Re-minisce's Pictures

2004-10-13T19:16:00.000-07:00

Statue of woman with tits popping out of clothes, standing in well filled with floating rose petals. After the bus trip back to SF I had to beat a hasty retreat to the airport and fly the 28 hours back to Singapore (via Taiwan) for my dad's 60th. Sigh. Would that I could've had more time on holiday in san francisco. Ah well, I guess I should be grapeful that I had the chance to go at all. Haha, grapeful. Ugh. Groan.

2004-10-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

After I failed to feed him, he went back to having a bath.

2004-10-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

This vineyard was the most opulent of the lot, with pretty gardens and statues and sculptures littered throughout it (Italians...) Built into one of the walls was a watering pool which this little chap was making full use of. He obligingly posed for this photo.

2004-10-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

... over to and including all that wasteland on the right which they apparently hadn't figured out what to do with yet. There's a waterfowl preserve in there near the middle of the picture. One could take a whole day walking across their land methinks.

2004-10-13T19:11:00.001-07:00

They owned all the land starting from that hill on the left...

2004-10-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

Our last and final vineyard was HUGE.

2004-10-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

Scenic

2004-10-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, it all looks terribly boring, but I was having a great time. Think we were on to our third vineyard tasting session by now. This picture does give one a sense of the size of these things.

2004-10-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

Sheer expanse of grapevines. That's a lot of grapes. They taste nice too.

2004-10-13T19:07:00.001-07:00

Lucky bird had a... bird. In the cage with him.

2004-10-13T19:07:00.000-07:00

for some reason this vineyard had peacocks in it.

2004-10-13T19:06:00.001-07:00

sonoma wine country

2004-10-13T19:06:00.000-07:00

more big tree.

2004-10-13T19:05:00.000-07:00

during the summer when the water dries out, salmon fry hang around in the pools engaged in the process of, well, growing up. In their second autumn / winter when the waters rise they start their run. (ie they stick around for the first year)

2004-10-13T19:03:00.000-07:00

this is what a salmon run looks like when it's dried up.

2004-10-13T19:02:00.001-07:00

hole-y tree.

2004-10-13T19:02:00.000-07:00

more trees

2004-10-13T19:01:00.001-07:00

People, and trees

2004-10-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, they grow by tubers. Big mother tree sends out a ring of tuber-root things. When Mother is threatened, she secretes hormones which make the tubers grow into big strong trees. Often this results in a ring of trees surrounding a bigger tree or a dead stump, such as this one.

2004-10-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

Miur woods, to be honest. Home of the coastal redwoods, the red sequioa - yet more big trees. Did I mention in my previous posts that the giant sequioa have no tap roots? I don't think these guys have, either.

2004-10-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

The next day I took a trip to the enchanted forest

2004-10-13T05:02:00.000-07:00

This is a view of the San Francisco skyline by night. Our guide drove us out here as the mystery bonus last stop not advertised in the brochure, for us all to take beautiful scenic shots of the grand skyscrapers shrouded at their very tops in a gentle mist. Naturally, my camera couldn't cope and turned out a black canvas with dotted lights all over it instead. When I finally install photoshop on my computers in Singaland I fully intend to edit these pictures and see if my camera actually managed to SEE anything. The diagonal line of lights on the left is the golden gate bridge. Well, at least nobody else's digital camera was able to capture the image either. Smirk.

2004-10-13T04:58:00.001-07:00

Anyway these were two dramatic pictures of sunset taken over fields of rolling nothingness. I just thought it was remarkable how the grass looked like the sea, sort-of, so I snapped the shots. Maybe I'm turning into a bit of a shutterbug... shudder.

2004-10-13T04:58:00.000-07:00

The cayotes tend to pose for cameras when vehicles stop, because tourists sometimes chuck them food from their cars. Hence in cayote's brain, stopped car = food. Presumably striking a dramatic pose earns him more. Our driver / guide also nattered on about the three times he had spotted bear in Yosemite park, in his twenty year career, including the time he had everyone craning their necks to spot the maybe-bear hidden far away in a bush, when he almost ran down the bear sitting in the middle of the road which he uh hadn't noticed. Heh.

2004-10-13T04:55:00.001-07:00

Perfect. That is one Ugly Cayote. (groan.)

