SF, CA - From Flat Tire to Lost Jacket

Does this sound like a good beginning to the day? I was outside talking with the family next door when the guy noted: ‘hey, you’ve got a really flat tire.’ And, flat is not the word, there was no air in that tire at all. It was resting on the rim, and the car tilted. Oops. Doesn’t sound good to me. But here’s the explanation: we have a tire monitoring system for the RV and the Jeep. Gary was recalibrating it yesterday and put the special valve stem covers on as usual. Same thing he’s done for 8 months but this time something went wrong with the fit and h-s-s-s-s all night. I’m surprised we didn’t hear it. All he had to do was to use his air compresser and fill it up. Problem solved. Day’s gotta get better, right?

And, it did. We journeyed into the city today, parked in a parking ramp that I had seen on the maps and went to the ticket booth to check the price. We were a little confused by the sign which read:

        $2.50         7:00 - 11:00

        $3.50        11:00 - 2:00

        $2.50         2:00 - 5:00

We wanted to know what the day rate was since we were staying all day. Well, add it all up: arrive at 9:00 and leave at 5:00. You’ve got 2 hours at $2.50, 3 hours at $3.50, 3 hours at $2.50 and your total is: $23.00. Holy Toledo. Well, one day and we’re out of here. But in the Visitor Center, the guy told us that when he has to drive in, he parks at the Discount Parking for $9.00 for the whole day. He gave us the address about 2 blocks away, we checked it out, retrieved our car from the jaws of the parking ramp, and drove over to the new place.

OK, now we’re cooking. A flat tire, a parking lot relocation and finally, we’re on our way to enjoy San Francisco. Oops, the long line at the Cable cars tells us that we won’t get on for another 2 hours. Hey, let’s walk up the street just to see it all. And, we took off.

I have forgotten how frenetic a city can be. I worked in Boston for several years, we’ve been to New York and Chicago but that was a while back. This is a city with all the people, all the aromas wafting from the stores, the sirens of emergency vehicles, the car horns, the music from the street vendors, the babble of people all around and all the other sounds that accompany walking a city street. The pace is livelier, the decible level is higher and the sights much more vibrant. Whew.

We reached Union Square where there was an art show going on and I began to take a picture of Gary near a neart statue by Tony Bennet. A nicely dressed woman rushed us and gushed that she was a professional photographer and could take a picture of both of us. Now I hate to let anyone touch my camera but she was dressed well and had a large wheeled bag from which she was selling cards. I didn’t think she could run any faster than we could so I let her have the camera. Ooh la la, a professional photo. Well, after fumbling a bit, here’s what she took of us.

And here’s another one.

Finally, after 2 more of her elbow, one of the clock tower in the background and 3 of that guy reading a book at a bench, she did get this one. Note our pose. She thought that was cute. Luckily she was a pro - I wonder what an amateur might do.

Have you ever walked in SF? When you look at a map, the streets are laid out in a level grid. When you look at the terrain, this is what you get. Nothing is level. It is all hills. Now, I knew there were hills, but these were like walking up a ladder, they were steep. Look at this picture to get an idea of the angle. 

And here’s another one.

No wonder they film car chases on the streets of SF. At the tops of hills, cars come flying over them blind. At the bottoms they screech to stop. They scrape bottom trying to get in to driveways. Wow. We have a hiking GPS which tracks elevation and it says that our cumulative elevation today was 1543’. Now, there is no hill in SF which is 1543’. However we climbed 3 which were 450’ or better. So, I’m claiming 1543’ for the day. My thighs tell me that’s what it was.

We were getting pretty warm as we huffed and puffed upwards so we took off our jackets, stapped them onto the backpack and started up again.

We stopped to eat lunch in a small park with a fountain at the top of Nob Hill. Many of the city’s mansions were on the top of this hill until the earthquake and fire of 1906. Now it is home to some of the poshest hotels in SF. Some think that the word ‘Nob’ comes from a contraction of the word ‘snob’ while others think it came from ‘nabob’ the word for the local governors during British rule in India.

We stopped at Grace Cathedral for our first stop. Beautiful church.

The belfry has 44 bronze bells with such names as Loving Kindness and Joy to the World. The front doors, called the Doors of Paradise are bronze and gold plate replicas of the ones made for a church in Florence, Italy.

The stained glass windows are beautiful and one, the Rose Window, is 25’ in diameter.

Now, you know how we like the unusual and seek out those things which most do not. Our search in San Francisco is for the hundreds of staircases which go from one level to another. Actually, these are what we in flat places would call sidewalks. Some homes are only accessible by one of these staircases and everything, EVERYTHING, has to go up them in your hands. Groceries, clothing, that new Kuerig coffee maker, the new flat screen TV, the replacement refrigerator for the one that broke, everything. You park on the street and carry everything up.

We have an IPhone ap for these staircases- imagine that. It finds where we are and then tells us where the stairways are, gives a picture and a short description of them and tells us how many steps. And we found our first one today. Here it is - uniting homes on 3 different levels. When we were there the mailperson had left her pouch at the bottom and was carrying the mail up the stairs to the homes. Here is the stairway. Pretty secret and quiet.

Off for the next stop of our day: the Cable Car Museum. We couldn’t get on the cable cars but we could get into the musuem. But, it’s not just a museum, it actually is where the repair the cars and where they house the mechanics of the cable cars are. Here you can actually see the huge cables which move the cars along their routes. Cable cars have no motors and are entirely driven by cables underground strung along the route. Inside each cable car is a ‘gripman’ who operates the lever which grips the cable to move the car at the 9.5 mph which whe cable moves or lets the cable slide through the grip when he wants to stop the car to let passengers on or off.

