More From Day 2 in San Francisco

This is a picture looking up at the Coit Tower. Before we went to it (even with reading the tourist material), I thought that it was a building like the Transamerica Pyramid (seen below), which resides in the Financial District.

From the Coit Tower, looking south, this is the Transamerica Pyramid. Even in the late morning, the upper reaches of the 98th tallest building in the world still had fog near the top. It was a cool and blustery day all day yesterday. I really had expected this building to be more physically imposing than what it was.

This will have to be a little bit of a lesson in photography for me. The goal was to get the street sign about the upcoming San Francisco Marathon to be more prominent while still catching the street sign, "Greenwich". Nonetheless, I took this picture with the Attanuccis in mind! (For any of you Yankees fans, I snagged a picture of a sign to the Joe DiMaggio North Beach Playground and Park.)

At Pier 45 of the Fisherman's Wharf is a submarine named the USS Pampanito (SS-383) and a liberty ship named the SS Jeremiah O'Brien. We ended up going on and around the SS Jeremiah O'Brien and found out that the liberty ships mainly were built during World War II and were heavily used during the storming of the beaches of Normandy (where my grandfather went aground on D-Day plus 2).

This may be the best picture that I was able to get of perhaps the biggest "attraction" that we didn't get a chance to do -- Alcatraz Island. Since you really need to reserve tickets for the cruises about two days in advance, we were on the outside looking in on this; however, I don't know that the world is going to stop for either one of us over it.

All in all, we've had a good time here. There's certainly a lot more to do in and around San Francisco, but we hit the high points. One fun, free thing to do in and around Pier 45 was the Musee Mecanique, a collection of old-time penny arcade games and related artifacts. This was a lot of fun to play some of the old games that I had never even seen before!

We rode the Cable Cars again late last night on the California line.

Today's a travel day down to Los Angeles. It is approaching 7:50 a.m. on Monday morning as I write this. I still have my Courier column to finish and send in, and then we'll be on the road.

I had a call from Rick Cook late in the evening last night wanting to see if I've heard of any local information regarding fires taking place on or near the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run course. (I saw this article on an Auburn, California web site, but it doesn't give a lot of current information.)