2004-10-13T04:55:00.000-07:00

This is a Doh! moment. Always remember when taking photos through glass that the flash will ruin the shot. Since I couldn't figure out how to turn off the flash (Y chromosome forbids us from reading the manual) I pressed the camera up against the glass instead. (the lens contacts the glass, obliterating the reflected flash-effect)

2004-10-13T04:53:00.000-07:00

Aww what the hell, one more for the road. There're rumours of Japanese blood in the family. My finger trembled on the trigger. I had a mini epileptic fit. Goshdamnit, it was beautiful, okay? I just wanted to take more pictures of it. Count yourselves lucky there weren't any topless knockout blondes on the beach in LA. Well, there was one, but she was lying face down in the sand, bugger it.

2004-10-13T04:52:00.000-07:00

I dunno. Whatcha reckon. Anyone getting sick of Half Dome and River yet?

2004-10-13T04:51:00.000-07:00

and Half Dome. I wonder if I should go into the postcard business.

2004-10-13T04:50:00.001-07:00

See? River.

2004-10-13T04:50:00.000-07:00

Yet another view of Half Dome, with a river this time.

2004-10-13T04:49:00.000-07:00

This is her Man. Err Buck. Bronco. Whatever. I forgot to say, the deer roam free here, meaning there wasn't any guardrail or anything. This was taken from a distance of about six feet. As you can see, he didn't think I was terribly interesting, giving him lots in common with most of the human female population around me. Sniff. I toyed with the idea of stepping closer, but apparently lots of tourists get hurt every year by spooking large, horny animals...

2004-10-13T04:47:00.000-07:00

This is her again, after I knelt down. Says a lot how much she moves doesn't it?

2004-10-13T04:46:00.000-07:00

Here she is, taken from behind. Damn, that sounded really, really dodgy. What I MEAN of course is I snuck around behind her and shot her. In a nice, animal loving way. Damn!

2004-10-13T04:45:00.000-07:00

The village centre on the valley floor was quaint and pretty. My photographs of the logwood hotel and visitor centres set against the backdrop of mountains, in the midst of pretty trees were predictably enough eaten by my camera. This particular shot was not. let's play Spot the Deer. There really is one in here. If ou look hard enough, you'll make out her eye, and then her head and neck. It's a bit like a 3D stereogram. Heh. Hours of fun.

2004-10-13T04:43:00.000-07:00

Turn 180 degrees around and you behold the face of El Capitan. Does anyone remember the Star Trek movie that had Kirk and Bones climbing a mountain, and Spock flying by in his antigrav boots and rescuing Bones when he fell? (or was it kirk.) Anyway they were climbing El Capitan.
El Capitan (even in this picture) is dotted with scores of crazy people with scant regard for their lives climbing it. They are barely visible with the naked eye, so far away is it from the viewer (we drove up nearly to the foot of the mountain and could barely make the climbers out unless aided with binoculars). To give you an idea of how tall El Capitan is, and how mad the climbers are, El Capitan stands at 20,000 feet tall, and takes four to five days to climb. You sleep on the rock face. Turning over in your sleep might have less than pleasant consequences. One of the other tourists (of course) asked what happens if you need to take a leak or a poo. The answer is you carry a thermos flask thingie around with you. Just make sure you don't mix up the coffee and... heh heh. Will our hero survive El Capitan? Tune in next week! How's that for the ultimate Cliffhangar.

2004-10-13T04:41:00.000-07:00

This is called Bridal Veil Falls, because... when there's lots of water falling from it in spring / winter, it looks like a bride's veil. The black colour marks where the water falls in season (I'm guessing the water carries silt which stains the rockface black). Naturally I chose to visit at the end of summer when all the water's dried up. Sigh.

2004-10-13T04:40:00.000-07:00

Yet more half dome and mountains. this time with valley floor included. The little grass thingies are actually trees. Many trees make a forest. Cor blimey, we learn summink new everyday don't we?

2004-10-13T04:39:00.000-07:00

Half dome in background. Funny how the yanks invaded the country, took something with a beautiful name like !@rjasifoajEDickaifja (okay, so I don't really remember how the Indians spelt it, sue me. It was unpronounceable whatever it was) and renamed it something as imaginative and creative as "half-dome". That's american enterprise and ingenuity for you.

2004-10-13T04:37:00.000-07:00

One thing that struck even me wasn't a falling boulder as the viewer might have hoped, but the way the light shifted over the span of minutes, variously illuminating different parts of the mountains as the clouds moved.

2004-10-13T04:35:00.000-07:00

Mountainey pictures. Half Dome in background. Can't remember what the other peaks are called.

2004-10-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

Beats me why I took this photo. Think it was to illustrate how high up we were. The brown stick thing is the top of a very tall, dead tree. If you look hard at the valley floor in the middle of the photo, you will be able to see a house thingie. If you look real hard you will see a fat man holding a sign that says Bush Sucks Ass, Vote Kerry! Just kidding.

