Monday, February 02, 2015

Sunday 1st February 2015- A day around San Francisco

After having some Skype calls with family and looking at a slightly confused little Katherine, don’t think she fully understood who was on the screen, we went back to the Lori’s Diner, where we went yesterday, for breakfast.
Jen's short stack
Yesterday were trying to purchase this Wi-Fi unit and we had discovered that another Radio Shack, which turned out to be slightly out of town, had one and so a taxi was the only way to go. We arrived at this slightly out of town store and they the unit in stock and the girl went to a lot of trouble to set it up for us. In view of the location we had asked the taxi to wait which was a good move otherwise to get a taxi from here would be difficult to say the least. Setting up the unit took slightly longer than expected, you see we don’t live in the USA and have a ZIP code which without can be a pain so the store used their own details.
From there we headed down the waterfront piers and found that several of the old piers had been converted in to cafe's and specialised food shops with a really mixed bag of food from Chinese Dim Sum to specially prepared burgers (well this is America). We walked along for a while and listen to a couple of old rockers who played two guitars and they were really very good. We then took a tram rise down to Fisherman’s Wharf and wandered around for a while and eventually found a highly recommended by Trip Advisor seafood restaurant where we subsequently dined on fresh Dungeness crab and pacific cod washed down with half a bottle of Californian Chardonnay, all of this while looking out over the harbour where the container ships were coming and going. In the harbour of course are the famous sea lions which have now been given their own dock area for them to enjoy.
In past years there was strong consideration to moving them away but it attracted so much negative publicity whilst at the same time drawing thousands of people to the area that the local council decided to allow them to stay unmolested. We continued walking for a while and then headed for Safeway to purchase the cereal for tomorrow morning breakfast, we don’t want to spend loads of cash on the full English or equivalent as it’s also not healthy.
A cable car ride back to the Hotel where we arrived just before 18.00 and after a well-earned shower we watched some rubbish American TV programs about solving murders  and ‘American Greed’ about this guy from Connecticut who ran a Ponzi scheme which lost hundreds of millions of dollars for the average guy in the street, bastard.
An evening of blogging and sorting out the photos and beginning to giver consideration as to how we get from here to Austin.
We mentioned yesterday that we might go to Alcatraz and/or take an open top bus ride but our 3 day bus pass covers all local transport including the famous San Francisco cable cars so not open top bus tour but might go the California Scientific Museum out in the Golden Gate Park tomorrow, but the decision will be tomorrow.