Sunday my friend and I went on a tour of Alcatraz and then hit downtown San Francisco. I had originally tried to get my hands on tickets to the late-night Alcatraz tour on Monday, but with it being President’s Day weekend, it was a little busier than I had originally anticipated.
Sunday morning we took the BART over to San Francisco and I was finally able to see what Berkeley and Oakland looked like in the daytime. After getting off at the Embarcadero, we took a streetcar down the pier to catch the ferry for the island. The streetcars were all originals from anywhere between 1804 and the mid 1970s. I rode a few of them while I was out there, but none older than about the 1940s.
The trip to Alcatraz included an audio tour of the jailhouse, which was pretty interesting.
One of the things that surprised me a bit was D Block, which was the solitary section of the jail. C Block (apparently there were no A and B Blocks) cells looked tiny compared to the D Block cells, although the solitary confinement ones looked to be the worst.
There were some good views of the city and the bridge from the island, including one from the top of the stairs headed into the recreation yard.
The tour ended in the cafeteria, where the narrator made sure to point out canisters of tear gas that were mounted in the ceiling in case a riot broke out in the caf. They were never used, and hopefully they were emptied at some point.
After we got back from the island we wandered down the pier some more to Pier 39, which was the start of the touristy portion of the San Francisco pier. You know it’s a tourist haven when they’ve got a Bubba Gump and a dozen t-shirt shops. We stopped to take a look at the sea lions that like to perch on the barges tied up to one of the piers.
After wandering through the tourist zone we grabbed lunch at a food truck named The Codmother. This was to be my first food truck and fish and chips experience, and damn was it good. Definitely worth the half-hour wait for the food. After that we did some more walking in an attempt to digest the massive amount of fried food we had just eaten, and wandered over towards Ghirardelli Square.
Before returning to Berkeley we stopped in at the Ferry Building, which was a huge indoor market. At the very end of that market I discovered Sur la Table, which is like a Williams-Sonoma on steroids. Never have I lamented not having extra room in my luggage more.
We went back to Berkeley and started heading up one of the steeper hills to my friend’s place (there is no flat route there). My friend dared me to run up the hill, betting that I couldn’t make it. He was wrong. This is a shot from the top of the hill:
Later that night we took his Jetta up the hills to Grizzly Point, which gave us some good views of Berkeley and the bay area. My friend played around with his tripod and a few different lenses while he did some extended exposure shots. The shot taken from my Evo is first; his is second:
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