Day 6 - From San Francisco
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| Typical Trolley |
Our last full day as we travel home tomorrow.
We have a shuttle booked at 11:00am to take us to the
airport. Our plane is scheduled to leave
for Dallas at 1:20pm, arrive at 6:50pm and take
off for Peoria
at 8:15pm arriving at 10:15pm so we should be home by 11:30pm. Then it is off to baseball games for the
weekend.
The first tour today started at the
main and original ferry
building so we took a trolley at 8:30am and had a sweet roll at the food court
in the ferry building before joining our tour group. The tour was a 2 ½ our tour of Market Street,
which is called the street of gold because it was the main path of gold during the
goal rush era. It is also the equivalent
of 5th Avenue
in New York, Michigan
Ave in Chicago
and other great streets in major cities.
It starts were all of the railroads where originally headquartered and
includes were all of the major newspapers started.
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| Lunch |
The tour was a narrative of all of the major buildings and
how the owners contributed to the greatness of the town.
Then we had lunch at a downtown Boudin Market and had a
couple of great sandwiches with soup to warm up us.
After lunch, we hustled over to our 1:00pm tour of North Beach,
which is the Italian community. This was
a great tour as there were only 4 of us on the tour and the guide was very
knowledgeable.
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| Owned by Francis Ford Coppola |
One of the pictures is of the building housing Café Zoetrope which is owned by
Francis Ford Coppola and the top two floors are his work area. He wrote the Godfather at a coffee shop right
around the corner from this building.
Then we walked around for a little while and ended up at the
Palace Hotel. The Palace Hotel was and
still is one of the greatest hotels in
San
Francisco. See
its web site at
www.sfpalace.com to get
an idea of how beautiful this hotel is.
It was first built in 1875, partially destroyed in the 1090 earthquake
and totally restore in 1991 after the 1989 earthquake. The
Garden
Court (see the picture) has 63,000 pieces of
Iridescent Glass in its ceiling which is 12,000 square feet, one of the largest
expanses of Stained Glass in the world.
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| The Garden Court of the Palace Hotel |
We ate our best meal of the trip in their Pied Piper Bar
& Grill, which also opened in 1875.
It is also totally restored and features very dark wood and a very old
world charm. When the waiter was taking
our picture, we told him it was our anniversary and the chef made us a
wonderful dessert, on the house. It was
a wonderful dining experience – a bit of a splurge, but it is our anniversary.
About San Francisco
–
The real estate market is booming here and some think that
there could be another dot com bubble being created. The prices for the houses within the city are
incredible for what you get – three stories straight up on a 20’ wide lot and a
one car garage. No street parking and no yard all for 1
million and up!!
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| The Pied Piper Dining Room |
What also is amazing is that even at rush hour, there is
very little traffic on the streets. The
public transpiration system is really exceptional. They are also utilizing trolleys that have
been retired from service from cities from all over the world. Most of the trolleys and busses are also
electric which is good because regular gas is $4.49 a gallon!! All of the public transportation units are
clean and run well – so their system works.
There are also very few taxis on the street, which is amazing for a
major city of 800,000.
After the earthquake of 1989, they even tore down some
freeways to create more open space.
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| Dessert |
The people are very friendly, especially the drivers of the
busses, trolleys, street cars and cable cars as we rode them all – what a great
public transportation system – the best we have seen.
It is a wonderful city – would we like to live here – yes,
but not without a summer which they do not have, so it just a fun city to
visit.
Thanks for reading about our trip – see you at home or
somewhere down the road.
Ed & Barb
