Our round the world trip (28): three icons in San Francisco
Our last day of the stop-over in San Francisco and the final day of our amazing round the world holiday – Day 29 (Tuesday) – began with another Argonaut Hotel breakfast. You order a ham & cheese omelette and you receive an omelette twice the size of any in Europe (they use three eggs) plus fried potatoes and a couple of slices of toast. Is it any wonder that so many Americans are obese?
Today we managed to experience three icons of San Francisco: a cable car, Golden Gate Park, and Alcatraz Island.
The San Francisco cable car network is the last manually operated cable car system in the world. Of the 23 lines that were created between 1873-1890, three still operate and one of them starts and finishes round the corner from the Argonaut Hotel, so we paid our US$ 6 a piece and took the Powell & Hyde line. As it rises up Hyde Street, you get a great view of Alcatraz in the bay and then you pass the head of the crooked part of Lombard Street. Turning into Washington Street, you pass the Cable Car Museum, before turning into Powell Street and proceeding through Union Square all the way down to Market Street.
As fun as the sights when riding the cable car are the sounds: the ever-present whirring of the cables, the periodic manipulation of the grip lever, the regular sounding of the bell, and the constant calls of the conductor: “All the way in – shoulder to shoulder … Hold on folks, goin’ downhill … New riders? … Union Square, anyone?”
From Market Street, we took a taxi to Golden Gate Park which is even larger than Central Park in New York: over 3 miles long east to west and half a mile wide north to south. We asked the Ethiopian cab driver to drop us off at the De Young Museum. At first, Roger was disorientated: the museum he used to visit in 1970 has been competed destroyed and replaced by a new one opened in 2005 and the exhibits he remembered have been relocated to a completely different museum. But then we found that, since it was the first Tuesday of the month, admission was free and the special exhibition had a reduced fee.
While we were at the museum, there was the sounding of the earthquake alarm system which is tested throughout San Francisco at noon on the first Tuesday of every month. The city was devastated by the earthquake of 1906 and seriously damaged by one in 1989, so there is always the threat of a natural disaster and a fear of “the big one”.
The special exhibition was a collection of Dutch Golden Age engravings and paintings including works from the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague (which Vee & Roger had visited on a trip to the Netherlands). The top draw of the exhibition was the famous Vermeer painting “The Girl With The Pearl Earring”. Also we enjoyed viewing a permanent collection entitled “Art Of The Americas” which ranged from the Aztecs to the Inuits. The views from the Hamon Tower and a visit to the cafe rounded off an excellent visit.
Trips to Alcatraz are often – as on this week – fully booked days in advance, but we got to the island this afternoon as part of our 48 hour sightseeing package. Starting from Pier 33 on The Embarcadero, it is a 15-minute ferry ride to the island which served as a federal penitentiary for 29 years until it was closed in 1963. Infamous inmates included Al “Scarface” Capone and Robert “The Birdman” Stround.
We took the audio tour of the Cell Blocks B & C (336 cells for the “general population”) and D Block (42 cells for segregated prisoners) and tried out one of the tiny cells for size. Having seen movies like “The Bird Man Of Alcatraz”, “Escape From Alcatraz” and “The Rock”, it was eerie to walk the blocks and contemplate the terrible isolation that such incarceration must have involved.
We had barely 15 minutes back at our hotel to freshen up for an early dinner with our dear American friends Art & Lynn Shostack who have very recently relocated from the East Coast to the West Coast. Art is a prolific author who is currently working on his 35th book which is about the unusual occasions of kindness shown by Holocaust victims to one another.
For our meal, we returned to the seafood venue of last night’s dinner and found that, since this time we had booked, the menu given to us was headed “McCormick & Kuleto’s San Francisco welcomes the Darlington party!” Roger & Vee had enjoyed last night’s clam chowder so much, we started with it again. Then Vee had jumbo shrimp scampi sautéed served over linguini, while Roger went outside his comfort zone and tried the San Francisco cioppino with crab, mussels, clams, squid, rockfish, scallop & prawns. As Lynn put it, the immensely affable evening was “the capstone” to a magnificent holiday.