As you may have gathered from the previous post, if we hadn’t both really wanted to visit Alcatraz Island, we probably would have skipped the hassle of making an urban stop in San Francisco. However, Alcatraz entirely met our expectations, and we spent the day in San Francisco with Tom’s cousin Vincent (actually second cousin, but who’s counting?) and had a wonderful time. We also learned a few things, like how to put rapid transit cards on our phones so all we had to do was tap them at the gate to get on the ferry. We were quite proud of ourselves that we got to the ferry on time, effortlessly tapped our phones and got into the boarding area, and enjoyed a pleasant half hour ride taking in the scenery on our way to the San Francisco terminal.
We arrived at the terminal around 8:30, and trotted ourselves down to Pier 33 to get the other ferry to Alcatraz Island. Of course we were early, but the early ferries don’t fill, so they put us on the earlier ferry and we arrived on Alcatraz Island before 10am.
Although some areas of the island are closed due to renovations, for the most part you are just turned loose to wander at will. You can get on any ferry going back to San Francisco, so you can take as much or as little time as you like.
A self-guided audio tour of the cell block is included in your ferry ticket. The tour is very well done, and tells stories of things that happened at Alcatraz over the years, including escape attempts. And it looks just like it looks in the movies!
This is one of the cells where one of the escape attempts took place.
In addition to the prison history, the island is also well known for its natural history. These cormorants come to the island for their breeding season every year, along with a number of other bird species. A park ranger volunteer had a spotting scope set up so you could see these cormorants displaying their blue throats in their courtship ritual.
We left Alcatraz Island and went back to the mainland to meet Vincent for a guided walk around the city and lunch. While we waited, we went to Pier 39 to see the sea lions, but we only saw a lot of people. When Vincent arrived, we walked up the hill through the alley stairways to Coit Tower. The elevator was out of service that day, so we climbed an additional 14 flights to get to the top, but the views were well worth it. It helped that we had a city resident with us, because he told us what we were looking at from every window. Vincent was so good that at one point the docent came over to talk to him, and we, along with everyone standing around us, learned more about San Francisco and its history than we knew there was to learn.
We left Coit Tower and wandered the hilly streets, looking at the architecture as it changed between neighborhoods. We walked through the Italian section of the city, passed China Town, and wandered in the business district where we walked in the elevated park created by SalesForce over the bus terminal. Somewhere in there we stopped for a delicious noodle lunch, although I think the restaurant was in the Italian section even though the food was more Asian. But whatever, it was delicious and the restaurant was quiet so we could talk, and talk, and talk.
We ended the tour and headed back to the ferry terminal to catch the 5:15 ferry back to Larkspur. Although we’d both been anxious about visiting the city both because we’re not city people, and because of bad things we’d read about San Francisco in particular, we had a completely enjoyable day. We know we only saw the tourist sections of the city, but it was clean, quiet for a city, and not overly crowded. We contemplated adding a day to our RV park reservation and spending another day doing tourist things, but ultimately decided that we’d had enough city and would head for Sacramento in the morning to catch another state capitol.