Suitably full, we made our way down to Pier 39 to see the sea-lions that hang out there. Their noise has to be experienced - somewhere between barking and honking, and lots of laddish pushing each other around too. (I say laddish because almost all of them are males, apparently.) They don't stop all night, and we can even hear them from our hotel in the quieter hours.
Also down by the piers I went to look at the fishing boats. As Tom will tell you, I take pictures of fishing boats at every opportunity. It took me a while to realise that the "Dungeness crab" on almost every restaurant menu was the name of the local species of crab, not crab imported from Dungeness back home in Kent.
Next stop, Lombard Street. Famed for being the "crookedest street", and only driveable from the top down. Most cars in the picture are actually parked in residents' parking bays.
Seen from a distance there's a better sense of scale.
No trip to SF would be complete without riding on the cable cars. Definitely an experience, but perhaps not the most comfortable or quickest form of transport.
If nothing else, our treks by cable car and on foot showed just how steep some of the hills in SF are ... in this view you could just imagine Steve McQueen speeding up the hill in his Ford Mustang in the film "Bullitt".
One of our more quirky stops was the Musée Mecanique - a collection of slot machines and arcade games dating back over a hundred years. The older ones would have been found in fairgrounds and seaside arcades in the early 20th century. Some of the more modern ones brought back memories from school youth club in the 1980s and pubs back in the 1990s. This is one of the older ones!
Steve quickly rediscovered his video game skills here. Tom thought the graphics were poor!
On the move again; this time it was trams and not cable cars.
Finally, we climbed Telegraph Hill and went up the Coit Tower. There were views in every direction, including this one of the Golden Gate Bridge.
No comments:
Post a Comment