San Francisco

On or about February 8th, Karen and I left San Francisco feeling slightly had. As I mentioned before, we had scheduled nearly a full week of our trip there, but we found it to be so expensive and angry that we cut our stay short in favor of taking off down the coast for Big Sur, Monterey and LA.

However, in fairness to SF, I need to observe that we did enjoy some things about our time there...

(there is a little Italian restaurant called L'Osteria del Forno that is absolutely fantastic, affordable, great service...truly a highlight)...

(our hotel, The Hotel San Remo, was extremely affordable, friendly and helpful service, beautifully appointed shared bathrooms, lots of European travelers...truly we cannot recommend this lovely place highly enough)...

(the Maritime Museum was a fantastic buy and allowed admission to restored antique sailing vessels)...

(Alcatraz was expensive but ultimately worth the price for the experience)...

...and there were others. Driving was not as bad as we were warned about. Perhaps having grown up within 40 minutes of Manhattan has seasoned me to compare all traffic "problems" with the Tri-State area. No matter how bad people say a given city's driving is, nothing ever does compare to the snarls of traffic I cut my teeth on.

The crookedest street in the world was definitely worth seeing:



I mean, honestly. What. Is. The. Point?!

The weather we had while we were there was unusually mild, and as you can see from our pictures, we were fortunate (especially for the winter) to have had lots of blue skies.



We saw lots of evidence that people were quite aggravated....nay, right pissed off about the re-election of Dubya.



While at the Maritime Museum, this sign caught my eye...thought it was quite a hilarious commentary on the differences between centuries ago America and today:



The docents at the Maritime Musuem were great. I talked to this guy for probably 45 minutes about this little turn of the last century marine motor - I want to say it was 5 horsepower, extremely slow revolutions, and surprisingly quiet - this particular specimen was employed up until the last few years in a large fishing trawler. Hit or miss engines are pretty much the first generation of internal combustion engines, and in my childhood I had the pleasure of restoring an old hit or miss washing machine motor. I still have it, believe it or not. Made for a fun conversation with this guy. He actually did this little dance when he would start the motor up. It was quite cute. :-)



We found San Francisco to be quite dirty and home to much more graffiti than the other cities we'd seen to date on this trip. However, some of the graffiti in the city revealed that there was still a sense of humor (at least among the graffiti "artists")...read this carefully:



There is a Sea Lion gathering place at Fisherman's Wharf. It's quite a tourist attraction as you might imagine...



They are a stitch to watch. Most of the sea lions here are males, and they spend their time trying to out-bark each other and push each other around to establish their dominance in the pecking order for the few females that are, er, "available":





We did end up taking the San Francisco Trolley from the waterfront partway to its final destination. When it broke down, we got off and started walking. Turns out we were able to at least keep abreast of its progress, and I think that we ended up beating it to its final destination.

Anyways, one of the good things about taking our aborted trolley ride was that we found these guys on our way to Chinatown.



By the way, if you go there, I think both Karen and I would agree: don't bother with the "famous" San Fran trolleys. They are overpriced, especially when compared with other modes of public transit readily available. They are slow. They are rickety. They go only from one place to one other place. And, you can get better pictures of them if you are NOT riding them. All great arguments for taking a pass on this "most San Franciscan" of San Francisco tourist traps.

Near the crookedest street, we found some interesting murals...



So, here endeth our tour of San Francisco. :-)