The Bird Plan and Alcatraz

A bit late on the post today, as the hotel's in-room high speed internet was giving me trouble last night, and this morning we were out and off to Napa bright and early. But before we get there, a recap of Sunday in San Fran...

This was the second of our two mondo-tourism days. We began, say it with me, at the Millbrae Pancake House before heading into the city to resume the 49-mile Scenic Drive that we got halfway through on Saturday. The drive is great; much of it is, in fact, scenic, and most is a crash course through the city's neighborhoods. We'll be back in SF again next weekend, mainly because we have tix to see the Melvins on Saturday, but with less touristy stuff to do, and the drive gave us an idea of some spots we'd like to explore further. Here's the problem: the drive has apparently been around for a good long time. Check out the circa 1950s design on the sign's iconic seagull at left. Of course, with anything that's been around that long, it's not always maintained at full capacity, so many of the signs have gone missing over the years. So much of our calm scenic drive was spent gnashing our teeth over being deserted by the gull. I think, with the wrong turns and backtracking, we ended up taking more like a 387-mile scenic-and-otherwise drive.

Anyway, one of the spots on the drive was the Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco. One of California's old Spanish settlements, it was completed in 1791. Perhaps more importantly in my little mind, it was the site of Carlotta's grave where Jimmy Stewart followed Kim Novak in Vertigo. The church doesn't really acknowledge the film (apparently they left the gravestone there for years, but finally had second thoughts and removed it), seemingly convinced that winning souls for Christ is somehow more important than cinema geekery.



That's us in front of a pair of other SF icons, the Palace of Fine Arts (a faux-ruin erected for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Expo) and the Painted Ladies, a row of houses on virtually every postcard coming out of SF and, I believe, in the opening credits of Full House.

But the day culminated in our evening cruise to Alcatraz. The tour of The Rock was the highlight of the weekend for both of us, informative and fascinating. As usual for us (me especially), we took our good damn time getting through the prison itself, and missed out on most of the supplemental talks that go on during the 2 1/2 hours you're over there. Still, after years of seeing pop culture representations of the place, it's startling how oppressive it is in there, even full of tourists rather than prisoners.

Next post: the moment we've all been waiting for... WINE!