Happy Birthday Benita
Can’t let it pass without pointing out that Benita turned the big 5-0 while in San Francisco. Happy Birthday and wishes for many more. She woke up to discover a banner across her cabin door announcing to the world not only the fact that it was her birthday, but that she’d also aged out of one demographic group into another.
San Francisco Harbor
The day started out slowly but with a great deal of excitement. To come into San Francisco, the cruise ship has to sail under the Golden Gate Bridge. Even though Eddie and I had been there before (and Mom and Dad, too, although it was about 45 years ago, so I’m not sure that counts any more), it was absolutely amazing to sail in under the bridge. There was about 12 feet of clearance given the height of the tide that day, and they blow the foghorn as you go under. One has to wonder if someone considering jumping at that moment might actually have the choice taken from them if they were startled by the horn and FELL!
Seeing San Francisco from this perspective was awesome. You can get a feel of how big and full the City really is, as well as what green space is available there.
It’s hard to imagine that this was originally desert and still gets only about 18 inches of rainfall a year. Fog, on the other hand, isn’t measured. They have that in abundance.Everyone in the group but Eddie and I saw whales as we were sailing in, before we got to the harbour. It never occurred to us that they’d be there so we weren’t on the lookout (also it’s hard to see whales when you’re staring at a slot machine in the casino).
The other cool thing was that we sailed past Alcatraz – they don’t keep anyone there, since it’s closed as a prison. You could really see the water churning around it, though, and it was apparent why nobody could escape by swimming. It looks very tiny, even up close, but when you’re actually there it seems much bigger. Having seen a number of prisons before, and since it takes a couple of hours at least to do that tour, plus the ability to walk up some pretty substantial hills, we opted for the “float by” view and pics.
Tourist Containment Area
Other than the long walk along the pier, getting off the ship was a breeze. Although San Francisco may feel like a foreign country, it remains a part of the US and thus no special shots or papers are necessary. Interestingly enough, some of the locals wish there were.
We learned a new concept – that of a “Tourist Containment Area”, which is designed to suck all the visitors into one confined area densely supplied with shops selling T-shirts and refrigerator magnets. The primary goal of this zone is to keep all the tourists away from the locals as much as possible while separating them from as much of their money as can occur within a limited period of time. This goal is furthered by making taxi stands and transportation either removed or difficult to find, thereby promoting the herd mentality that causes cruise ship passengers to walk en masse from Pier 35 where we landed to Pier 39, which is the infamous “Fisherman’s Wharf”.
Listening to the talk on the ship afterwards, it appears to have been an effective strategy as that’s mostly what they did – walk down to the Fisherman’s Wharf area, buy T-shirts and refrigerator magnets and come back to the ship. Woo-woo!
Our San Francisco Experience
We didn’t do none o’ that stuff. Instead, we’d been working with our friend Paul (who Eddie and I met last year through www.couchsurfing.com when we were here) for him to play tour guide. He’d engaged his friend and neighbor Keith to act as driver for us, and they’d picked up a big van to carry all of us around the City. They’re both long-term residents and knew all the cool places to go that weren’t populated by tourists. Thus, we had curbside pickup and were whisked away from the TCA.
The first part of the trip, of course, had to include a closer view of the Golden Gate Bridge. We rode through the park, around the Presidio (a former military base that’s now home to lots of not-for-profit entities) and up onto the bridge. You really can’t get a concept of the scale from the pictures; it is so gorgeous and massive. After we crossed over, instead of stopping on the right hand side at the visitor information center, we took a left and went to the old military escarpment where there used to be cannons and things to guard the harbor. What an incredible view! The bridge looks close enough to reach out and touch, even though it’s actually a couple of miles away. You begin to get a sense of the complexity of San Francisco there, because you can see a lot of the different neighborhoods and how the houses and buildings lay out.
After going even further up the mountain on that side of the Bridge, we turned around and came back across ($6.00 toll during non-peak hours) and started getting drive-by tidbits as we passed some things that were on the way to somewhere else but didn’t warrant getting out of the Van. We saw the Ghiridelli Chocolate factory, which is no longer a chocolate factory, and also the birthplace of Levi jeans. They also provided great stuff about “colorful characters” that live in San Francisco, like “Camo Man”, who disguises himself and wears leaves and branches while hiding in the hedge along where the tourists come. He then jumps out and screams at them, they (after their hearts start beating) think it’s funny and give him tips.
Probably not the career path that his mother had in mind, but if it works and he’s happy, what the heck.
There are 43 hills in San Francisco. I suspect that we climbed most of them at one point or the other. As the day wore on, there seemed to be a direct correlation between the number of birthdays one had and the desire to see a particular site up close as opposed to remaining in the van.
