Saturday, we had a leisurely wake up in the morning, we looked at doing a few things including a helicopter tour. This was rather expensive, but Jonathan thought that Raym needed to go up in a helicopter since he was the only one of us who had not done it before. Dash suggested a hot air balloon ride, which I was all for, but alas, you needed two days notice, not the kind of thing you can spontaneously decide to do. But I guarantee you, I will plan ahead some time and do the hot air balloon ride, I have always wanted to. I digress, we decided to visit Coit Tower. I had never heard the name Coit Tower, but surely had looked past it many times, as it is situated on top of Telegraph Hill. I found a really good video about it if you have ten minutes to waste on such things. After I watched the video, I realized I should have paid closer attention to the murals, of which I did not take a single picture. Oh well, a good reason to go back.
This a repeat of yesterday's Golden Gate Bridge photo, but it bears repeating in this portion of my travels. As we got out of the car, their was a hushed silence in the crowd of people, which was basically small. The parking area only surrounds the circular drive in the front. Those waiting for parking spots, wait in their cars at the top of the hill entering the circle. We only waited a short time before a spot opened up. As we drove up the hill, I saw the stairs that were the entrance to the park and thought on another day, it would be nice to park at the bottom and take a nice stroll through the grounds to the top. This particular morning driving up to the top in a convertible Mustang with the top down and the sun warming my shoulders was simply perfect.
The crew taking in the view.
There was a great view of Lombard Street from where we stood and we decided we would drive down it when we were finished. When we went to do just that later, the line to get down was literally blocks long, we opted for another time. I was thinking how cool it would be to live on that street until I saw the line of traffic constantly streaming down the block. It's better to just visit, I think.
Raym took this picture of the flag waving perfectly in the wind with the bay as the backdrop, just lovely. By the way, the statue is of Christopher Columbus, which seemed weird to me. Shouldn't he have statues on the East Coast, do people still believe he discovered America? Anyway, he welcomes all to Coit Tower.
Alcatraz is so cool sitting out there. I went on the cheesy tour once with Rachel, and I told the kids sometime when they are in the city again, they have to do it. I was fascinated by it and really glad I went, I would go again. And bonus, you get a cool ferry ride across the bay!
I was highly amused that people had to pay fifty cents to turn their own penny into a souvenir. I am sure as a child walking down Fisherman's Wharf, I begged my mother to have one. I admire the clever ways folks find to get other people to give them money. I did not see anyone use it while we waited to take the elevator up to the top.
At the top of the tower, I took pictures out of every window, which I will not bore you with today. However, Raym pointed out the soccer field and we both thought that was a pretty random place to have a soccer field. We wondered if it was portable and there was something special going on this weekend.
Before we went down, instead of looking out, I looked up to the beautiful day.
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