San Francisco here we come!

Here's a restaurant down on the dock called "Stinkin' Pizza". I think it's because they use lots of garlic. We didn't eat there but it looked good.
We're on a cable car looking down a hill.
This is a view looking down a hill in San Francisco. We were surprised how much of it was land fill that was added later. It used to be a big port, but Oakland modernized their ports years ago and now has the ports.
This store with the rainbow is in the Haight - Ashbury district that is known for the hippies of the late 60's. Now the Hippies can't afford to live there. The bus tour guide said that Yippies live there now. Yippies are Yuppies that are Hippies with money. The rainbow on the storefront was there since the 60's when a new owner came and took it off. The neighborhood made such a stink that the lady had to repaint it or go out of business. Interesting huh?
This is a VW bus on the side of a restaurant that serves as a walk up window at pier 39. We saw lots of cool things like this.




Wed 11.7.07

Today we drove into San Francisco with the Miata and will be staying here for two nights. We valet parked the car and don’t plan to drive it till we leave the city. Public transportation here is very good and finding a parking spot is difficult. People we met from the area at campgrounds said it is a walking city. We took a three hour bus trip of the city today. It was very informative. There are three modes of transportation they have here that I’ve never been on. Today we rode on the top deck of a double deck bus and also a street car. Tomorrow we will ride a trolley. The difference between a street car and a cable car is that a street car looks more like a bus and a trolley looks like a cable car (like in the old Rice-A-Roni ads). Both run on rails. The street car is powered by electricity supplied by overhead wires while the cable car is propelled by gripping a cable that runs under the street. If we hadn’t ridden a cable car, we would have missed the flavor of San Francisco. To become a Cable Car driver, one must drive a bus for several years and then be trained in cable cars and also pass a strength test – yes, a strength test. The driver must pull long levers that have ratchets that click and hold the cable or apply brakes. There is also a secondary foot brake. There has only been one woman street car operator and she quit after two years and became a conductor on the cable car. Their responsibility is collecting fares and I think they also apply brakes as well as signal the conductor with a bell system.

We ate at Café Dante on pier 39. It was very good. We watched a man making crepes at a shop there. They had his station in the front window. The food here all looks so good. I wonder how much weight I will gain in three days. There are lots of piers and on pier 39 alone they have about 20 restaurants. As I write the sounds of the city are upon us. An ambulance just went by and I can hear the trolley bells quite often. Hope we sleep OK. Tomorrow we plan on going to Alcatraz, the pier area and China Town. There are 100,000 Chinese in SF and only 15,000 of them live in China Town. We tried to book a tour of the city in an old fire engine but they are booked up over a week from now. Tom and Tammy Moser told us about them. Today on the bus trip we saw a fire truck configuration I’ve only seen on TV. It was a semi tractor pulling a ladder trailer that had a steerable rear trailer axle. We watched them make a turn and the man in the back steered the trailer around the corner so it followed the tractor’s tracks. It was pretty cool to watch. Our tour guide said there is a buddy seat in the back and that a few years ago there was a lady sitting in the buddy seat that didn’t put her seat belt on. They hit a bump and she was thrown out and killed. As we watched we did notice that the thing rode really rough and the guy steering the trailer had a bumpy ride.