San Francisco

After a night in Alameda, Sue and I drove over to the City of San Francisco. We wanted to visit the Exploritorium, but unfortunately, there were closed on Mondays. Sigh. Oh well, I got some nice photos of the really neat structures at the Palace of Fine Arts.

We then drove over to Fort Point which is located under the Golden Gate Bridge. It's an old structure built in 1861 and used until 1943. It was a coastal defense fortification built to prevent enemy warships from entering San Francisco Bay. I remember when you could walk around the fort and get right under the Golden Gate Bridge, but of course that is no longer possible and in fact there were armed soldiers here once again -- here to help protect the bridge from possible terrorist attack. I'm just glad we were able to get up to the fort at all. It's a pretty cool place, especially on such a foggy and windy morning.

After Fort Point, we drove over to the Cliff house for brunch. They have a great restaurant there. There is also a really cool museum of old mechanical toys and a small nature museum. Seal rock was sealess, but made for some nice photos anyway.

We next walked over to the ruins of the old Sutro Baths. They were built in the late 1800's and closed and finally burned down in the 60's but the remains are pretty interesting all the same and in fact it's now a preserved site. It's a fun place to explore and climb about -- and of course take lots of photographs. There is even a man made cave which was built to draw water for the swimming pools. There was a lot of foam in the water. I do not know if this was man-made pollution or just biofoam, but it was kinda fun to watch it as waves ran underneath the froth.

Golden Gate Park, one of my favorite places in the city and one of my favorites in the park, the Japanese Tea Gardens. After a wonderful cup of Jasmine tea and cookies, we explored around and I got photographs of all the cool landscaping. The moon bridge is really cool. I remember climbing it as a kid. It was a lot bigger back then.

The thing nice about San Francisco is that even in January and many of the trees leafless, there is still a lot of green about and even some flowers. The Tea Gardens look great even mid winter!

We wanted to visit the conservatory, but this old large greenhouse is still being retrofitted after damage from the 1989 earthquake so we just went to the arboretum. There were quite a lot of flowers in bloom.

We mostly visited the New Zealand section and a little bit of South Africa. But, as usual I did not take any notes or anything so these plants are anyone's guess. I just hand held these shots and for the most part used my 20mm f2.8 Nikkor lens. Way cool plants.

Finally, we went to Chinatown which is a lot more than window shopping. Stores are crammed with very, very expensive stuff, vases anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars and carved ivory pieces one of which was priced at $90,000.00 It's like visiting a museum in some of those stores, except things are right out in the isle, I think so that people can break them. They probably get most of their sales that way. ;-)

Funstuff - A Day in the Woods