3/6/18 San Francisco - Well we found a great and cheap parking spot for the truck (it doesn't fit in parking garages) at the Presidio Visitor center near the Golden Gate bridge. The big mistake we made was our decision to walk to the harbor where all the tourist activities are centered. As it turns out it is a 4.1 mile walk. We started walking at 10:45 and barely made it to pier 33 for our 12:30 departure for the Alcatraz tour. Great hike but it was pretty warm today upper 60's and we really didn't know where we were going. I never admited this to Wendy!

The Alcatraz tour was pretty cool, a must-do if you come here. What I didn't know is that the original structure was built in 1853 as a fort to defend the harbor to sandwich attackers between this location and Ft. Point at the Golden Gate bridge. The military used the facility as a jail after the civil war ultimately turning the inland over to the newly formed Bureau of Prison in 1915 with a larger facility constructed.

Sad guy!

 This is one of the cells that 6 men broke out of the prison. Pretty true to the movie on the same subject. The 6 men were never found.

                                Vent in the cell was dug out with a spoon handle used like a drill.

                  This is a picture of the narrow utility hallway that runs behind each of the cells/vents.

Same utility hallway as above picture but looking up. The passageway gave access to the roof skylights. The prisoner's removed a glass panel and got onto the roof and were gone.

Uber was a life saver to get back to our truck in SF, so we managed to squeeze in Muir Woods just across the Golden Gate Bridge.  This is a grove of 800 year old redwoods which are massive. Interesting to note is that redwoods only grow north of Big Sur to Oregon and no more than 20 miles inland. 

We capped off the day with dinner in Sausalito which is across the bay from San Francisco. Dinner was at the Spinnaker Restaurant, which was good and pretty reasonable.

                                               
                                                   View from our dinning room table.