Post Irony

We got a hugely generous offer from my cousin Anne, who lives near Napa, to give us a tour of the Napa Valley wine country and show us the sights and be our designated driver. We got up early and rolled down to the historic Ferry Building to catch a ferry across the bay. Unfortunately, the sunburns and the long bicycle ride from the day before left us feeling less than 100 percent. Neither one of us felt like going on a daylong-wine-drinking spree, so we were pretty low-key.

We hit the winery owned or partially owned or formerly owned by the great movie director Francis Ford Coppola. The place had quite a bit of Hollywood memorabilia on display and a bizarrely huge collection of vintage magic lanterns.

The valley is beautiful and the vineyards are very picturesque, but the sun was straight up, making outdoor photography pretty tough. Besides, I was pretty out of it due to the highly uncomfortable sun burn and I didn’t try very hard. Anne took us to a great little restaurant for lunch and we had a fun visit.

On the way back to the hotel in the mid-afternoon we passed a LEICA camera store and I had to stop in and check out the cameras I will never be able to afford. Wow. I’ve never been in a more customer-unfriendly store. All the merchandise is behind glass and the decor is pretty stark and intimidating. A few LEICA Men™ were standing around discussing how LEICA cameras were on the verge of curing cancer. The sales staff could clearly tell I was out of my element and didn’t even bother to offer any assistance.

One thing I wanted to see on this trip was Pacific Ocean waves crashing on jaggedy black rocks, so we headed down to the imaginatively named Ocean Beach on the west side of the city. It was on the trip out there that we discovered the ride-sharing service Uber™. It was a revelation. No more frustrating mass-transit rides for us. You just use a phone app to request a car and one shows up in less than five minutes. The fare comes straight of your credit card so there’s no hassle of paying the driver. Most drivers even refuse an extra tip, saying the tip is built into the fare. Uber™ was having some kind of sale in which fares were 25% off. On top of that we got a few discounts for being first-time Uber™ users. We took Uber™ cars several times during the next two days and a couple of those trips were totally free.

We wandered around the corner to the south side of the bay where we could see the western side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I had done a poor job of planning and I had it in my mind that the bridge would be closer. There’s a hiking trail that runs all the way to the bridge but it was something like two miles and we just didn’t have that in us.

We made our way down to the water’s edge and I got a few sunset/beachy/rocky photos.

Then we watched the sun sink into the Pacific Ocean. A first for us. We even caught the green flash as the sun slipped out of view.

We saw all these bike-rental outfits advertising bicycle tours of the Golden Gate Bridge and we thought it was a brilliant idea. The way it works is you pick up your bike at wherever, ride it along a dedicated bike path on the bay to the GGB, across the GGB and into Sausalito. After a couple hours of suffering Sausalito sticker shock you roll your bike onto a ferry and ride it across the bay and drop off your bike. It’s about 8 miles of bike riding. It is such a great idea that approximately 97% of tourists in the city at any one time are also doing it. At times it feels like you are in the pelaton of the Tour de France. Except you are going much, much slower. At the bike rental place I asked Gina if she thought sunscreen was in order. Despite it being light-jacket temperatures the sun was high and bright. “Nah, I don’t think so,” Gina inexplicably replied. “OK,” I replied with equal inexplicability.

We made the 5 miles to the beginning of the bridge and I had shed my jacket and could feel my tender pink arms and face sizzling. I knew by then that it was most likely going to be bad. I had been on the lookout for any kind of store that might carry sunscreen but the bike path stayed in mostly parks and residential areas, so I was SOL on that front.

Somehow I made this picture and the bike/walking path looks reasonably uncrowded. I can assure you it was not. We spent most of the time kinda straddling and walking the bikes. The pushing from behind from other riders was so intense that I didn’t feel like I could stop and really enjoy the bridge. One cool thing is that while we were on the bridge there was some kind of filming going on of racing boats in the bay. A helicopter with one of those gyroscopic cameras on the front flew under the bridge a couple of times from the ocean side capturing a big group of power boats heading under the bridge at top speed.

We finally made it across and down into Sausalito where apparently a lot of rich folks hang. We checked a marina full of huge yachts and then made our way onto the ferry. These houses are on the hillside in Sausalito overlooking the bay.

Being of the sea, I was pretty fascinated by the giant ocean-going vessels plying the waters of the bay like this one that the ferry eventually passed behind at about 100 yards.

We got a pretty great view of the ship as we passed by.

We also passed pretty close to Alcatraz. By this time we were feeling the effects of the sunburn. The last time I got burned that bad was 7 years ago in Destin when I went out into the waves and the gallons of sunscreen I had applied evidently got pounded off in the waves and I didn’t have enough sense to reapply before lounging on the beach for a couple of hours. It hurt. After we returned our bikes we didn’t even feel like going out to eat. We just stopped at a Walgreens to get premade sandwiches and sunburn medication before going back to the hotel to crash.

We kicked off day 2 by buying our three-day pass to the SF mas transit system, which includes the iconic cable cars. It was foggy and drizzly and cool enough to require a jacket.

We rode a cable car to near Fisherman’s Wharf and headed over to Pier 39 to see the famous sea lions that gather there.

The wharf area is where most of the local commercial boat traffic in the San Francisco Bay originates. Lots of fishing boats, ferries and tourist craft around.

It was also a good spot to see Alcatraz, despite the obscuring fog. We didn’t learn about the insane demand for Alcatraz tours until a couple months before our trip. By then it was too late to get a ticket. So we didn’t make it to Alcatraz. I can’t decide which photo I like better.

The wharf area is also home to the National Park Service Maritime Historical Park, which boasts several full-size historic ships.

While touring one of the ships the fog began to lift and we got our first glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Gina was more interested in the bridge than the ship.

After hanging around the wharf until well into the afternoon, we eventually made our way to the BART line headed out to the Mission District because Gina had a line on some good Mexican food. We didn’t rent a car because we planned on using the various mass transit options, but we found the city’s mass transit system sort of difficult to use. San Francisco is served by a mish-mash of regular buses, electric buses, cable cars, trolley cars, light rail, subway and even ferries. And we found that most of the time we had to walk several blocks at one or both ends of a trip. At one point we got on a light rail car powered by overhead electric lines that moseyed along a street stopping at regular stoplights. Then the train stopped and like a Transformer™ the cars retracted their electric poles and the exit steps raised up to form a level exit platform. The cars started again and dove underground and kicked on the afterburners going about 20 times faster. The next stop was on a subway platform.

After supper, as I was photographing this mural an older homeless woman came up to us and demanded a money “in the name of God.” Gina gave her a couple bucks and then she turned her guns on me, refusing to believe me when I insisted I didn’t have any cash. She pulled up her shirt to reveal a truly massive scar running down her entire torso and then pulled up one of her pant legs to show another giant scar. That was enough for me, but she also showed us a scar on her arm. I tried to give her $5 bill and she saw I had a $10 and she decided she wanted it “in the name of God” even if she had to make change. She was going to give me $7 in change and she didn’t care that that would leave her with less money than if she just kept the $5. I ended up giving her the $10 and she finally wandered off. She wasn’t the only super aggressive panhandler we encountered. Gina was full-on accosted by a man who pelted her with profanity when she didn’t any attention to him. He wouldn’t let up and I finally ended up nearly screaming at him to back off, which he did.

The downtown area has some nice buildings.

The view from our hotel window.