Day 9: "I left my heart, (da-dum-dedum, da-dum-deedum) at Sam Plank's Disco..."

We love this city.
Emma managed to spot whales and seals galore as we approached SF (including one that did flips just outside the window - just after I walked away, of course).
We were late getting into port due to unco-operative currents, so we didn’t arrive until around 10am. On the upside the weather was perfect, and the sail-in was as spectacular as any we’ve had. On the downside our late arrival meant we lost our near-perfect berth near Fisherman’s Wharf and ended up in some crap berth south of the Bay Bridge. Even this had a silver lining (or at least a shiny aluminium one) as we had a great view of parts of the city we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

San Francisco is truly one of the great cities of the world. The look of the place, the mood, the culture, and those indefinable “somethings” that give a place its character are so wonderful here. Like anywhere it has its flaws. but there’s enough right about San Francisco to make up for its failings.
To me I’d sum it up by saying that it feels the most Australian of American cities (this statement which may well serve to insult Aussies and Yanks in equal measure). Hey, they even have Melbourne-style trams:

After a long wander we ended up at Fisherman’s Wharf and had lunch at Fisherman’s Grotto, where we had lunch on Emma’s first (and last) visit in 2001. I had forgotten how *massive* the serves are. I ordered the avocado and prawns, Emma the avocado and crab. We could have had one plate for the two of us and still had enough left over to feed a small Indonesian fishing village for a week.
We caught the light rail to Union Square, where we did our tourist-y duties and dumped massive amounts of cash into the local economy.
The list of goodies (to the tune of “On the First Day of Christmas):
“On the first day of Frisco,
My true love bought for me,
six CDs
five new books,
four pairs of Levi’s,
three pairs of shoes,
two t-shirts,
and a silver 80 gig iPod…”

(For the sake of historical accuracy it was actually seven CDs and four books, and we didn’t buy any t-shirts. But the song worked better with a bit of poetic licence.)

Here’s a shot of Emma later that night. So many shoes, so few feet…

And for the geeks, a shot of the inside of an Apple Genius Bar. The San Francisco is possibly the only place in the world where geeks with tattoos are commonplace:

We then sat on the deck armed with a margarita and a daiquiri and watched the pelicans fly across the bay.

Sail-out was delayed as the last two passengers were running very late. A black car came screaming up to the dock and dumped them out about two minutes before they lifted the gangway (lucky for them they made it as it’s a damn long swim to Hawaii). The delay gave us a perfect dusk/early evening view as we sailed out. My camera can’t do justice to the views of the moon over the Bay Bridge and the city lights coming up, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it was stunning.
But these may give a small sense of it: