Alcatraz

Thursday night at long last I finally went to Alcatraz. It’s continually booked out and I never got the chance to go before so it was especially nice that I got to go to the Rock for free for an industry mixer. Free food, free drinks and a free tour. Perfect night out. The boss asked me to look respectable so I had to wear a shirt and tie, which I had bought for the conference in San Jose and is still too small.

The tour itself is a guided audio tour, narrated by one of the former prison guards. It’s a really interesting tour, and they’ve even got the cells which Frank Morris and the other two prisoners escaped from in tact complete with the holes they made in the wall. It’s an awesome place, quite a bit smaller than I expected but still very cool. There’s a part of the tour which takes you to the solitary cells, which even with the doors open are scary to be in. Prisoners were kept in their cells in complete darkness 24 hours a day, and only allowed out for exercise once a week. Scary thought. It is also said that when the wind was calm, prisoners could hear people in Fisherman’s Wharf, in San Francisco. Alcatraz was also the only prison in the country which provided the prisons with hot showers. Not for comfort, more so the prisoners would not become accustomed to cold water should they escape and attempt to swim to San Francisco. The water around the island is extremely cold and has very strong currents, not to mention sharks.

So the free food was awesome, there was clam chowder which is similar to chicken soup and loads of cheese. Open bar too! Dessert was a seemingly endless supply of cookies and brownies which I partook of in excess. I also may or may not have loaded my coat pockets with Ghirardelli chocolates.

Anyway I have loads of photos, and I really should upload them to Flickr but I can’t be bothered right now. Here’s one of my favourite shots taken from the boat.

Yosemite

Ok, so onto the crazy weekend part. I had Friday and Saturday off work, so I had a nice lie in. I had a phone call from my brother David and the cleaner came in to clean my room. She’s Asian and speaks very little English so it’s better to leave her to it. I headed downstairs where I met my friend Brazilian Lisandro. He invited me to go to Yosemite with him and his friends so I figured I may as well. So after waiting for Arturo to pick us up, we headed off to Yosemite National Park in the late aftertoon. Traffic in San Francisco was awful, it took us an hour to get from 2nd Street to the Bay Bridge.

The ride to Yosemite was fun. It was a very international group, with me being the only native English speaker. In total there were five of us - Lisandro from Brazil, Arturo from Peru, Isabella from Spain and Kannai from Japan. Here’s a lovely photo of us:

Arturo is actually not in this photo, long story short he had to go back to San Francisco for work and this photo was taken on Saturday.

It takes nearly 4 hours to get to Yosemite, it’s over 200 miles away. I acted as navigator, since I’d previously been to Yosemite which really was about as much use as a degree in Computer Science. Needless to say we stopped and asked directions several times. One gas station guy had never even heard of Yosemite. Idiot.

We finally got to the Yosemite Bug Lodge, which lucky for us still had space for all five of us. It’s a beautiful hostel, and compared to SF prices it’s pretty cheap - just $20/night. They’ve got a great little cafe styled like an Irish bar where we chilled out in the evening. Lisandro tried Guinness for the first time and is now very much a fan! So after some late night banter, we went to bed and got a half decent nights sleep.

The next day we got up at 8.30 and grabbed an American breakfast at the cafe. Lots of bacon and eggs, was great. We drove into the park, and were a little bit sad to see the weather was overcast with showers. No matter though, Yosemite was beautiful as always:

I think the mist added beauty to an already spectacular place. Half dome was invisible because of the cloud, but it wasn’t such a disappointment. After spending some time taking photos and seeing around we headed down to Mariposa Grove of Giant Seqoias. These are among the largest trees in the world. This is where the ‘fun’ started.

After a 40 mile drive to the trees, just two miles short the car started smoking. We hadn’t been keeping an eye on the temperature gauge and the car’s radiator was seriously overheating. We pulled over and asked a park ranger what the best thing to do was. We left it to cool for a while, then took the radiator cap off. Oh boy!

This was taken 5 minutes after taking the cap off. It was like Stars in their Eyes before that. We were stranded for about an hour while we filled the car up with more water, and gave it time to cool off. Then headed up to the trees.

The trees are awesome. You can’t go to Yosemite without seeing these things. They’re just insanely huge.

There were a hail storm just before we got there, so it kinda looks like snow. It’s close, but not quite. When it does snow it will be beautiful.

The car was still hot on the way back. We had to stop every 40 or so miles to fill the car up with more water. There was an underlying with the car that was causing it to drink all the water, and none of us knew enough about cars to work out how to fix it. Luckily just outside of Merced on the way back, at a truckstop, we found a mechanic called Robert who manged to fix the car enough to get us back to San Francisco. We still had to cruise down the freeway the 40mph with the heaters on full blast! It was very funny and we weren’t too bummed out about it. After leaving Yosemite at 6pm we finally made it back to Frisco at 11.30. I was shattered by the end of it. I got back too late to go to a party at UC Berkeley, which would have been cool - I had been invited by some very nice French girls…ah well, next time.

Anyway, I’ve written far too much here. Must go to bed. Toodles.

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