I had no idea about how cable cars worked. Now I do and have a great appreciation for them. Inside the Cable Car Museum are many things used on cable cars from the past. There are also some cable cars not in use and lots of explanation about how they work. You’ve all seen the cable cars, they’re an icon for San Francisco. A tourist thing but, when the mayor tried to get rid of them - there was a near rebellion and some citizen committees were able to save 3 lines. But, more about that in another blog along with the story of the cable car savior.

If you ever get to SF, you’ll probably ride the cable cars. Before you get on, check out the ‘Gripman’. Is he muscled and strong, does he have good hand-eye coordination and can he anticipate problems and solutions to them? If not, stay off that car. Because it is the gripman who handles the lever that moves the grips which grip the cable which keeps the car moving smoothly. But, seriously, if he is a gripman on a cable car in SF, he’s already one of the 30% who pass the training course and is an accredited gripman. And, as of August 2011, there have been 2 women who have been gripmen.

Here is a diagram about how the grip and the cable work together to move the car along the track.

Besides the gripman, each cable car carries a conductor whose job is to collect fares, manage the boarding and exiting of passengers, and control the rear wheel brakes when descending hills. When people grab anything and sit anywhere on the cable car, a good conductor is as necessary as a good gripman.

Meanwhile we really enjoyed seeing the guts of the cable car system. Here are 2 of the 3 wheels which have the cables wrapped around them.

Since these cables are strung along each remaining cable car line and are the cables that the gripman grips, they are what pull each cable car along.

They are about 1 1/2” thick and composed of many interwoven metal threads. But, you ask, what happens if they unravel or, as cables do, one strand breaks? Then what? Well, they had a picture of that. There are many ‘broken cable’ detectors under the cable line and they stop the car when a broken strand is detected. Right in the middle of the street with passengers on it. The location of the broken wire is noted and at night between the hours of 1 am and 6 am when all the cable cars are in the shop. The broken section of cable is removed and a new section is spliced in. But, not to worry, they splice these two sections together over 90’ to ensure its strength, continuity and integrity. This is all done by hand.

But, of course the cables wear out and need to be replaced. They are continually moving along the track all day long at 9.5 mph. Here is a new cable and a worn out one.

We spent some time in the museum but then moved into the gift shop where we bought 2 t-shirts. When Gary turned around he noticed that he only had one jacket strapped to the back pack. Oops. You should have seen those two old people run out of that store, up the hill to the right, cross the street, up another hill to the left and back to the Cathedral. Their heads were bobbing back and forth frantically looking every which way. But - they found no jacket. OH, shucks. But, you know, it was just a jacket. It can be replaced, but that wasn’t what we wanted to do.

We then called it a day and headed home. Near the parking lot was this street performer doing his thing.

Pretty good.

8.4 1468’

San Francisco, CA - There Goes the Neighborhood

We’re staying in a town south of San Francisco called Pacifica for the month of April. It’s about 240 miles up the coast and much of it goes through wine territory. Now, this is not the Napa Valley but we noticed all of the vineyards as we drove north. These were huge vineyards and I expected to see the name of Gallo.

As we drove north we noticed that many of the farmers put their picture on the roadway in their fields. Here’s one with the farmer and his dog. We saw pictures of fathers and sons and many of wives and husband.

We arrived yesterday at our resort about 3:00, registered and found our site. Interesting thing - the coast gets all of the west winds from the Pacific Ocean. Whoa - these are pretty steady at 20 - 30 until they gust higher.

There’s a song in an old musical called Flower Drum Song where a young woman sings a song called ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl.’ Yesterday, when the wind was gusting to 40 or 50 mph here on the coast and the temps were in the low to mid-50’s, I was inside the RV changing it from the travel mode to the camp mode when I looked out at Gary getting the elecricity and water hooked up. The song running through my head was: ‘I Enjoy Being A Girl.’ Vacuuming the house is not my favorite chore (one I do whenever we get to a new campsite) but, I’ll take the inside jobs to the outside jobs any day - especially a day like yesterday.

Now, I know that April can be cooler along the coast up near SF: the average high is 69 and the average low is 49, but I’m thinking that this is an average - that the temps might be above 69 part of the time. Silly me. It seems that this spring has been much cooler than average and also much breezier.

This resort is located right on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The RV’s in the outside row, of course, have the premier spots and can look out on the ocean. Beautiful views. However, these sites are not so prime as the resort learned recently. Unfortunately everyone now knows that the cliff is made up not of solid rock but of shifting sand, which eroded quite severely a week of so ago in some severe winds and rains. Chunks of a trail outside the campground and some of the asphalt in the campground actually fell into the ocean. Luckily no RVs fell and no one was injured but the sound of the cliff falling in to the ocean did wake people up. When they opened their windows in the morning, some of the RV’s noticed that they were much closer to the ocean than they had been when they went to sleep.

Here you can see where the cliff fell off. The trail used to go all the way through.

Here is a look up from the bottom of the cliff and you can see where the sand has fallen. If you look closely, you can see some of the posts lining the campground on the edge of the cliff here.

Slowly but surely over the next week, they moved RV’s out into sites further away from the edge and today, the whole front row is empty and a fence has been placed over these sites. How scary is all this? And, here’s a picture of the row of campsites near the cliff. When we arrived these campsites were completely full but obviously, they’ve moved the RV’s out of this area to study and analyze the situation.

We arrived after the cliff had fallen but before they had put up the fence. We are pretty far in and for once, I am happy to be here in the cheap seats and not closer to the high rent district near the ocean.