City by the Bay

Ok, so I’m on the plane for (edit:most of) this post. The plane is still on the ground but we’re about to set off on our way home to Sydney, I’m pretty happy that I paid the extra for the exit row. It wasn’t cheap, but it’s nice to be able to stretch. The Dreamliner has an individual PowerPoint even for economy which is nice.

So Thursday, the journey to San Francisco and some tourism too – don’t you love time differences! It was an early start on Thursday, I had to be up at 5.15. I had booked a car for 5.45 and I’m glad I did that. It wasn’t cheap, but it was easy and reliable and got me to the airport without any fuss. I’m glad I got to the airport when I did though – not long after 6 for a 7.55(ish?) flight. The queue for bag drop was that long, I spend over 45 minutes waiting. In the end, I got to my gate about 5 minutes before boarding started. The JetBlue experience was as good as last time and we touched down in San Francisco about 15 minutes early.

After a short wait I got my luggage and managed to find my way to the pick up point for Uber. I got to the Mosser and apparently I arrived right at the shift change. After assuring them that I had paid for early check-in it was only about a 10 minute wait. The hotel room is probably the smallest room I’ve ever seen (photos to come in future post). It was fine – I wasn’t planning on spending a lot of time there, but more than one person and you’d be falling over yourself. I had a brief nap, it has been an early start and I didn’t get as much sleep as I wanted the night before.

Then it was time to head down to Pier 33 for my Alcatraz tour. Google public transport directions are pretty good in the US and somehow my iPhone had already told me about how to use Apple Wallet to pay so that was fairly straightforward. However, I freaked out a little when I re-read the Alcatraz booking on the way and realised I was supposed to be there half an hour before my ticketed time. Despite my attempt to stop the street car (read tram) I still overshot my stop by one. This lead to me running down the street and making it to pier 33 just under 10 minutes before my boarding time. I wasn’t the only one running late and we were able to board the ferry without problem.

The surprise on the ferry ride over was how foggy it was. Alcatraz seemed to be shrouded as I learned and you’ll see evidence of, this isn’t that uncommon in June in San Francisco. Alcatraz was fascinating. There were two main things I looked at. Firstly was the new exhibition about the native American / Indian occupation of Alcatraz. This was something I didn’t know about Alcatraz and it was really interesting to read their stories and understand it. The second major part was obviously Alcatraz as a prison. I did the audio cell tour which was amazing. At the end there was a museum about what a problem America has with incarceration and it’s more a recent phenomenon. There’s no solution but the statistic of 1 in 10 people being in prison at some point was astonishing.

We were told their was a possibility of views of the Golden Gate bridge but it was far to foggy. It was also getting cold so everyone sat on the inside of the ferry on the way home – the outside spots were no longer popular. By this time I was very tired – early start and time difference so I headed back to the hotel got some food (grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s this time) and went to bed, knowing I had an early start the next day too.