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On my last day in San Francisco my flight was in the evening so a colleague and I took the opportunity to visit the second most famous tourist attraction, Alcatraz.

Lots of websites say you need to pre-book up to three months in advance, but evidently this doesn’t apply in January as we just turned up at the dock and bought tickets for the first ferry of the day. The trip across the bay was very scenic, with great views of the city and the island and the bridge in the distance.

We didn’t have an awful lot of time on the island so couldn’t do the guided tour, but the audio tour was pretty good. And we got to see all the cells and facilities and escape shafts and so on, with some half-decent narration.

Quite a few people told us, we “absolutely must see the sea lions!”, which are in an the harbour area where the ferry docks. What a waste of time. It was some captive sea lions lazing on a wooden pontoon in an enclosed pool. Maybe I was missing something.

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I had a really hectic week in SF working 12 hour days for our product’s launch (even on Sunday!). So after it was over I felt justified slacking off for the afternoon to go exploring. If you were curious why I spent the last few years travelling to Asia all the time, here’s the thing we (finally) launched! (video) (sales blurb)

I walked from my hotel in a slightly seedy downtown area called “the Tenderloin” to the city’s highest point called Twin Peaks. San Francisco has an alarming number of homeless people – you can see some of them hanging out in the first photo below – which I didn’t really expect.

Walking up the hill

Above a certain point the view really opened out and you could see all the way across the city to the Golden Gate bridge. The Twin Peaks area is easy to locate from anywhere owing to the massive radio antenna on the top.

Panorama from Twin Peaks

I made it to the viewing area at the top just before sunset and made this panorama. On the other side you can see right out over the Pacific. I hung around until it got dark and cold then I summoned an Uber to ride back down. That being the thing to do in SF.

I’m in Trumpland at the moment as some kind of tech support for the launch of our new product. On Saturday we had a free day to do some sightseeing.

I always imagined California was warm and sunny all year round but this is sadly untrue. At the weekend it was cold and wet and grey. Obviously the number one attraction is the bridge, so a group of us walked there from the downtown area. The neighbourhood around our hotel was decidedly dodgy, but the hilly residential area near the bridge had some very nice houses. Although there were no shops or other amenities to be found.

Pink house

Everyone else’s photos of the Golden Gate bridge have blue sky or the iconic fog, so I suppose my grey clouds must be somewhat unique. It was still very impressive to look at.

Golden Gate Bridge

Just underneath the bridge is an old fort called Fort Point that you can climb up on top of to get some really good views. This used to form a triangle of fortifications with Alcatraz and another fort across the bay.

Fort Point

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