Trolley Time (Day 13)

Today was a long one! We started early (like 7 am early), ate some Nutella (a road trip favorite) and decided we were going to hit up the Cable Car Museum to learn about the Trolley System. We headed down to the Piers since that is where the museum was located.

First we stopped and played on a playground with the kiddos:

Then we headed over to this restaurant called Waterbar and had some wonderful food. The pea soup was the best I have ever eaten. Highly recommended! Then we headed over to the museum.

Oops – that was not the right museum. It was a street car museum, and I accidentally got our family trapped into this long conversation about street cars. There was no massive cable system that we could see, so we quickly discovered we went to the wrong location.

We decided we would just drive to the correct museum, but we probably should have just walked.

Tip #13 – Park (if you are lucky enough to find a space) and just Uber everywhere. This city is absolutely nuts when it comes to parking – there are just not enough spaces. Also, when you do park, make sure you turn your wheels correctly!! Jeffrey got a ticket today for not turning the wheels on a slope.  That’s $62 he says he’s not going to pay… we’ll see.

Once we made it there, we learned how the cable system worked and how they reinstalled the system around 1982. This is not an efficient system, but the city has a lot of pride in it, so the trolleys currently run more for a tourist attraction than an actual means of transportation.

A cable only lasts between 75-250 days, and each cable that is worn takes about 5 hours to replace.

We made it a point to take a ride on the Trolley, and it was fun. The boys really liked it:

Now at this point, Andre was starting to go a little crazy. You would think walking up the hills would have burned some of that energy, but no. It might have been the chocolate crepes or the entire ice cream cone that he ate prior, but who knows.

Tip #14 – Be sure to bring at least one towel on the road trip as you never know when you will use it. We could have used it when we did an impromptu swim in the Blue Hole.  Luckily, thanks to an unplanned Target stop, we had one ready for Dre’s massive ice cream cone.

Tip #15 – Don’t stop on crosswalks!! I don’t know how many times Jeffrey did that, but it was driving me crazy.

Then Jeffrey decided he really wanted to drive over the Golden Gate Bridge. I am 70% confident it is because he was planning on throwing Dre and myself over. Dre for acting absolutely crazy and not listening to anything we were saying, and me for heavy sighing and saying something every time he decided to stop on a crosswalk. So I filmed going over just to make sure we weren’t murdered:

After we survived the GGB, we went to a place called Urban Putt. It was so clever, and I would highly recommend this to everyone!

The boys did excellent at putt-putt so we decided to go find some grub. Big mistake. Let me remind you that it is difficult to get around this city anywhere fast. We finished putt-putt around 8 pm and it took till about 8:45 to go the 8 miles close to our VRBO. Then we decided to eat at the closest restaurant to where we could find parking, which was a French Bistro.

This picture was taken after Dre was misbehaving, me trying to correct him and almost pushing the table over, which made a super loud noise, Owen banging silverware incredibly loud, Andre pushing the table with his legs and squishing Owen, Owen having a complete meltdown afterwards, the manager adding a 3rd table so we could put all our stuff on it while rolling his eyes, and Jeff and I chugging a glass of wine….

The sea bass was great though, and Dre ended up falling asleep on my lap. I would say we got a full experience (and there is a ton more to see) from good old San Fran!