Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

A productive day's tourism

Well, this morning I thought I'd do the tourist thing and amble over to Fisherman's Wharf in order to take a walk around the shore to the Exploratorium, which is just the kind of tourist attraction I like. Having run away from the Fisherman's Wharf area pretty fast as it's one big tourist trap, I hiked a couple of miles around the top end of town until I finally reached the Exploratorium to find that (as someone had actually told me yesterday, duh) it's closed on Mondays. Ho hum.

The Exploratorium is housed at the old Palace of Fine Arts, an extraordinary fake Roman temple ruin that's well worth a visit anyway so the trip wasn't entirely wasted. I took the bus back to Fort Mason and walked back to Fisherman's Wharf as being both a tourist and a transportation wonk, I thought I'd better ride the famous SF cable cars at least once. This is quite an ordeal as they're usually packed with tourists and there's always a queue, but coming here and not riding on one of the world's only remaining cable-hauled tramways would be a shame.

Unfortunately, while I was in the long queue being forced to listen to a busker demolishing Wish You Were Here and the crushingly inevitable Stairway To Heaven, a sensation like having a handful of gravel thrown at my head made me reach up to realise that (as a lady in the queue pointed out a few seconds later, though in a more circumspect fashion) a seagull had crapped on my head. I guess that it's a statistical inevitability that anyone spending a lot of time outside will get crapped on by a bird eventually, but still, it's kind of surprising when it actually happened. I cleaned myself up as much as possible with a few tissues and then headed back to the hotel (not via the cable car for obvious reasons, and trying to avoid touching things as much as possible as my hands had traces of bacteria-laden ick on them) to the hotel for a shower and a clean T-shirt.

So, that's my tourist day. I went to a museum that was closed, stood in a long queue, and just as I was getting to the front of that queue a seagull crapped on my head. Who said holidays are never fun?

Finally, for anyone interested in these things, here's a cool link - the live track status page of the MUNI Metro's tram subway in central SF. This is approximately what in Europe would be known as a pré-metro or a Stadtbahn - trams which go underground in the centre of town. Note the extremely complex crossover/turnback sidings at the eastern end of Embarcadero station (labelled EML/EMR).