San Francisco day 3 of 3

Kim hanging onto the side of a cable car.
Here is a cable car and in the distance is a turnabout. A turnabout is a short section of tracks on a big turntable. Two guys push the car onto the turnabout and turn it around manually by hand. It isn't very hard to do.
Here's the guy who gave us the bike taxi ride to China Town.
This is the inside of a street car.
Here's the outside of a streetcar. It has two large antenna like arms that make contact with the electric wires above.

Fri 11.9.07

Today we went to the Cable Car Museum and Power House. This is the operations center for the cable cars. It is a must see while in San Francisco. There were old cable cars and lots of artifacts such as good displays of how the car grips the cable and how long the equipment lasts. A cable last 75 to 250 days and the pine wood brakes that rub the track for stopping only 2 to 3 days. In 1947 the city decided to do away with the cable cars and replace them with buses. There was such uproar from the people that they finally put it to vote and the city overwhelmingly voted to keep the cable cars. As I said in an earlier post, they identify the city and now the cable car system in San Francisco is a national monument so they are here to stay.

It was good to get back home. I realize our home is mobile and I have seen signs that say, “Home is where you park it”, but last night I came up with how I feel about it – “Home sweet home – wherever it is”. We met our new neighbors last night and helped some people who pulled in after dark. They are a crew of painters from North Dakota that paint grain elevators and such. They’ll be here for a month. The owner was really nice and we talked quite a while. I think today will be reading and writing my book. I haven’t made as much progress as I would like. I would like to have my library with me and we probably need to stay in one place long enough for me to concentrate. I’m getting chapters organized though.

San Francisco number 2 of 3

Here's Alcatraz - The Rock. It is very intimidating. On the way there I couldn't help but to wonder what it was like to be on a prison boat bound for the prison. It was a cold looking place.
Here we are approaching the dock at Accatraz.
Kim looks at home here, but I feel out of place.
This is a view of San Francisco from the yard at Alcatraz. The prisoners said it was difficult having freedom so close that they could hear voices at night when the wind was right. People were laughing and having a good time and they were in prison.
This is Darwin Coon. He wrote a book on Alcatraz and his imprisonment there. I read it the day we got back to the RV and Kim read it the next day.

Thurs 11.8.07
San Francisco and Alcatraz

We started off the day with a trip to Alcatraz. Alcatraz started off as a fort when the government thought it was a good defense point for the San Francisco harbor. Alcatraz is an island that is one and a quarter mile from the San Francisco shore. It was never needed or used to defend the harbor. The military then decided to make it a military prison. They had prisoners build the prison over a two year period and then they became the first inmates. Later it became Alcatraz Federal Prison. They have a self guided tour in which they give you a small player and headsets and you go through at your own pace. Once on the island, you can leave whenever you want. The ferries run every half hour all day. There was an Alcatraz ex-inmate there who had written a book about his experience there and we purchased a copy and had him sign it.

From the dock area we took a bicycle transport (with a driver and a bench seat for us) one and a half mile to China Town (most all uphill). It was a very good investment to travel like this. It was kind of crazy in that since he does this every day, he would stop in front of a bunch of traffic that had a red light and sit there and show us things. He was very informative and it is a method of transport you should try sometime. He suggested a good restaurant (Hunan Homes) and Kim and I ate lunch there. It was interesting. The bike guide told us to walk around the block as it was the area where the Chinese shop for their supplies. He also said there is no really good Chinese food in San Francisco. He said if the Chinese want good Chinese food, they go to grandma’s house.

This is a walking city, but you still need to try all the forms of public transportation. As we walked we have climbed some big hills. The most aggressive street is 31.5%. That is steep! After just a block of that it makes us huff and puff. The people here are generally nice. The city has a good attitude about it for the most part. Locals are very helpful with directions and information. The Cable Car operators are somewhat grumpy and short tempered, but I sense it is more of a persona they want to give off than how they really are. If you don’t understand they aren’t overly helpful, but stay with it and they’ll warm up. Last night we were on a cable car and the operator seemed short with people. When we got off at the last stop, I stood about 20 feet away and waited for him to look at me. When he did I smiled and saluted him. He smiled and gave me a friendly wave. It seemed as though that since he wasn’t busy, he could be friendly. It was interesting to see him react this way. The drivers stand to operate the cars and it is a lot of hard work. It seems that when we go downhill, the 6 foot long brake lever requires about 50 to 60 pounds of pull! While they are standing, they operate two large long levers that ratchet as they are pulled back and have a hand release lever on them and a foot brake – and watch for traffic signals, traffic, pedestrians, the hills and passengers getting on and off. It is a very demanding job. The Cable Cars are so unique in that they don’t care if you stand on the side platform and hang on standing up. In this day of law suits, it is a wonder they still let you do this. If the seats are filled, they even tell you that if you want to ride you must ride standing holding the rail. They even warn you when another cable car is coming in that if both cars have passengers hanging on and they aren’t tucked in close, they could hit. I’m not sure about the particulars, but there is a general courtesy that cars afford Cable Cars. There are times when the cable is not accessible under an intersection and the car has to coast across the intersection. If a car cuts off a cable car, the driver may have to stop and not make it to the next cable. A local rider said that if that happens, the people on the cable car get off and push it to the next cable. Someone in a car cut us off and that is how I found out about this. We were able to get to the cable by coasting though. The operators do a very good job of running the cars so the ride is very smooth. The cable car is a very easy place to meet people. We have met locals as well as people from Israel, Australia, Ohio, England and Pennsylvania.

