tealin | Things I Have Learned in San Francisco

1. If you want to get on a cable car, you should either go to a terminus or wait for a weekday.

2. There's a surprisingly shallow sandbar a way out from the coast and waves break on it! That's cool.

3. When the morning or evening sun isn't reflecting off the Golden Gate Bridge in a photogenic way, it is actually quite a dark red.

4. Golden Gate Park is not connected to the bridge, but is neat.

5. Things generally look awesome, probably because SF didn't consistently throw out everything over twenty years old, unlike some West Coast cities I could name; it has Flavour, and that flavour is neither Shiny nor Cardboard.

6. Joseph Conrad Square is actually a triangle.

7. This city has two science museums. TWO! No wonder it's so fantastic.

8. If every tourist trap is crowded beyond reason, the Maritime Museum is still manageable. And cool. Even when the main museum building is closed and the Balclutha is in drydock. The model of the clipper Champion of the Sea in the visitors' centre is worth a visit too.

9. The granite retaining wall on Pine and Mason is all that is left of the Hopkins Mansion, which was destroyed by fire. (yes, that fire.)

10. San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle were the first three big cities on the West Coast because they were the only places where marine commerce could get inland in any significant way; Seattle has Puget Sound, Portland has the Columbia River, and San Francisco has the bay (which goes on and on) and the rivers that drain the Central Valley.

Actually photos of the Eureka, former ferryboat. There were a lot of cool old cars on the car deck but I didn't get photos of them (yet). Most of these felt like old photos even when I was standing in them, so I obliged and aged them up a bit using my wondrous modern technology. Oh the irony! My belly shakes with merriment.

I admit a great deal of the joy I extracted from this ship was related to how exactly it matches the Martinez in the first chapter of The Sea Wolf.