San Francisco: Day 1

For Ben and my ten year wedding anniversary, we wanted to go on a trip. We had initially looked into Hawaii which was overwhelming and a tad bit more money than we wanted to spend. Ben and I have always wanted to go to Alcatraz, so we starting looking into San Francisco. The more we looked into it the more excited we got and thus how our trip to San Francisco began.

Ben and I drove the girls up to my parents house, and they watched them for us. My Mom took us to the airport on a Friday morning and by Friday early afternoon we were in San Francisco. We decided to take public transportation so we would not have to deal with parking and driving around the city. We had an interesting ride on the Bay area rapid transport (the BART) from the airport to San Francisco. It made me start questioning our trip and if we had made the right decision. There was a man a few rows up from us with his jacket hood over his head. The BART travels underground for a portion of the time and while underground it makes an eerie high pitch sound that felt to me as if it got progressively louder the longer we were on it. The man with his jacket hood over his head sat rubbing his head over and over while mumbling and moaning in a deep, raspy voice. This moaning progressively got louder along with noise from the BART. At one point a girl sitting across from him had had enough and told him to knock it off. The man ripped off his jacket hood and the two began to scream at each other up until the man's stop where he stood up and jumped off. Luckily this incident was not a reflection of our trip. 

We did meet many homeless people and got asked multiple times for spare change, which we were expecting to happen. One man who liked to hang outside of our hotel liked to swear and insult people, telling us we were idiots as a tactic to get spare charge. Not sure how well that was working out for him? Another time while Ben and I were waiting for a cable car, we shared a hug, and a man walking past us told us to go back to Italy, no one wanted to see our European romance. Aside from these few moments, that made our trip very interesting, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and had fun exploring San Francisco.

 

 After checking into our hotel Friday afternoon, we had nothing planned so we decided to go out walking and explore San Francisco. First we headed over to China Town and window shopped.

 While exploring we happened to walk across the Grace Cathedral, an Episcopal church that welcomes multiple denominations. When we went inside a man was playing beautiful music and a spiritual labyrinth walk was taking place. I had never heard of a labyrinth walk and it was odd to observe. I learned it is an exercise to allow someone to recenter, allow contemplation, and to pray.

 

Nothing in San Francisco is very old because of the earthquake and resulting, devastating fire that broke out in 1906. The fire lasted several days and destroyed approximately 80% of the town. The original Episcopal church was destroyed in the fire and a family donated their land for a new cathedral to be built. The Grace Cathedral opened in 1934.

We followed our map of San Francisco over to the Cable Car Museum. The San Francisco Cable Car system is the last working system of its kind in the world, it was built in 1872. They had on display the only remaining car, Clay Street Hill, from the first cable car company.

This is a working museum, it houses the cable car engine/power house, which keeps the cables in constant motion. Each cable car has a "grip man" on board that operates the grip. This allows the cable car to move by gripping the underground cable. Only three cable car lines remain today.

We were able to descend below the junction of Washington and Mason streets and view a large cavern where the cables are routed out to the street.

Ben and I were able to ride on the cable cars twice during our trip. It was fun to stand on the side of the cable car and ride down the steep hills of San Francisco.