2004-10-13T04:32:00.000-07:00

Yet more devastation.

2004-10-13T04:30:00.000-07:00

More of the same. Bear in mind these are being taken from a moving minivan. Use your imagination - that's a LOT of dead trees. Incidentally the big fire took place about fifteen years ago. I think the word for this is "devastation". It must have been devastating at the time. Devastating is a nice word to use when describing a girl's eyes to her, they become nice and pleasant after that for some reason.

2004-10-13T04:28:00.000-07:00

We all got back on the bus to journey to the valley floor. Along the way, we passed a burnt-out section of forest. Apparently, a half century's worth of aggressive firefighting had resulted in a massive accumulation of underbrush, so that when the fire came, it came real hard and fast (sounds dodgy...) and was virtually unstoppable. Today, the national park ranger and firemen-type people actually set small controlled burns of the underbrush to prevent this from happening ever again. They must be the only people in world whose job is to set forests on fire.

2004-10-13T04:24:00.000-07:00

More of the same. Not quite as big. The tree in the foreground is a very, very tall tree, the sort you see in movies in large forests where James Bond types scoot around on snow speeder thingies and liberate evil villains from the tyranny of their lives.

2004-10-13T04:21:00.000-07:00

Finally, someone dumb enough to get into my field of view. Size of person for comparison. Note, person in foreground, tree in background. Nobody wanted to step into the tunnel for me unfortunately; they were all too busy gawping or fondling each other (we had a newly married couple. The bloke looked sixty, the bird looked sexy. And about twenty. Russian, blonde, very beautiful, very bus... uh, well endowed.)

2004-10-13T04:19:00.000-07:00

See? Burnt through. When it went, it went with style.

2004-10-13T04:18:00.000-07:00

They call this one the Tunnel Tree. As you can see, there is a tunnel in it. It was wide and tall enough to fit a horse carriage through, in days long past. Today, it fits a minivan full of tourists through with some effort. However, the trail has now been closed to vehicular traffic. This particular tree burnt to death. Nobody can figure out how it managed this, seeing as it's fireproof. Shrug. Oh yes, and for those who are interested in trivia, these trees do not have tap roots, meaning all 250 feet of them is supported by little superficial roots spreading out around the base of the tree. Reassuring, eh? (I don't get it. My brain doesn't remember things when I want it to, but stomp along with brain in cruise mode and near everything our guide said stuck in my head... for instance, the acorns of this tree are about one by one centimetre, absolutely minute. It's conckers!

2004-10-13T04:14:00.000-07:00

If you look carefully, you'll spot holes in the trunk. Woodpeckers like this tree because it is nice and soft and easy to make holes in. They store nuts in the holes. Isn't this neat? you get a nice picture session and national geographic education all in one. I should also mention the burn marks on the trunk. These trees are naturally fire resistant since they're full of resins and tannin. Meaning if you chewed on the trunk you'd stain your teeth nasty yellow I think... The acorns this tree produces rely on fire to clear the underbrush, and open up in extreme heat to liberate their seeds unto the nice, clean fertile burnt-out soil beneath. One plant's poison is another plant's... meat? err.

2004-10-13T04:10:00.000-07:00

Giant, big tree. Giant Sequouia to anyone who's interested. These things grow up to two hundred fifty feet tall. Mental image of someone walking up the trunk counting feet.

2004-10-13T04:06:00.001-07:00

seriously big trees.

2004-10-13T04:06:00.000-07:00

the next day, I went to yosemite to look at some big trees.

2004-10-13T03:52:00.000-07:00

These friendly folks waved at me as their fancy ship (with swimming pool, sundeck and helipad) steamed under the bridge where I was standing. I considered my options : a) spit b) wave back -- and decided to wave back congenially. Hey, I was having a good time... I did wonder what would happen if I accidentally dropped something onto the ship. And toyed with the idea of scribbling a message on a piece of paper, folding it into a plane and dropping it down onto them. Summat like "Will the blonde girl with the nice blue eyes please marry me." or "your momma has smelly feet." A short while later, a supertanker laden with containers steamed into harbour which dwarfed even this monstrosity (which put our own Star Cruise's.. Queen Elizabeth, is it? to shame. Hell it even made the golden gate bridge look small, and it was nearly as large as Alcatraz Island, I kid you not)

2004-10-13T03:48:00.000-07:00

Cyclist at sunset, on the Golden Gate. Re-minisce watched the sun slide below the horizon over water for the first time in his life. It was magical, and also breathtakingly quick. You can actually make out the sun plummetting at an almost exponential rate inexorably downwards to meet the surface of the water. I almost expected to hear hissing...

