When Transportation is More or Less (than) Two Wheels

What a fun time today was. Yesterday I counted four forms of transportation to which I availed myself (motorcycle, bus, subway, cable car) and today we added three more!

In discussing my visit to the City By the Bay with my brother Tom the one point of interest I had on my must-see list was a tour of Alcatraz. I can not explain why other than to say its reputation made it irresistible to me. Like the River of No Return, The Rock was something I felt had to be explored.

So this morning Tom and I took the street car down to Embarcadero where we grabbed a coffee and a scone before wandering over to Pier 33. (Truth be told, we walked to Pier 39 before Tom realized we needed to backtrack several piers).

The street cars are a collection of vintage cars from around the world, gathered from the four corners and beautifully restored and reincarnated as glorious public transit vehicles. I did not get an exterior shot of our carriage but here is an example of one from Dallas, as well as the placard from our Italian masterpiece.

Pier 33 is the departure point for the ferry that takes people to and from The Rock. 

A short wait in line behind a couple hundred of our closest friends and we found ourselves aboard the vessel, where I was reminded of Tom's life long aversion to motion. He now has a high tech band that gives him a wrist lobotomy to distract him when on the high seas. This, along with sitting on a lower deck in the fresh air pacified his inner motion detector, while I went afore ships to take pictures.

By the time we tied up at the pier and walked the hill of stairs I had 27 8x10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what it was... (A reference to another major crime of the last fifty years - if you don't get it, just ask me sometime).

I elected to take the self guided audio tour while Tom stood by dutifully and read the placards. 

There were, to my recollection, four primary subjects that provided thematic emphasis to the audio tour - racism (they had segregated cell blocks for Blacks, Indians and others and also explained why it was so difficult to hire black guards), hard times as you can imagine, a riot that left two inmates and three guards dead but did not result in anyone escaping, and the infamous escape from Alcatraz which resulted in a population reduction of three but never gave up the answer to the question "did they survive or perish?". 

The final oratory of the audio tour was all telling:

One of the last inmates who was released when Robert F. Kennedy ordered the prison closed talked of standing on the shore in San Francisco. His words were something like "their were people everywhere, rushing here and there, everyone had a home a job, an appointment to rush to. I had nothing. I was scared to death."

Once we returned from our cruise we walked a distance to a bus stop. Tom tenaciously inquired as to the location and route number of the appropriate bus and,despite what the maps said, were able to get on a bus that delivered us to the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Give me some of that old soft shoe...

I removed my BSU ball cap to avoid watching it drift 220 feet down into the icy waters of the bay. We then took a couple pictures and strolled the 1.7 miles to the other end of the bridge. After a brief rest we walked back again and checked "walking" off on my list of modes of transportation, making seven in two days.

The bridge affords a nice panorama of the city skyline...

By this time it was 5 o'clock, so we joined thousands of people on a city bus that stopped every 500 feet to let more people on. Eventually we landed in the cradle of BART and took the high road home (this particular platform was elevated, but eventually we returned to BARTs subterranean roots.

In all we covered 28 plus miles, much of it afoot, providing a nice workout for a day on the bay.