23June06 Friday
Today our main activity was to rent a bicycle built for two and ride across the golden gate bridge. We had talked to an outfit on Fisherman's Wharf that rents bicycles called Blazing Saddles on Thursday and decided that we had to give it a try. We also found out why they call them Blazing Saddles as it reminded me of the 30 mile ride that I took with Joe down on the Los Angeles beaches a few days earlier.
The people at Blazing Saddles said that the ride was no problem and easy as it's level over across the bridge and then downhill all the way down into Sausalito on the north end of the bridge. This wasn't quite true. There was a steep uphill push to get onto the bridge on the south end but not all that bad. The weather was somewhat sunny down on the wharf and nice but as we looked up towards the bridge it was covered with fog. As we got closer to the bridge it was not only fog but a strong wind. I decided to buy a jacket at the bridge gift center before starting across the bridge. I was glad that I did. Looking up at the base of the towers it was not possible to see the top of the towers due to the fog. It was surprising to hear a helicopter go beneath us under the bridge and disappear into the fog. Apparently he could see the water but we couldn't see all that much.
We eventually made it across the bridge after many stops to watch the sailboats underneath us, watch a couple of workers with harnesses enter the base of one of the towers with a piece of steel to do some work up on top, and to take a lot of pictures and video along the way.
It was really windy when we got to the north end and had to walk the bikes for a ways even though it was level. In a short ways it became fairly steep going down into Sausalito and the bike trail follows the highway into town. Our hope was that the brakes would work at this point. After getting down to the beach area in Sausalito the sun was out and the hills to the back of town cut the wind and it was a perfect place for lunch at a streetside cafe.
In the morning the city had declared today as a "Spare the Air Day" and all the city public transportation was free. We found our way to the public ferry dock and took the ferry back to pier 1 in SF. The bike rental company had provided ferry tickets to us but we didn't have to use them and it saved us $16. The penalty was that we had to ride from pier 1 back to pier 39 to turn in the bikes but it was also a nice ride and we got to see more of the bay.
We were going to take a ride on the cable cars after the bike ride but they were also free and the lines were so long that it would have taken over an hour to get onto one so that was given up and we did a little more touring of the wharf area and spent some time in the National Park Headquarters there looking at some of their exhibits. Quite a bit of the bay area is National Park. During WWII the bay area was a staging area for over 1.5 million troups and a lot of the old barracks are now part of the park buildings. A lot of the land has been reclaimed and converted to park area.
The pictures show some of the bay, the ride across the bridge, fog over the bridge that we rode through, and a couple pictures of Sausalito.
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