West Coast Trip:Day 4

The 4th day on our exciting and jam-packed West Coast trip started off with a ride on cable car down to Fisherman’s Wharf.

We had a fairly early ticket reservation for the ferry over to Alcatraz, so we got up early enough to catch a cable car and get some breakfast and walk around down at the wharf. We ended up just grabbing McDonald’s. Although, the bread at Boudin’s looked and smelled amazing. They weren’t open yet.

Mural down at the Wharf when we got off the cable car.

Love the sunflare from the morning sun.

We walked down to Pier 29, where the sea lions hang out…literally. 🙂

Rob was surprised when we got over there, because the last time he was there he said all of the platforms you see were covered over with sealions.

We were glad they had an explanation for where they all went.

After checking out the very few sealions that were there, we kept on our way towards the Alcatraz Pier.

We got there a little early so we just got in line and waited to board.

Views as we left the pier looking back at the city.

More views during the boat ride over to Alcatraz

When your 12 year old decides to make his face the subject of your photo…

Here’s some pics of Alcatraz. I really enjoyed visiting here. It’s not nearly as creepy as I had expected. I appreciated that they handed out an audio tour on headphones that guides you through.

Counting the years?

One thing we learned was that this island is a bird sanctuary even back when it was a prison.

It is also has beautiful gardens. There are volunteer gardeners that come out each day and take care of the beautiful flowers and plants.

You can get some really nice pictures with San Fran and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background from the island.

I took a ton of pictures while we toured so I will be writing another post about Alcatraz.

This was on our boat ride back to the city. You gotta love’em!

When we got back we were ready for lunch. There’s lots of seafood options right there on the wharf.

We ended up getting lunch from The Crab Stand.

Seafood chowder in a Boudin’s bread bowl. Delish!

This was Alex’s lunch. He didn’t get to eat it though. After getting it we were walking across the street to find a place to sit and eat and listen to live music. The seagulls in that area are everywhere and they are not very nice. Alex’s food was flipped over by a surly group of seagulls. His food flew all over the ground and a swarm of vulturous seagulls over took the shrimp and fries in a matter of seconds. So we had to go back and spend another $10.

After lunch, we walked around and perused the shops near Fisherman’s Wharf. We went into a candy store called Rocket Fizz. Lots of unique candy and novelty items.

One of the things on our list was Ghirardelli Square, so we walked over there. It was pretty crowded so we didn’t buy anything. I was really wanting to have some ice cream because I had heard it was amazing. However, standing in line, in a long line was not something I was anxious to do. We did wait in a fairly short line for some free chocolate samples.

After getting some chocolate we debated on waiting in the long line to take the cable car and decided to go ahead and wait it out.

It was really cool to watch the end of the cable car line where they manually turn the cable cars around.

We didn’t really have quite enough time to do anything else, so we just went on to the stadium so we could get pictures and see it before the game actually started. This really worked out great for us.