Day 15 - Lombard Street, Cable Car Museum and Golden Gate Bridge

Saturday 26 April.

Today we split up and did our own things, the Godfrey's were going to hire Segways and have a look around the local area, and we were going to tackle our list of three things we wanted to see.

We left the house before 9am, and we headed into town on the Muni, we then transferred to a bus and headed towards Lombard Street.  We could have caught the cable car, but we had learnt our lesson not to get on at the start of the route.  The bus took us to within a few blocks of the bottom of Lombard Street (which is the best place to take photos).

Lombard Street's claim to fame is that it is the crookedest street in the world.

It was quite funny watching all the tourists driving down the street.

Once we walked up the street, we caught the cable car (no waiting yay!) to our next stop which was the Cable Car Museum.

This was really interesting (and free), and as well as being a museum, it is also the barn that houses the cable pullies, motors and sheaving wheels.  If you ever wanted to know how these cable cars operate, you can read a bit about it here.

The cables you can see here, run under the streets were the cable cars run, large wheels under ground help the cables turn corners.  The car is attached and unattached as necessary to stop and start.  This is all done manually by the grip man onboard the cable car.

We then went back outside to catch the cable card again to Powell Street.

This time Nick got lucky and got to stand on the outside...

We landed up walking down to Union Square, mainly because YELP told me that there was a Cheesecake Factory there!  (YELP is a great app that helps you find anything, anywhere - highly recommended even for when you are at home).

I think Nick was secretly hoping that Penny from 'The Big Bang Theory' would be our server!  Sadly she wasn't LOL.

And we had to force down some Cheesecake - It was bigger than this, but we had already started eating when we thought to take a photo.

After lunch we jumped on another bus and headed out to the Golden Gate Bridge.  Our original plan was to hire bikes to cycle over the bridge, but it was so cold and windy we decided against it, also it is a long way from Fisherman's Wharf were the bike hire places are to even get to the bridge (and it is mostly up hill).

We set out with the aim to walk to the first tower.

While on the bridge we looked down at a big old brick building, when we got back to the house we searched in Google and found that it was Fort Point, and decided that we would go back tomorrow to have a look at it.

Meanwhile, Dale, Wendy, Luke and Mitchell were on the Segways...

They had a different view of the Golden Gate Bridge...

and they also visited Union Square later in the day.