We did stops at a couple of the expected tourist locations. We not only went to see Lombard Street, reputed to be the “curviest street in the U.S.”, but we RODE DOWN IT IN A FORD MAXI-VAN. Did I mention that Keith was an excellent driver and never got flustered? We needed to turn around – he’d make a perfect 3-point turn on a street with a 45 degree slope. No problem. At the bottom we stopped for pics and then went off to find T-shirts. After all, we are tourists when you get right down to it. Instead of hitting the typical outlets, though, they took us to some really funky T-shirt places in Haight-Ashbury (birth of the hippie movement).
Eddie and I found great shirts. One place, in particular, is called the Upper Playground. They’ve taken original artwork, primarily by street or graffiti artists, and transformed it into T-shirt stuff. It’s very avante guard and very cool. The kids, being young and from North Carolina, were leaning more towards wanting “I ♥ SF” and opted out.
After going through the Haight, we did the ultimate San Francisco tourist thing, we rode a cable car. A long ways. Incidentally, Mark Twain once said something along the lines of, “The coldest winter I ever experienced was one summer spent in San Francisco”. That was what we were experiencing as well. It was sweatshirts for most everybody, although we did wear shorts. In the van it wasn’t so bad. Hanging on the side of the California Line Cable Car, ($5.00, one way) though, it got a bit brisk, especially since it was post-5:00 p.m. and we were in the shadows of the tall buildings. It was pretty cool, though. I took video of the ride – unfortunately, the ship’s connection is so slow that it’s simply not possible to put it on here, especially at $.55 a minute for internet time. Getting pics uploaded is hard enough at times.
After the Haight we went through China Town. Didn’t stop, because we were running out of time, but did make the dash through in the van. We ended up being dropped off back where we started at Pier 35 and made our way back in time to change for dinner at 8:30. Given that we’d never stopped to eat or anything since we left at 2:00, we were all ready to eat.
Monday Dinner
We have a great waiter at dinner. His name is Lyall (I think I misspelled it earlier) and he’s from India. He’s bonded very well with the kids, remembers all of our names pretty well already, and started doing tricks while we were waiting today. The second one was pretty cool – he took toothpicks, bent them in half, and made a flower that would move into a star if you knew what to do. Nope – I ain’t tellin’. But Caleb has decided that he needs to start writing down bar tricks for future reference.
Wait staff on cruise ships usually do something kind of corny on different nights. Last night, they sang the Italian song “Oh Sol o Mio” (which I’ve probably misspelled terribly, but you know what I mean) – in 37 different accents. They’re not ready for American Idol, or even Britain’s Got Talent, but it was cute when they paraded through and everyone was clapping.
Dinner ended with the announcement that we would be going under the Golden Gate Bridge again shortly, so we made our way up to the top to watch that at night and from the other direction. That lasted about 10 minutes, until we realized that it was too cold to stand and we could go to the bar on 14 and watch from inside while having a drink. This seemed like a much better option
The Promenade
There’s a big promenade down the middle of this ship (fully enclosed on level 5 – think “inside mall.” It’s like a short main street (a block long or so) with shops and bars on either side, except without the panhandlers. Mom and Dad’s room looks out onto it at one end. They do parades and other events in there at night.
Monday night’s event was “Music of the 70’s” street party. I think the kids were somewhat surprised that we knew the motions to “YMCA” when it started playing (of course, the Village People were up on a bridge across the street leading the crowd – you can’t have 70’s music without THOSE costumes!). Their surprise turned to either amazement or embarrassment, it’s hard to tell which, when we started DOING the motions as well. Some things just happen automatically if you’re of a certain age.
With that Eddie and I went off to bed and left the kids to enjoy the street dance. Mom and Dad got separated and lost some time after dinner and before we went under the Bridge, and Bobbie Jean opted to go to the room right after dinner and watch the bridge recede from her balcony.
It was definitely not the experience other cruise members had in San Francisco. We saw lots of things that are well off the tourist track, and Paul and Keith were great at providing tidbits and other information that we wouldn’t have gotten from the typical tour guide.
At the beginning of the tour, Paul warned us that every day was Halloween in San Francisco, and we should therefore keep our eyes open for the unexpected and unusual. He said that he knew he’d become somewhat jaded when over the weekend he saw a group of about 15 nude bicyclists travelling through town. The jaded part comes from the fact that it took him a few minutes to realize that this was unusual, and then later when it didn’t occur to him to tell anyone else, because the event wasn’t sufficiently newsworthy.
This is an alternate universe.
The rumor has been around almost since San Francisco was built that it was a part of the original lost continent of Atlantis, and that people who are drawn there and live there were Atlanteans in a former life. There’s definitely a different feel; it’s very California, not especially rushed. For some reason, Paul decided that Taylor was an Atlantean, too, although we’re not sure why. Taylor did seem to connect with the location, though. If he does and decides that’s his destiny, that’s great. Our goal is to encourage the kids to look at life outside of Hickory and follow your dream, whatever it is.
