San Francisco Trip - Day Two

Come Friday morning we have about 45 minutes between us and the Golden Gate Bridge. We found our way there and I grabbed my phone to get a picture to send to my family with the caption “the Golden Gate Bridge” and when I got the shot and looked at it there was nothing to see! Too much fog! I should have sent it anyway, it would have confused everyone but it’s what it was! Fog!

We originally thought it would have been a good idea to set up a home base so started to let the GPS lead us to the Day’s Inn on the Beach in south San Francisco but got led right to a photography spot I wanted to try to find – the Palace of Fine Arts. Free parking! It was spectacular. Then we began to meander and promptly got lost. Rick became aware of the need to fill up the car and we couldn’t find a gas station to save our lives! We finally found an edge of town that was flat and found gas for 3.91 a gallon – hey, still under $4! We maneuvered our way to Haight / Ashbury, Lombard Street (the really curvy road), shot a cable car or 2 and “the painted ladies” (no – not what you’re thinking) a set of houses kept original and painstakingly maintained. We headed toward the coast to grab a few sights I saw on the internet that turned out to be a bust, mostly due, I think, to the grey coastal sky, then made some lunch and headed towards the Fisherman’s Wharf and our one and only appointment – our trip to Alcatraz!

There’s really not a lot to say about Alcatraz that you can’t just see in the pictures that we took. It took us 2.5 hours to thoroughly shoot everything we could find. Besides the actual “grey-bar hotel” aka cellhouse, there were many other buildings including a morgue, machine shop, warden’s and guards rooming, a lighthouse, guard tower, water tower, the exercise yard and gardens, a “parade ground” that was overrun with mother and baby seagulls and therefore closed off to the public. Some buildings were mostly intact and some were just shells. There were overgrown gardens blooming everywhere and screeching baby birds and mother seagulls warning you to stay clear. Being the derelict-building-lovers that we are we had a great time!

That was the one place we ended up having to pay parking for and wouldn’t you know it – we stayed just a little over the limit on “the Rock” and our time had expired. We were sweating bullets that we’d have a ticket welcoming us on our windshield but, alas! We lucked out!

We finally headed out to get our room and found it to be in a very quiet end of town, across the street from the zoo, actually. We couldn’t get our internet to work but when we walked 2 doors down to Java Beach to have a dinner of hoagies and hefeweisen we discovered they had great wifi so I walked back and got my laptop. One last shoot attempt was atop “Twin Peaks” which gives a fantastic overview of the city but it turned out to be too foggy. The place was overrun with partying teenagers so it was just as well, I felt particularly out of place up there with all the revelers.

The rest of the story coming up next...