Nick’s world tour

Now onto the final stop of the world tour, a short one hour flight up the west coast from the City of Angels, to the Bay City.

A friendly, laid back, arty city by the sea. Built on endless rollercoaster hills, next to the Pacific. The two major sights are the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.

Understimating distances and times, I walked an incredibly long way from Downtown, where I was staying on Union Square all the way out the bridge and across it. With a further bit of inspired map reading I saw that there was a ferry back to the city, but didn’t realise it was from the next town, which was a bit further round the coast. Almost running the last two miles, I missed the boat and had to wait for an hour and a bit in Sausisto, a pretty little town full of honeysuckle, and tree lined streets of deli’s and antique shops. Could have been a worse place to be stuck!

Back in the city, dodging the street cars and trams, and persistent beggars, there are lots of little neighbourhoods to explore: North Beach, Little Italy and Chinatown and the waterfront with the famous but oh-so-tacky (and pretty disappointing in my opinion) Fishermans Wharf- now seemingly a construction site.

Finally there’s Alcatraz which is very popular and as I found out, you can’t just walk up and buy a ticket, even mid week in low season. Fortunately I have one more day left (not wishing to give away that I didn’t want to waste my last morning writing my final installments!) and I can go tomorrow morning. I imagine that it will be very interesting, the prison built on an island about 1mile from shore. Apparently no-one ever escaped because of the freezing water and occasional sharks. No further review necessary!

And then god-willing I’ll be running pretty much all the way back to jump in the shuttle bus to the airport, to catch the last possible flight home before my ticket expires at 2359 on the 14th……

My final night was spent in a bar, with a girl I met on Fiji and one of her mates, who is also leaving tomorrow. It is now starting to hit that I’m leaving! After walking them back, I pass a 24 hour diner, and decide to spend a while in there. I’m not hungry or thirsty, but I’ve never been in a 24 hour diner at 1am before, and it’ll be a while before the opportunity presents itself again. So why not?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.