San Francisco - Day 2
The next day was Monday, but it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day so Kristina
and I both had off. Apparently so did the entire Bay Area, because
there was absolutely no rush hour to speak of. We took the BART into the
city, and then walked along the Embarcadero. It was a pretty street, it's a
good thing the elevated freeway that once was there was torn down.
We got off the BART right near the Ferry Terminal:
You can see in the foreground a street car. San Francisco bought and
restored street cars from all the major US cities and uses them along this
road; each has a little sign on it saying what city it is from. Sadly I
didn't see a Baltimore one.
Also along the way was a strange concrete fountain:
It was still foggy, but we were used to it by now. We walked until
we got to Fisherman's Wharf on Pier 39. There we saw the (quite noisy)
sea lions.
Fisherman's Wharf was nice and had a lot of neat shops. One would take a
3-d image of your face and embed it in a crystal! I am usually not one for
shopping, but it was a nice area.
You could see Alcatraz from the shore:
We walked among the ships of the
San Francisco National Historic Park.
There were crazy people swimming in the bay despite the rather chilly weather.
Kristina and I then walked up to see Lombard St, the so-called most crooked
street in the world!
We then walked down and bought some sourdough bread which San Francisco is
apparently famous for. For lunch we got clam chowder served in a hollowed
out piece of said bread, which was quite good.
We rode the famous cable cars (though not the one pictured):
The cable car was climbing this hill:
Kristina and I had climbed this hill ourselves;
Lombard Street is at the top. So then we caught the cable car, and rode it
the whole way to the end of the line near Union Square.
We then caught yet another form of public transportation, the
MUNI. This particular one was
half subway, half street car and it switched between the two.
It ran on tracks and got its power from overhead cables.
And believe it or not despite all the mass-transit we took, there is still
other forms in the San Francisco area we did not take!
So once we figured out how to pay for the MUNI we headed back to Golden Gate
Park, but this time to the Eastern edge. There we went to the famous
Conservatory,
and saw the interesting plants inside.
After that we walked around the park a bit, then we figured out how to
catch the MUNI back downtown. We then visited the
Cable Car Museum.
That was a fascinating place; you could watch the giant motors work that were
turning the cables for all the cable car lines in the city. Remarkable
feats of 19th century engineering. I took a picture but it didn't turn out.
Our final stop was Chinatown. We walked around a bit, as Kristina was looking
for replacement tea cups for her family. We dodged some over-aggressive
restaurant promoters, and at the end of the day caught the BART back
to Pleasanton and then returned to Livermore.
Kristina left early on Tuesday, but we managed to figure out Air-BART and
get her to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Her flight back to
Maryland was uneventful.
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