The Plan (the whole Plan)
Day #4 : Mon 12 May : SF
The day began with a nice Lancastrian couple giving us their unused Muni Passports - weekly passes for the cable cars, trams and buses - that still had two days to run. Thus equipped, we hopped on a cable car down (and up, and down again) to Fishermans Wharf, to catch a ferry to Alcatraz.
We
peered into jail cells, and listened to a former guard tell stories (and
incidentally try to sell copies of his book). When we had done everything
there was to do on the non-cordoned off sections of the island, we returned
to the dock. Patrick and Mark cursed the other two as one ferry departed,
and three of us cursed David as the next ferry left, half an hour later.
David appeared about a minute afterwards, to receive an appropriate amount
of abuse.
We took lunch in a streetcar diner, which consisted of clam chower
in a bread bowl and a bottle of beer. Then we took a cable car (what else)
to the cable car museum. The actual mechanism that drives the cable cars
is the centrepiece of the collection, so it's rather noisier than most
industrial museums. However, we learned enough to make us worry when we
encountered a driver in training later in the day.
By
this point it was getting warm, so we made a brief stop at the hotel to
drop off the backpack full of jackets and sweaters, and to change jeans
for shorts. Then we set off for the museum of modern art. It was observed
that we celebrated the cultural high point of our trip by taking off our
trousers. SFMOMA is an extraordinarily vertical building, and for no very
obvious reason has a cat ladder between the stairs and the exhibits on
the top floor.
David and Mark were inspired by a collection Andreas Gursky photos to try out some arty-fart shots of their own while in the museum. The distrinctly mixed results can be found here.
A few rounds of beer in a bar near the museum followed, then we took
off on the cable cars again to an exceedingly expensive and rather good
restaurant in Fishermans Wharf. Then back to the hotel, for David to practice
(using Flight Sim) landing a plane on the Golden Gate Bridge, and for Rupert
to fall asleep. First day of the road trip tomorrow...
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