Year 2 - Day 198 - July 18

 When we decided we were coming to SF, tops on both our lists was a trip to Alcatraz. Tickets are available 3 months in advance online, so we got them as soon as we could. Many stories from friends, family, and online told us that was the best way to go. They were right. We had a conversation with a dad & son from LA on the ferry and they had been in line since 5am to get their hands on "day of" tickets. The journey starts with a ferry ride,

and ends at the dock of Alcatraz. I'm not usually into Audio Tours, but the one there was fantastic. It kept me very entertained and took us all over the place.

Lots of flowers, too ... you don't think about flowers when you think about a prison on an island!

The view of SF from the city is nice, too. It showed us that we were really stupid to walk up Hyde street yesterday, because you can tell how much steeper it is than the others!!

We bought our Christmas ornament here, it's a giant Key. Other things in the gift shop made us laugh too. Mike wanted to get this for his office.

After our Alcatraz visit, we did some more walking. We had lunch at the wharf so that Mike could have dungoness crab and then I had a spectacular strawberry chocolate crepe. YUM.

We took a lot of pictures today, because we didn't have the real camera while we were at the wharf yesterday. We tried to see the sea lions, but most of them appear to be on vacation this week!

Today we spent more time looking at the random stuff in the wharf area, and we found the old game collection that Tracie & Kevin told us about. There were some cool old ships as well, but we've been on old ships before so we decided just to do the photo op.

We took a different street back to the hotel today, this time at the bottom of Lombard Street. I had to take the typical tourist picture, but of course.

After a brief nap, we decided to use our Groupon for Mel's Drive In and just have burgers for dinner. Ugh. It was awful. Neither of us finished our meals, but they only charged us for one. Oh well. Hopefully our other groupons work out better!! Tomorrow we are going to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge. Hopefully. ;)