Ashbury business.

After leaving the Haight-Ashbury district, which is now not a lot different from what it was then, it was time to head for the Golden Gate Bridge.

Heading toward the Golden Gate with Alexandria.

The cameras came out at the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

...and stayed out.

Looking back at San Francisco.

Golden Gate.

O.K., here's the deal about riding the top side of a tour bus across the Golden Gate Bridge:  it's cold!  When I say cold I mean your contact lens freezes.  I mean that your hair rises from your scalp and ice forms in the spaces, which for some of us is getting wider.  I mean that the top of a tour bus in San Francisco in June is approximately equal to January in North Dakota during a blizzard.

From the Marin County side.

Once across the Golden Gate Bridge, and having earned our wings as top-riders, we weenied out and rode in the bottom if the bus back across the bridge the other way.

San Francisco from the Presidio end of the Golden Gate.

My parents warned me about ending up here.

We got off the bus at--where else?--the 39th Street Pier, aka Fisherman's Wharf!  Sure enough, it was worth the wait and the effort.  There are hundreds of commercial attractions such as gift shops and ice cream, but the best thing on the Wharf is the seals, who occupy docklets, and talk with each other--sometimes sweet talk with each other, and bask in the sun and human interest.

These two seals kept up a charm school patter that was intended to interest...

...the ladies among these seals, one or two of which would occasionally leave
the group and swim over to say, "Hi there, sailor!" to one of the young bucks.

After our exploration of Fisherman's Wharf, we caught the Big Bus again, and then switch buses at Stop #1 to return as close as we could to BART.  What a surprise to find out our tour guide Alexandria was there again, with the same patter, the same bright attitude.  A few stops later, we got off and walked back to the Bart station.  But we couldn't get a ride.  Those false steps we took at the Fremont Station meant we'd used up all the round trip credit on our tickets.  A visit to the information booth corrected this, and the assistant there wrote us special passes to enable us to pass through emergency exits.  Apparently this happens all the time--the person behind us in line had the same issue.

We got back on the train and 45 minutes later were back at the Fremont Station.  It was only a few minutes from there to our hotel, and a very nice dinner, with good food and tasty, albeit tiny (they must have ordered the mini-glasses special) drinks.

Mary Frances, with mini-cosmopolitan.

The old guy, with a teeny-tiny-tini.

When we got back to our room it was time to let our friends know about the newest episode of our adventure by way of this blog.  But Doubletree, who had already insulted us by wanting $10 for internet access per day, per device, screwed up their internet access altogether.  A call to attwfi proved that their system had failed, not ours.  And thanks to them we could not publish our blog on the appropriate day.

So this is about yesterday, and it was a really cool day, in more ways than one.  And we can't thank Holly and PT enough for making our San Francisco adventure a really great day.

So if this was yesterday, what about today.  Hey, I'm working on it.