San Francisco

2019-12-29
Cable Car Museum and Chinatown, San Francisco, CA

It was forecast to be a rainy Sunday so we went for more indoor-type activities. We started with a cable car ride up to the Cable Car Museum. If you’re not familiar with how cable cars work, this is a really cool place where they actually pull the cable in a loop under the streets. The cars themselves work by clamping onto the cable like a pair of pliers. When they’re holding onto the cable, they move at cable speed. They can also let the cable slip a bit to run slower, and disconnect from the cable entirely to cross another cable or turn the car around.

From there it’s just a few blocks to Chinatown. There is some cool architecture there, and you can watch fortune cookies being made at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company. You can even write your own fortunes and they will fold them into cookies for you. They are smart enough to give you a free sample, which generally leads to the purchase of a bag to snack on.

The rain was falling steadily so we were thankful for our raincoats. We caught a random cable car just for the fun of the ride and then hiked back to Fisherman's Wharf to try some Irish Coffee at the Buena Vista. The coffee was great, but we took it to go because the place was packed and they had no internal traffic management - people that arrive later but are standing in the right place would get the seats. If you like Irish Coffee though they make a fine cup.

We then wandered down to look at the Boudin Bakery museum, where you can look out over the bakery. They have a thirty- or forty- foot tall silo of flour (33,000 lbs) that lasts them about a week. They have a great cafe and they sell a ton of bread there (and that's just to me).

We headed back to the hotel for the evening, stopping to get some supper in Fisherman’s Wharf. Being right on the water, seafood was the choice. There are a lot of great restaurants along the wharf area that have great seafood choices; I'd recommend eating there if you are in the area.