It’s time for day 3 in our California adventure! On this day we visited Alcatraz Island, Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square and a Giants game!
DAY 3 – SEPTEMBER 14, 2018
We were all so excited for chosen attractions today, starting off with the infamous Alcatraz Island. I came to Alcatraz when I visited San Francisco with my family, but it’s been 15 years (😳) since then so I was very excited to see it again. If you didn’t already know, I’m really interested in “creepy” or weird topics like true crime and the paranormal, so a place like Alcatraz is right up that alley. And we visit an even creepier place later in the trip which you’ll see in a few days…
But I’m getting ahead of myself! We were up bright and early for our Alcatraz visit. After a short wait we were on our cruise and heading over to the island!
It was SO foggy outside today. We were very happy we had already visited the Golden Gate Bridge on a beautiful clear day! The gloomy weather also seemed fitting for our destination today. It really worked out perfectly!
Once we were off the boat it was just a short walk up to the starting point of the audio tour. The tour is self-guided and is narrated by former officers and inmates who tell the whole story of Alcatraz and life in the prison. It gives you directions on where to walk and what to look at as you’re listening to make sure you don’t miss anything.
We all really loved it! The cell block itself is pretty small and it can be easy to get crowded in a place like this, but the audio tour kept everybody moving nicely so it never felt too busy. I also really liked the personal stories from the different narrators that told how they lived inside those walls. The tour is really well done and we all learned a lot.
Of course, since it’s an audio tour with headphones, there wasn’t much for the vlog to hear, but I thought the things we saw translated well enough onto video anyway! You can see it starting at 2:20 in the vlog. Some highlights: the solitary confinement cells which were SO creepy:
The library, which was actually really pleasant with its large windows and natural light:
Cells of inmates’ personal belongings:
A photo op inside one of the cells:
There was also a part of the tour that took you outside to the recreation yard, which offered a view of San Francisco that was just stunning:
The fog was completely hiding the Golden Gate Bridge!!
Another cool thing was seeing the cells with the carved-out holes that a few inmates used to try and escape in 1962. These holes were SO small, I could not believe grown men had been able to fit through!
The tour concluded in the dining hall.
Once we were all wrapped up we had a few minutes before the next thing we wanted to do, which was a presentation from one of the volunteers that works there. He was speaking all about attempted escapes from Alcatraz over the years – of which there are a lot! I thought it was really interesting so I included a bit of it in the vlog, starting around 5:44.
After we were satisfied with our tour and seeing everything, we popped into the gift shop where they had some very… interesting items for sale! Sarah and I both ended up getting a few magnets as a small souvenir.
After we had our goodies in hand we headed back to the dock to cruise back over to the city! Alcatraz was such a cool experience and I think all of us were really glad we decided to check it out. The island is now run by the National Park Service, and it’s extremely obvious that everyone working there has such a huge passion for the subject and sharing it with others. It’s hard to imagine what it would have been like on Alcatraz Island while it was a working prison, but the audio tour and all the people working there do a great job of helping us understand.
It was turning out to be a beautiful day!!
Back on the main land we realized we were STARVING and set out to find some food. We were very close to Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf, so we headed that direction in search of some delicious seafood!
We settled on a place called The Grotto for lunch. There was barely anyone else in there and it seemed very fancy but it ended up being a perfect lunch spot!
The server said she had a very special table for us and it was – we were right next to the window overlooking the water, and it was so pretty!
For lunch we all kinda got the same thing (again!!) which was a lunch special that came with a bowl of clam chowder and an entree.
We all LOVED the chowder – if you don’t already know, I’m obsessed with soup so I knew I would have to have an amazing bowl of chowder sometime in San Francisco. This did not disappoint!
Then for our entrees Sarah and Ana both got fish & chips, and I got an alfredo pasta. Everything was amazing!
This restaurant also had the most wild decor choices, like this mirror in the bathroom:
Odd. After we finished lunch we had a few more quintessential San Francisco tourist things we wanted to do, so we were on our way again. This time we were headed to Ghirardelli Square!
Even though we were stuffed from lunch still… when you’re at the real Ghirardelli, you have to get ice cream, right?
We decided to split this masterpiece of a sundae, called a Painted Lady. The Ghirardelli store was pretty small and mostly what I expected, and very similar to the one in Disney Springs. But they had more about the history of the brand and how chocolate is made and things like that. It was cool!
Once we finished our sundae we were more than stuffed so it was time to get heading back to our hotel. Our vehicle was…
A cable car! We used Google maps to figure out the route of the cable cars and made our way to a nearby station. The tickets cost $7 for one way and it would drop us off basically right next to our hotel!
The whole process of how they flip the car around was actually really cool. It’s basically on a giant turntable and they flip the car to go back up the track on the opposite side. It’s hard to explain but there’s footage of it in the vlog at about 15:14!
Unfortunately the cable car ended up taking MUCH longer than expected so we were waiting a while, but eventually we were able to get on! Also unfortunately, the attendant running the car and collecting tickets wouldn’t let us stand in the back of the car (even though other guests were doing so on previous ones)… but soon enough we were on and riding a cable car in San Francisco and feeling like we were in the Princess Diaries. Before long we were back at our hotel to get ready for our next activity of the evening!
For this trip, we did something new in that each of us chose one specific activity that was special or important to us. Tonight was the first of special activities with Sarah’s choice and we were headed to a baseball game!
Sarah LOVES baseball and AT&T Park was on her bucket list of parks to visit, so it was a must do for her to go there when we were in San Francisco. Ana & I have both never been to a baseball game so we were super excited as well!
Upon arrival I quickly decided there was a souvenir I was interested in and picked up my very own…
Foam finger! And I do not regret it even a little bit. This foam finger really cranked up the fun level to 100.
The park was absolutely beautiful:
The backdrop of the water is just so stunning!! At this point we were all super excited and ready to cheer on the Giants.
We also of course had a food break in the middle to get the all-American meal of a hot dog for dinner:
The game was actually SO much fun! I’m not going to lie, I was worried it was going to be really cold or boring but it was neither of those and we had a GREAT time. And the Giants won!!
We had so much fun and I’m so glad Sarah chose this as her special thing! Our first baseball game was a huge success! And I love my foam finger!!!!
Once the game was over we quickly popped outside and called a Lyft to take us home, and we were EXHAUSTED! We had to get all our things packed up because this was our last night in San Francisco before heading out on our road trip to LA the next morning. We were sad to be leaving but we had seriously such an amazing time there, and really checked off all of our SF must-dos! Plus, we still had so much fun ahead of us that it was hard to be sad for too long 😊
And that’s a wrap on day 3 of our California vacation! On day 4 we’ll set out on our drive down the coast to LA, with a few stops and interesting twists and turns along the way… that video and blog post will be up soon! I hope you’re enjoying this series of posts and videos. I’d love to hear your thoughts on our trip, the vlogs so far, or anything else for this trip because I am having so much fun writing about all of it! I love this new format of videos AND blogs because it really lets me recount every little detail of all the fun we had 🙂 If you do like the videos so far, don’t forget to subscribe to my youtube channel and feel free to leave comments or like the video if you’re enjoying it or have any questions! Thanks so much for reading so far and I’ll see ya on day 4 ❤️
xo!
