Northern California - August 19, 2017



Woke up early and got on the road for San Francisco. Rt. 1 was closed, so we had to take a detour on the Panoramic Highway. It was a steep, windy, 15 mph road, complicated by cyclists crawling up and bombing down. Evie got carsick.

Eventually, we made it to San Francisco. Parked near Fisherman's Wharf, and walked to the closest cable car terminus.


It  took a long time to get on, and it was packed.


But so fun!



We got off in Chinatown and walked to a place to see how fortune cookies were made.





Dim sum for lunch, at supposedly the first dim sum restaurant in the US. It was good, but not as good as New York, and more expensive. No carts!




Then off to the Cable Car Museum, which Evie said wasn't really a museum (the way Fern Canyon wasn't really a hike), because it was interesting. 



The actual mechanism that pulls the cars through the city


More walking up and down hills...


To the SCRAP escape room on Polk Street, where we tried the 8 Suspects game ... and failed. I had a bad feeling when we found out the escape rate was only 5%, but as David said, there was no reason we shouldn't have been among that 5%. We averaged more than one degree per person, even with three kids. We got pretty close, but there were some interesting psychological pitfalls that tripped us up -- the tendency of some of us (ahem) to hoard information, the lack of a leader to get everyone in line, the effect of time pressure, the disinclination to start from zero again, which caused us to ignore critical information. This puzzle was more about teamwork than any other puzzle we've done so far.


But it was still fun.


After not-escaping, we walked to the Embarcadero and grabbed a quick dinner at the Alcatraz pier, then set off on the boat for the night tour.

Too many shrimp poppers for Evie.


Alcatraz was fascinating.

Prisoner intake area.
The audio tour was so good, it was a highlight of the whole trip.

The prisoners kept themselves from going crazy with things like Auto-Bridge! We still have the one Jonathan gave us somewhere. Good to know we'll have some skills if we ever end up in prison.






The tour included audio reenactments of riots, escape attempts, and the Battle of Alcatraz. It was all done in stereo, so it sounded as if things were happening all around us. Evie said it was scary.


Rapt children.
I kept a close eye on Evie, because there were so many people, and he had a tendency to go charging off, even when the tour said things like "Walk slowly down the corridor..." He was so engaged in what he was hearing that when each segment ended, it was like he woke up from a nap. He would look around like, "Where did everybody go? Am I trapped in this prison?"

Afterward, we had a nice view of the skyline as we returned to San Francisco. David took great pictures, including some from the drive home at a viewpoint on the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Panoramic Highway again going home ... blech.




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