San Francisco

We checked in to the Travelodge at the airport in San Francisco. The reasoning was that we may as well be near the drop off point for the rental car, and this way we would avoid having to deal with city centre traffic. In the morning we dropped the car off and went into the airport to sort out the re-validation of our tickets. What should have been a quick job ended up taking ages. The Virgin desks don’t open until 12:30, and the ticketing desk not until 13:00. That meant we had to wait around to see the ticketer. We had asked another of the desk staff, who checked and then took our tickets away, but she returned them telling us to wait.

After we had the little sticker allowing us to fly we caught the BART into San Francisco. We’d done a little bit of homework and pre-booked a hotel right next to the BART station, The Powell. It was a little more expensive than some of the other hotels we’d looked at, but was worth it. The room was really nicely and newly refurbished and the hotels location couldn’t have been better, literally in the middle of everything and right next to the cable-car turnout.

We took advantage of the 3 day MUNI public transport pass, very good value at $18, considering a single cable-car ride costs $5. The cable-car’s were cool. It was fun watching the drivers and conductors turning them manually by pushing them round on a circle in the road. Old school. The first car we took was full inside so we had to hang on the exterior platform which was cool. Every time I turned and looked at Gemma she had a massive grin on her face. At one point we went rather fast down a very steep street which was quite exhilarating. We spent a nice couple of days charging round the city on the cable-cars and sometimes on foot.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern art confirmed my suspicions that modern art is rubbish. Not all of it was crap, some was interesting. We saw a video installation of Turkish people singing karaoke Smiths songs. I quite enjoyed that.