I also finalized plans so we can drop off the coach for service in Mesa, AZ when we go to Goshen for Christmas Dec 15th. Hopefully it will be done when we get back on Jan 3rd. Probably the most time consuming thing is to replace some cracked tile. We are looking forward to the next month and a half. The kids are coming to San Diego over Thanksgiving, we will see my parents in AZ before Christmas, come back to Indiana to see family and friends for Christmas and then back to AZ in January to see my parents again.

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.

Yosemite 3 of 3

On the left is El Capiton. This is the largest granite monolith in the world and stands at 3,593 feet from base to summit. Climbers come from all over the globe to scale it.
Kim at the visitor center.
This is a tunnel. You can see the road to the left and right of it.
Frequently we would see a big boulder just standing on top of the ground with very few other rocks around.
The mound on the left has rings around it that are very pretty.


Yosemite has the most diverse range of scenery we’ve seen. It has rocks, sand, bald mountains, smooth, jagged rock – gentle streams, roaring rivers, waterfalls and well, you name it. We drove the car about 150 miles investigating lots of the sites.

The visitor’s center traffic layout is kind of a mess and it isn’t that informative. The traffic engineering must have been planned by the same guys who lay out Post Office traffic flow. If a road sign would have been missing, we would have been lost. The whole thing was just more complicated than it need be. The parking lot was a half mile from the visitor’s center and there were signs posted of a bus route which we found out doesn’t run. Oh well, I won’t go on and on. Plan on an hour if you stop there.

Today we plan to travel to San Juan Bautista. We will be staying at a campground for a week and plan to take the Amtrack into San Fransisco for two or three days. We may get a hotel there or commute back to the campground. We will see what advice the campground gives us. The Amtrack is six miles from the campground.

Yosemite 2 of 3

This rock formation is called Half Dome. It stands at 8,842 feet and is Yosemite's most distinguishing monument. It is a few miles away from where I was standing. They say in the summer it is crowded with rock climbers.

We drove through about 5 tunnels. Some were not trimmed out inside with bricks, but just jagged rock. That was pretty. It also made you realize you were really in a tunnel.

This pic is not in the park, but Moccasin, CA. This is the Hetch - Hetchy pipeline system. The town is owned by the city and county of San Fransisco and workers for the pipeline live there.

In the town of Moccasin, you can see the historic Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, a pipeline from a reservoir in the Sierras that carries much of San Francisco's water supply, plunges into the Bay briefly next to the old Dumbarton Cut-off railroad bridge. It emerges in an octagonal structure on the end of a pier, and continues towards the city, flowing through the Pulgas Water Temple before spilling into the six-mile long Crystal Springs Reservoir, above San Carlos.

Immediately east of town, State Route 120 climbs from about 910 feet AMSL elevation to about 2,450 feet at Priest Station, California, over a distance of six miles. Old Priest Grade, a narrower road and predecessor to the current route of SR120, covers the same change in elevation over about 2.7 miles. It is common to see vehicles with smoking brakes descending the old grade. During summer, ambient temperatures can be in the 90~100°F range. In these temperatures, many vehicles overheat climbing the old grade. Locals tell stories of car accidents in history where the vehicles left the path of Old Priest Grade and tumbled into Grizzly Gulch. The hillsides are sturdy chaparral with thick vegetation. The terrain was so difficult that, in a few cases, the cars and bodies were not retrieved, some locals claim.

Yosemite 1 of 3

Yosemite is just so diverse. It has most every shape and color of rocks, it has mountains of trees, no trees and all trees but a bald rock top. I can only post 5 pics so here are three post of the park.
Break time. I take breaks from time to time as it keeps me more alert to drive.


This rock leans out over the road. There are times when they have a height sign of say, 13 feet. Around the corner will be a rock that leans out over the road.

Lake Tahoe - More Pictures

We spent some time here just sitting on the rocks. It was very scenic.
I caught Kim in mid-air in this pic.

This is an Island at the south end of Lake Tahoe. In 1929 some crazy lady (with a whole bunch of money) had them build her a tea house on top of it. Look closely and you can see it.
This is the fish viewing area at Taylor Creek. We are very late in the season. Bad news is - some things are closed - good news is - there are no crowds. Our campground has about 420 hookups and there are only about 20 there. We went to Taylor Creek Oct. 31, the last day it was open for the season. It is a very worthwhile stop.

I am limited to 5 pics per post, so these pics go with the blog below. It will probably be a few more days till we're online again.