Our 36 hours in San Francisco started badly when the hotel we’d booked had given our room to someone else, with no apology and no assistance in finding another. It was late evening and our body clocks told us it was about 6am, so we weren’t impressed. I managed to find another hotel which we walked to – it wasn’t terribly salubrious but it offered us a place to sleep for two nights.
Next morning we took an Uber to Mama’s on Washington Square. There was a bit of a queue, as expected. but we were there early enough that it wasn’t too long a wait – about 30 minutes for us, but those who arrived later were waiting much longer.
Breakfast, American style. A great start to the day.The famously steep Lombard StreetFive miles an hour is quite a speed limit, but of course only one car in a thousand is using the road to get somewhere – everyone is here for the experience.We took a cable car down to the waterfrontAnd then took a boat ride out to see the Golden Gate Bridge – a rather gloomy day at the moment, but better than the fogs for which the Bay is infamous.Alcatraz IslandThe less famous Oakland Bay BridgeSea lions at Pier 39Looking through the Pier 43 Ferry Arch to the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, a WWII ship and naval museumThe submarine USS Pampanito together with SS Jeremiah O’BrienWe had a look around the submarineThen it was time for lunch. This was Lucy’s starter portion of calamari.We took another tram to the cable car museum
As well as the museum, the building houses the cable-pulling equipment. It’s remarkable that these cables can go around so many corners and still be efficiently pulling over such distances.
We ran out of energy in the late afternoon, and though there was more we could have done, we were still very tired from the journey from the UK, and so retired for a quiet evening, conscious that we had a fairly early start in the morning to get to Emeryville.
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