We are very excited today - it's our night time tour of Alcatraz - ooooooo scary! Before then we have a lot to take in. Yesterday we decided to get a hop on hop off bus ticket to go to the Golden Gate Bridge - oh my days it was windy - so windy my hair hurt and Daniel thought his glasses would whip off his face! It was a little foggy but cleared up on route. It was great, the bus took us over the bridge and back again - don't know about cycling it in that wind though.
We thought on the way back we would get off at the Palace of Fine Arts built for the Expo that SF hosted. It was very fancy and old, very much like British venues. After some photo snaps we headed back to the bus...and waited...and waited...and the bus...never turned up! What! Where was it? The guy said one would be along - he lied!! We ended up getting the Muni bus to Fort Mason which was a pleasant surprise. A nice walk through the park where we witnessed a bicycle crash of two French tourists - a little closer to the edge and they would have been goners!
We made it back to the Wharf and had some more fish - well it is Fisherman's Wharf so really we should! This time sole and jumbo shrimp. This fuelled us enough for shopping!!
We thought this would be a good evening to visit China town - it was virtually deserted. Felt very different to London which is manic even first thing in the morning. We did manage to find an awesome restaurant and had a delicious meal. It even had the Peking duck similar to China. I was very impressed. We just wondered why it was so dead - were American's scared of it after dark? It was Friday night, it should have been heaving!
Saturday itself was dedicated to one thing and one thing only - Alcatraz - however...it wasn't til 6pm so how to fill our day, hmmm. Well we decided to visit the park. On route we saw picturesque landscapes like the Painted Ladies. The park itself was huge - so much so we only saw a tiny part of it! They had a music festival like Leeds/Reading in one part. We headed towards the Academy of Sciences which was cool - inside they had a small scale rainforest to walk through, not great in the canopy with birds and butterflies flying round your head! They also had a planetarium with a good earthquake show with some great facts, though hard to remember now - should have took notes! There was also an aquarium - loads in one place. It is a research place which you can see bits of with a museum added on.
The one thing we haven't yet tried is the dungeness crab so after we headed to a crab house for an early tea before boarding for Alcatraz. Now although its a night tour it's not actually dark at 6pm so at the minute we are just like all the day visitors...things soon change. It's quieter, there are more sections of the prison open and you have a guided tour up to the cell block. You still have the audio tour but after there are talks by rangers and a demonstration of the cell doors opening and closing. As the sun went down it became spooky. There were times where there were only us on a certain cell block. And the hospital, well that was probably the scariest place, just like in the Alcatraz programme - which I still think they shouldn't have cancelled - deserted, dark, only lit by one solitary lantern. There was one room in complete darkness, with a tiny opening to look through - you couldn't see anything and were too scared to stick our heads in so we put the camera through with the flash on - it was a bathroom - not in use and still like it was back in the day. We also got to go round the kitchen and had a talk by the ranger on the library about one of the prisoners, his friend later in life. A little personal insight. The cell doors demonstration was loud and echoed round the empty prison. I say empty, tomorrow is their anniversary so former guards, kids of guards and prisoners are staying in the prison tonight - one prisoner in his former cell! Good luck to those!
We get to leave on the last boat with the rangers in the pitch black. The night tour was definitely not to be missed and felt much more reminiscent of the true Alcatraz. The only grievance is we didn't have time for the shop before the shut it - oh well!
This nicely rounds off our trip to SF - next stop LA!
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