2004-10-13T03:46:00.000-07:00

View of city of San Francisco from further down the bridge, as night and fog sweep across it's face. Interestingly enough, it started getting VERY cold. Day and night temperatures can vary as much as 15 degrees. Fortunately, re-minsce had cleverly enough worn his overcoat out in anticipation.

2004-10-13T03:45:00.000-07:00

View of the city of San Francisco at last light, taken from the bridge.

2004-10-13T03:44:00.000-07:00

I said, the Golden Gate Bridge! It's two miles long I believe. Words cannot give you an idea of scale. It took me almost an hour to cross it at a very fast march.

2004-10-13T03:43:00.001-07:00

The Golden Gate Bridge

2004-10-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

This is St. Dominic's, a Dominican church inhabited by, suprisingly enough, dominican monks. I toyed with the idea of attending a dominican mass for the first time in my life, but sunlight was fading and so I passed, with some regret and moved on to...

2004-10-13T03:41:00.000-07:00

Scene from under the arch in picture below. Nice pagoda thingie. This entire village scene is set atop a rampart thing which looks like just another mall from the road below. The town itself sprawls out behind us, and to the left and right in a low-rise maze of shops and houses.

2004-10-13T03:40:00.000-07:00

I decided to try to foot it from the mission to the golden gate bridge, possibly stopping for mass along the way. Grand ambitions gave way to insiduous onset of hunger pangs. Fortunately, Japantown appeared at just the right moment. I was expecting maybe a high tech shiny mini metropolis and was rather disappointed to find a sleepy backwater chocka with restaurants with funny names like "kimoche". Notice the grey car in the picture. There's always one wot appears out of nowhere to spoil your perfect shot, innit. I think the drivers make a career out of lurking around corners waiting for that perfect moment to zoom into your picture, just after you've pressed the trigger on your incredibly sleepy digital camera

2004-10-11T05:14:00.000-07:00

This lovely sculpture of a Franciscan monk in the cathedral cemetary is not, as one would have expected, a sculpture of Saint Francis.

2004-10-11T05:13:00.000-07:00

this cemetary was apparently used in a scene in one of Alfred Hitchcock's scary murder movies. Any film buffs out there want to tell me which one it was?

2004-10-11T05:12:00.000-07:00

i can't understand why this picture came out blur. Camera was stabilised, and preview picture on camera looked sharp enough. shrug.

2004-10-11T05:10:00.002-07:00

glass

2004-10-11T05:10:00.001-07:00

Say it with me. Stained...

2004-10-11T05:10:00.000-07:00

Yet more stained glass

2004-10-11T05:09:00.000-07:00

Stained glass.

2004-10-11T05:08:00.000-07:00

second attempt at decent picture

2004-10-11T05:07:00.001-07:00

More light effects. Mmmmm. nice.

2004-10-11T05:07:00.000-07:00

Inside the modern cathedral. Methinks this photo desperately needs photoshop retouching but as luck would have it, I don't have it here in Singapore :(

2004-10-11T05:06:00.000-07:00

A mockup of the original mission town before the rest of it was dismantled after acquisition by the mexicans, and fell into decay. The quadrangle apparently became a bullfighting arena. Today, only the chapel/cathedral remains. The bright white flash top right is the sun in miniature. Honest. Okay, so it's a reflection off the plastic walls of the case - it was hard enough to limit the flash to this area of the photo and involved a lot of painstaking body positioning to block out reflections of the tourists and sunlit quadrangle behind me. Along the way, I accidentally dropped my walkman audio tour and broke it. Fortunately the nice woman gave me another one at no charge. Yanks. Lovely people, really.

2004-10-11T05:03:00.000-07:00

The Altar itself was a work of art so intricate and ornate it impressed some of the indians into conversion to the awe and majesty of this new God who had arrived in their land. (Shock and Awe tactics, only less violent?) Look back now at the first photo of the church and note the ceiling, which reflected the colours (something to do with basket weaving) of the Indians who built this church. The entire church was built by Indians, although planned and engineered by Franciscan monks (spanish)

2004-10-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

I especially liked the way sunlight streamed softly red/yellow through the stained glass windows, giving the whole place an air of utter and complete warmth and serenity. The altarpiece you see here was pretty dang impressive as well. Apparently if you look hard enough some of the carved figures have visible veins on their hands and arms.

2004-10-11T04:58:00.001-07:00

Inside the Old Mission. Beautiful.

2004-10-11T04:58:00.000-07:00

This is the original mission, or at least the cathedral that the original mission was built around. San Francisco started as a mission town ysee.

2004-10-11T04:57:00.001-07:00

This is... the front of the cathedral. Whoda thunk?

