Saturday 13th September 2008

[23:31 PDT]

Today we had two trips planned.

First off we met up with a group of people to do a Segway tour of San Francisco.

This involved us getting some simple practice on the segway (it's the second time Linda and I have been on one). Then going around some of the areas of SF local to Fishermans Wharf and little Italy. For large amounts of time we were riding about on the road. Everyone arrived back safely. It was a great couple of hours and we saw a couple of places we'd not seen before (although we didn't do Lombard Street - that's on the advanced outing! We did get out of tortoise mode though, so we were moving along at 10am.

Afterwards, we were supposed to get picked up by a bus to go on a sea-plane journey around the SF bay area. Sadly, there was a mix-up on the booking for that and we didn't get to do the ride. Hopefully, we'll get the refund without any problem.

That left us at a bit of a loose end for a couple of hours. So first off we jumped onto a bay boat trip which took us under the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather had brightened up a lot quicker than yesterday, so we actually got some good pictures of the bridge.

We then decided to have a go on the cable car, up the SF hill sides. Sadly, the wait for this was a hour wait in the (by then) hot sunshine before we managed to get about one (it seemed one of the cars kept losing the cable and stopping).

I actually enjoyed this quite a lot. I'd imagined it was just an expensive ride to the top of the hill, but in the end it was just a (semi) expensive trip to the other side of town. Quite a good ride, especially coming down some of them steep hills.

We did a bit of shopping around the union square area before returning on the cable car to the Fishermans Wharf area.

We'd initially intended to have a meal at Planet Hollywood, but their computer had crashed, and they were not taking any new customers. So we ended up at a nearby Italian place.

Just before we came home, we stopped to watch a street performer, Eric Cash, do his show outside Pier 39. I quite enjoyed it, especially when he told an obnoxious kid that he lived under the kids bed! Sadly by the end, of his show as he lay on a bed of broken glass with a 6ft guy standing on his chest, Linda was shaking. Whether it was from the cold evening air or from her two cocktails earlier in the evening, I couldn't tell :)