Outing #9: Tourists in San Francisco Part 1!

We have been to San Francisco numerous times and taken guests there to show them around as well.  We have often seen these tour buses.  We thought it might make a fun outing to ride one and see what we could learn about this interesting city!

Here are a few of the sights we saw and things we learned:

Fisherman's Wharf including Pier 39 is the second most visited place in California!
(Disneyland is first)

The Transamerica Tower has been the tallest building in San Francisco for decades but it will be in second place when the Salesforce Tower is completed later this year!

(First two photos show Transamerica, second two show Salesforce)

View coming across the Bay Bridge:

Speaking of skyscrapers, there are at least 100 ships buried underneath San Francisco especially in the Financial District where there are lots of skyscrapers.

 The ships brought  prospectors to San Francisco during the California Gold Rush only to be mostly abandoned even by their captains who wanted to try their luck in the gold fields.  They were later covered up by landfill as the city grew like crazy in the late 1800's.

 San Francisco is considered the second hilliest city in the world, next to La Paz, Bolivia.  And some of those hills are steep.  Look how steep this is!

There are even stairs instead of regular sidewalks.

Lombard Street has a section near the top of Russian Hill with a steep hill that made it dangerous for most vehicles so in the 1920's they transformed it into a switchback with eight sharp turns.  Our bus could not go down Lombard Street so they just pointed it out from a distance.  But they did tell us this:

350 cars per HOUR go down the crookedest street in the world!

Another thing they told us about were the cable cars which are another famous part of San Francisco.  I enjoyed sitting near a couple from another country and obviously their first time to San Francisco.  When this cable car passed in front of us they were so excited to see it and kept pointing it out to each other--sort of like seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time.

 Our tour took us across the Golden Gate Bridge and back.   It was my most unique crossing, and I've been across many, many times.  Here's why: We were sitting on the top of the bus where it was open.  The bridge was COMPLETELY fogged in.  As we crossed and felt the wind and the wetness of the fog we could not see any part of the bridge except for a little of the road ahead.  Could not see any part of the towers or cables or out to the bay or the ocean.  It was surreal!

Later when we crossed over ourselves and it wasn't quite as foggy, we parked in a view lot for Dan to get on a conference call.  For an hour I watched numerous people, many of them probably their first and only time, taking selfies with the bridge in the background.  Here are a few that I caught with my camera.  From what I could hear all of these people were speaking a language that was not English. 

 

This was their one chance to have a remembrance of their visit to The City

and this is what was in the background--barely a bit of the bridge and no skyline of San Francisco:

So glad we got to wish Elizabeth a Happy Birthday from her birthplace!

 

To be continued...