Day 8: San Francisco

Breakfast featured a delightful stop at McDonald's.

Then we decided to ride the CalTrain into the City. Here is the Palo Alto CalTrain station. It's three train stops away from our hotel, but it's the closest one to Stanford.

Here are Ellen and Julie waiting for the train to come.

Riding the train.

The train connected with the metro bus system, but not at a station where all-day passes were available. Since we wanted all-day passes, we hopped on the local light rail to go to the visitor's center. (And no, we didn't save any money by getting all-day passes, as it turned out.)

Riding the light rail.

Studying tour info while riding the light rail. Do you get the impression it was a longish train ride? It wasn't, really, compared to the main train ride, but the light was better.

Our first glimpse of San Francisco on stepping out of the train station. Looks like San Francisco, doesn't it?

Oops, back into the train station to get transit passes. We had figured out by then that we wouldn't have time to visit Haight Ashbury, so we used this Exploratorium poster as a substitute.

This millennium countdown clock bugged Julie since it's counting down to 1/1/2000 instead of 1/1/2001.

Ellen didn't think much of my suggestion that we go ride these glass elevators.

Here's the Montgomery Gallery. We just passed by.

Fish market in Chinatown. Phew!

The streetcars were very full, so we never got a chance to ride them.

Here's the grand entrance to Ghirardelli Square.

Here's the clock tower on the corner of Ghirardelli Square. I should have taken some pictures of the chocolate shop, but I was too busy shopping.

Here's the Palace of Fine Arts, leftover from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. That's the same Expo that San Diego's Balboa Park was built to compete with. It's a popular place for weddings, or at least wedding photographs. Here's one now.

Now the Exploratorium. The trick room.

One of the cool optics exhibits.

Some of these exhibits have been there for a while. This one's running on a Mac SE.

After they kicked us out of the Exploratorium at closing time, we spent a few minutes seeing the Palace. Can you see Ellen in this picture?

And in this one?

But it was a little chilly and a lot windy and some of us were getting cranky. We rode the bus back to Ghirardelli Square for dinner.

Then we rode the train "home", back to Palo Alto anyway. Julie amused herself with the digital camera.