Dad and I both had trouble sleeping and got up around 5:30 am.  No big deal but we didn’t have a flexible schedule.  One nice thing about our San Francisco hotel room was it has a little sitting area where Dad and I could both sit and read or surf the internet. We had coffee, hung out, I showered.  Down to breakfast at 8:00.  Same mad scene as yesterday, but it was a nice setup, I must say.

We left at 9:00 for our 9:45 Alcatraz tour.  For this, as for a lot of events, we ended up Ubering to places I normally would have just walked to – and I’ll bet Dad would have been fine with that if he hadn’t been healing and lower-energy.  Off to the dock, out at the curb, figured out where to go in, had our code read, and stood in line for the next ferry.  They don’t really worry about keeping tour groups together – you just get in line and get on ‘the next one’.  Unfortunately, no way for Dad to sit down in line, but he could lean against the balustrade. Once on the ferry, we found indoor seats at a table over in the corner (most people opted for out on deck).  The ferry ride isn’t that long, but they were really pushing for you to buy drinks and food. (we did not)  

It wasn’t clear to me how the tour worked until we got there, but basically, once on the island, you can go free-range.

You can walk to all the sites yourself, but the prison part at the top of the hill (the main focus) has a self-guided audio tour.  The prison was quite a schlep up the hill from the dock, which almost everyone did, but we took the handicapped tram up the hill to the prison, and that was wise.  Got our audio guides and the nice people showed us where the elevator was to the next floor, so didn’t have to go up the stairs like everyone else.

Even though we got set up fine with the audio tour, once we started the tour, about five minutes in, Dad decided to ignore it and struck out in whatever direction he fancied. Then about fifteen minutes later was like, ‘what’s going on, what are we doing?” and I was like, “dude, you ignored the instructions and just went charging off on your own” and he was like, “you should have stopped me”.  (yet another example of never being quite sure when to step in and lead the way with an elderly person) He didn’t realize you could pause the narration if you wanted to. No big deal.  We saw pretty much everything and heard most of the narration, even if we were not necessarily in the place the narration was covering when it played.

As I suspected, just doing the prison part was enough for Dad.  He was really not enjoying walking.  Like the modern art museum, we left a lot of admission price behind because there was a lot more we could have seen. I’m not bitching (much), this was very much about doing what Dad was up for and not pushing for more. We waited for the handicapped tram, back down to the docks, waited in line for the ferry, got back about noon.  We had some odd Uber experiences – like when we watch the car approach on the app and it suddenly jumps blocks away going in the wrong direction. For this trip, the car kept looking like it was getting closer and it would never actually get there – a real watched pot.

Back to the hotel eventually. We’d sort of planned to eat our leftover sandwiches (stored in a mini-fridge), but turns out what I thought was a microwave was a safe and we had no way to heat them.  We had already decided to spend the afternoon driving around so we decided to go to Sausalito and have lunch there. So we got the car, went to Sausalito, drove through the tourist part once, then backtracked, parked in the public lot and had lunch at Taste of Rome, which was feet from where we’d parked.  It was good!  You order at the counter, and they had coffee and pastries and pizzas and all sorts of things. We had chicken Caesar salads which were great, and I had a ginger ale.

We then did the loop around San Pablo Bay. We saw some interesting stuff, but got stuck in traffic once and on the Oakland side, I should have made more of an effort to stay right by the coast, because we ended up just doing boring highway driving. Ah well. (might be a nice place here, though, to say that our car was a Chevy Malibu and I really liked it – it drove well and was quite roomy. And I love to drive, so I had no problem doing all the driving on this trip.)

We decided that it would be dumb to be in San Francisco and not have Asian food at least once. I booked us into what turned out to be a surprisingly high-end Chinese restaurant in the financial district: Harborview.  Service was a little weird – despite the upscale quality, there were a lot of restaurant workers wandering around in hoodies. We were never quite sure who to order with.  I had two cosmos, Dad had a rye Manhattan and a glass of wine.  We started by splitting steamed shrimp dumplings, then each had a cup of hot and sour soup, then split a fancy version of beef and broccoli.  (no rice offered or wanted)  Everything was great.  We each had dessert: I had a ginger pudding which was really hot (temperature), and Dad had these fried sesame balls with stuff inside.  This was an unusual and special meal.

Back to the hotel and to bed. It feels like we really didn’t do a lot of stuff, but Dad and I had both been to this city before. If I’d been on my own, I just would have picked neighborhoods and walked around. (Also gone to g*y bars.) But what we did was entertaining and worthwhile, for the most part.