According to Mr Google, “I Left my Heart in San Francisco” by Tony Bennett is the No. 3 song about San Francisco, and whilst we were riding the Cable Car on our last afternoon in The City (locals never call it ‘San Fran’), we crossed Tony Bennett Way and I immediately knew what I would be calling this Blog Post!

 

However, I digress…

 

After a LONG flight from Sydney, we reached San Francisco last Saturday, about 3 hours before our plane departed from Sydney!  We had arranged a car from the airport because we weren’t keen on having to negotiate public transport after only 2 hours sleep. I’m glad we were travelling on a Saturday evening otherwise I think that the traffic would have been horrendous!

 

Sunday was spent finding our bearings, getting a Public Transport card and catching our first Cable Car. We are staying about 2 blocks from Chinatown, which meant that the Cable Car was the easiest form of PT for us. We headed down to the waterfront, enjoying the sunshine, until the wind hit us! We saw our first view of the Golden Gate Bridge, we saw the famous Fisherman’s Wharf sign, we walked out and saw (& heard) all the seals that have made a home on Pier 39, visited the Jeremiah O’Brien, which is only one of two surviving Liberty Ships, bought our tickets for Alcatraz, had a look at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and finished the day with coffee and pie at a Diner around the corner from our Hotel.

 

The Jeremiah O’Brien is the last of 2710 Liberty Ships that were built between 1941-45. She was built in Maine in 1943 and served in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and survived D-Day. She still does the occasional steaming out of San Francisco but is mostly a static exhibit showing life on a Liberty Ships wasn’t easy. Liberty Ships were crewed by Merchant Marines, with 26 Naval Guard manning the guns. She never fired a shot in anger, the guns were merely for protection.

 

One of our big ticket items that we wanted to visit, involved a day-trip to Yosemite National Park. It meant an early start and getting picked up before 6am (!) and then it was a 4+ hour drive to Yosemite. Our Guide said that he knew everything ”about California” – does that mean he knew nothing about any other state?, but he was closely related to the Energizer Bunny! We had hoped that Monday would be a good day to visit the Park, but it turned out that they were cutting trees and generally trying to reduce the fire load before Summer starts. Apparently last summer was a bad year for fires in the Park and it was closed for most the season.

 

We were lucky visiting in springtime because all of the waterfalls were running beautifully, with lots of snowmelt creating lots of waterfalls. Another good thing about doing the trip on a bus, we got to drive through a combination of suburbia and farming land.  Apparently, California is the No. 1 grower of almonds and peaches!

 

We finally reached our accommodation at 9pm on Monday night.  It was a LONG day! But we didn’t get a sleep-in! Because we had booked a trip to Alcatraz on Tuesday morning, we were up and ready to start the day by 8am! The only good thing about the early start was that we managed to get on an earlier boat over to The Rock. There is lots to look at and to listen to both guards and inmates who talk about what it was like working or “living” there! It wasn’t cheap but it was certainly worth the visit.  I have told Nick that we will have to rewatch all those movies that are set in San Francisco, now that we have been here!

 

I the past couple of years, MJ has become interested in Geocaching, which is an outdoor treasure-hunting activity that requires you to navigate to a specific set of coordinates to find a geocache at that location. She had a couple of caches that she wanted to find which meant that we did quite a bit of walking but we also managed to find some interesting locations. We walked through Fort Mason, to find a Community Garden where we had a lovely chat with an old guy who was a week shy of celebrating 60 of marriage!, we did some exploring in a park that has an amazing view of the Golden Gate Bridge and then did some more walking – over 19,000 steps according to MJ’s FitBit!

 

By this stage, our feet were hurting so we decided to use the Hop On-Hop Off bus to get a bit further afield. What can we say about the HO-HO bus? It’s expensive, it’s a bit of a rip-off and even when a stop says “Lombard Street”, yes you are on Lombard Street but you’re at the wrong end for the crazy part of the street. We also found that the drivers were not able to answer any questions – either due to lack of knowledge, lack of English or “not understanding our accent!!!

 

Our second-last day in The City was spent trying to get maximum benefit from our HO-HO tickets. We caught the bus to Alamo Park and got off the bus to see the Painted Ladies, which is a set of 6 Victorian Houses that managed to survive both the Earthquake and the Fire of 1906 and are very popular in movies filmed in San Francisco – if you ever watch the series “Full House”, these houses appeared in the opening credits.  The next place that we wanted to visit was Chinatown and take advantage of the free Walking Tour of Chinatown that was included in our HO-HO tickets. But this was Stop #2 and the Painted Ladies were at Stop #8, so we had to around the full circuit and when we finally got to Chinatown, we had totally missed the walking tour! So we took ourselves through Chinatown, found a restaurant where we had a lovely lunch (I think that we were the only “round eyes” in the restaurant) and then headed back to our Hotel.

 

Hey, we have time to find a laundromat and do our first load of washing in the US! Nick double-checked Google Maps and we set off on foot. We walked up hill and down dale and found the laundromat. It cost $4.50 (in quarters) for a load in the washing machine, and then another $2.00 (in quarters) for the dryer. And then we trudged back to our hotel, and then what did we see about 2 blocks from our Hotel? Around the corner was a laundromat and a coffee shop – and Mr Google knew nothing about it!!!!

 

Today (Thursday) is our last day and we made excellent use of a Day Pass on our Clipper Card. We travelled on all 3 Cable Car lines several times and we also caught a Trolley. What is the difference, I hear you ask? A Cable Car doesn’t use any electricity to run, it uses a clamp to hold a cable that runs below street level. A Trolley has a catenary which uses overhead electric cables. We also visited the Cable Car Museum which had a pretty amazing story about how the Cable Car was developed and also a very clear explanation about how they work. We also went to the San Francisco Railway Museum, which is really all about the Trolleys and nothing about trains! However, both were free!

 

We have discovered Walgreens which is a pharmacy/supermarket, we have also visited the San Francisco Centre, which is a Westfield (!) and full of either empty shops or well-known name which very expensive price tags. I think that the most normal-priced shop was Foot Locker! We saw a lot of vacant premises as we walked around the streets too – is it a result of COVID or just the global economy?

 

And now we are packed and tomorrow, we will be off to Las Vegas!