We woke fairly early this morning, still being somewhat on GMT. We went and found some passes for the MUNI transport system which covers metro trains, cable cars, trolley buses and street cars (trams). After seeing Union Square looking gorgeous in the spring sun we went up Powell Street on the Cable car and to the museum to see the history of the cable cars and how they work. The cars work by gripping onto cables under the road that move all the time at 9.5mph. The driver is called a gripper and controls the speed of the cable car wit what is essentially a huge pair of pliers that grips onto the cable to a lesser or greater extend depending on the desired speed. San Francisco has the only system of this type left in the world now.
We had lunch at a nice Italian restaurant called the Nob Hill Café and then went to Grace Cathedral where we had a good explore and a cup of tea with a friend from Oxford, Jane Shaw, who is currently the Dean of Grace Cathedral.
Later we went to visit the Mission Dolores in the Mission neighbourhood. It is a well preserved mission from the Catholic Spanish Mexicans dating back to 1776, before the colonists had got to the West Coast. We walked on then through Dolores Park to get up to the Castro.
The Castro area is famous for being the area where Harvey Milk, the first openly gay US politician did much of his campaigning in the 1970s and was assassinated in 1978. We visited the shop that used to be his camera shop in the 1970s (and above which much of his political activism was based) and a few bars. We had a burrito for dinner then came back for a fairly early night.
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