Birthday Weekend Blowout, Rachel's Travel Guide Edition, Part 2 - Ferry Ride and Cable Car Advice

Tonight I'm posting this from Susanville, Ca., where I'm staying with my mother for a few days (at least). I brought her home from the hospital today, and she is now well on her way, it seems (we hope and pray), to recovery from kidney failure and a septic blood infection - yikes. I am now her nurse, but I'm much nicer than Nurse Ratchet - most of the time...

Matt will be handling things at home with the girls, and I hear they've LOADED up on the cereal!!! And not the healthy, may or may not, lower your cholesterol kind.

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So, on with Part 2

We stayed in Tiburon at a little hotel we've stayed at before called The Waterfront Hotel. This time, we had a room with a view :)

View from our tiny balcony

Daytime view of the city from our hotel's deck

The Hotel is right on the water, as is obvious from the photos, and there is a ferry dock only a couple hundred yards away. Since it was such a beautiful day, we decided to take the ferry into to San Francisco, even though the last ferry was scheduled to come back at 4 pm. The views were worth our day in the city being shortened, especially since we had our car to go back later :)

Alcatraz

Transamerica Building

View up Hyde Street from the bay

View down Hyde Street from the back of a cable car

Further up Hyde

We didn't really have a plan for the day - we only knew that we wanted to eat delicious food! When we arrived, we decided to walk down to the Hyde Street cable car turnaround area. Hopping a cable car a block up from the turnaround is one of my favorite things to do in San Francisco. Let me tell you why, and by the way, this happens to be very valuable information for anyone who ever travels there. Pay me now, thank me later. I love it because there are always a bunch of poor saps waiting in line (yes, I was once a poor sap too), sometimes literally for hours (especially during the summer months), and none of them know that they can catch one at every intersection :D They think they have to have to buy a ticket at the booth near the turnaround, but they can buy one right on the trolley from the driver, and get on whenever the car stops, which is all the time, not even counting the cross streets. They don't ever fill the cars to capacity when the load them because they know they'll be picking people up along the way. There's usually room right on the back end, which is where you want to be for the best view of the bay. Does it make me a bad person that it warms my heart to hop a trolley and enjoy knowing that everyone on it is a suckah (like we were before we discovered this trick)?

Part 3 coming soon...