#70 - Ride a cable car in San Francisco

This spring, I got to take an amazing road trip with two of my friends.  Planned literally two weeks before we left, it was much an impromptu trip; not necessarily the kind that I'm used to.

As an accountant, my vacation can never really happen anytime before April 15.  We decided to head out right after tax season was over.  Initially the trip started out as a "let's go skiing/snowboarding out west!"  Eventually, we realized that we could head all the way out to San Francisco.  The guys had never been there before, so we figured it'd be something new for the majority of us (two out of the three). 

We headed out and drove for about 20 hours before we hit Snowbird, UT.  We spent the night in the van and woke up to go skiing/snowboarding.  The guys went snowboarding; I maintained my skiing position, as I have for the past twenty years :)

This was the first time I'd ever skied in Utah.  I've skied Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Wisconsin and Minnesota (obviously), but never Utah.  I was pretty excited to do that really.  We skied Snowbird, which I probably wouldn't do again.  I wasn't that impressed.  But then after skiing, we basically headed straight out to San Francisco.

In SF, we arrived early in the morning, booked our hotel in the parking lot, and started walking along the pier.  The boys had never been there before, so it was of one of those "let's go explore the area and see what there is to do" kind of days.  We hit the pier that had boats going to Alcatraz.  I really wanted to go to Alcatraz, so we definitely took up that tour.  That was a ton of fun; one of my favorite parts of the tour was seeing how they opened up the cells.  One of the guides/workers there showed us the contraption that they used to identify which cell they were going to open and how they would move the different levers to open the inmate's cell.  It was interesting for the fact that we were basically on an island, and that's where they housed some of the criminals. 

Anyways, our third day in San Francisco, we took a cable car from one end of town to the other.  It was pretty cool; we got to stand on the edge and hold onto the railing, as we were basically out of the cable car.  Literally, the Rice-a-roni song came into my head, as well as the Meet Me in St. Louis song, The Trolley Song.  I thought that standing on the outside of the car while it was moving was pretty awesome; totally the kind of "cable car" experience I was expecting!