2004-10-11T04:57:00.000-07:00

This is the Misión San Francisco De Asis
(Mission Dolores). http://www.graphicmode.com/missiondolores/ where St Francis served, and is pretty much where San Francisco (Saint, Francis) all began. Okay, actually it's not - this is the cathedral church built onto the side of the original mission, over the bones of another cathedral church built slightly earlier which didn't survive the 1909 quake.

2004-10-11T04:54:00.000-07:00

... the civic centre. God knows what it's all about, but it does have nice shiny gold bits, so I took another photo. That smokey stuff coming from the ground is steam from a pothole. It wasn't remotely cold, so I'm guessing this is just a clever stage effect to remind New Yorkers that they're still in the USA.

2004-10-11T04:52:00.000-07:00

... the UN building (pathetic little thing left), the state library (grand building right, has very big library full of tourists and nice toilets with CLEAN toilet seats - singaporean men could take a lesson from that alone. The grand building in the background is...

2004-10-11T04:49:00.000-07:00

I decided to wander down market street just for a look-look see. This stretch was just after the dodgy stretch advertising nude girls! Tera Patrick live in action on stage! Sex show tonight! and all other of gentlemen's persuits. These guys weren't bad and I'd have trounced a few of them if they weren't charging fifty cents a game, so after trying desperately to warn some poor tourist by means of semaphore behind his back that he was making a huge mistake (he could of checkmated his opponent, despite being a rook and queen down) I wandered off down the street (the punter was beginning to stare daggers at me for some reason) rather than behold a merciless slaughter and waste of fifty cents. There, I discovered a lot of homeless hobos in the street, and...

2004-10-11T04:45:00.000-07:00

This is called maiden lane. Once upon a time, "maidens" used to lean out from the balconies you see and tout their wares (hint, pamela anderson has two big uns, BiWares I guess you could call em. Or Twin Peaks. heh heh.) to gentlemen who apparently doubled as plumbers I think. One of the locals mentioned them loving to plug holes. Or was that plugging holes with love? Heh. Incidentally, Twin Peaks of telly fame - who remembers that? I loved it! - is in san francisco. Or at least, there's a place called twin peaks in san francisco. I never made it there though, my feet gave out somewhere along union street, where my brain called for a timeout and forced me protesting into a cinema to watch The Forgotten.

2004-10-11T04:43:00.000-07:00

'case you haven't figured out yet, there was a little carnival for the elderly going on. I also took a photo of some really gorgeous seeing-eye labradors but the camera decided to eat that one too. So you get to see old people instead. The Geriatric Elvis Impersonators unfortunately got obscured at the last minute by the little contingent wandering down the middle of the scene (my camera has a 4 second delay between triggered freezeframe capture and actual photo capture)

2004-10-11T04:41:00.000-07:00

Closer inspection of the scene revealed the further evidence in support of the Universal Law that pigeons invariably gravitate towards monuments. It has to do with molecular attraction and quantum physics I think. Oh yes, note also the Let's Rock and Roll banner (this photo is worth clicking on for that alone) which shows 2 oldies in their rocking chair and wheelchair respectively. Groan.

2004-10-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

Union Square, the heart of the city where all the shopping is. That made the girls sit up, didn't it? The tall thing in the middle is the Dewey monument, which "commemorates the victory of Admiral George Dewey and the American fleet over Spanish forces at Manila Bay, the Philippines, on May 1, 1898, during the Spanish-American War."

2004-10-11T04:29:00.000-07:00

I walked all the way to the Rotunda at the Palace of Fine Arts. To give the viewer a sense of scale, that tree you see is a very, very, very tall tree. Did I mention that I walked all the way there? Well, I did. Along the way, I dragged myself all the way down a pier, and back again (why, I have no idea), and even stopped by Ghirardelli's (which predictably enough, my camera ate all the photos of.) to buy my dad a birthday present. Of the Chocolatey variety, 'case some of you out there are particularly slow. I couldn't help but notice that every single person along the waterfront was British, including the weird hobo who was building a sort-of sculpture out of suitcase-sized rocks balanced end on end, to form... a tower of suitcase-sized rocks.
I also passed some adorable little kiddies playing footie (Brit variety) on a beautiful green right smack by the sea, and bordered on the one side by the most beautiful houses I have ever seen, and the other by a man-made bay full of yachts, and felt that life just doesn't get better than this. I would have felt jealous had my feet not been hurting so much by now.

My grand ambition to walk all the way to the Golden Gate bridge was prematurely terminated (And i almost made it, too!) by my rank stupidity and inability to figure out which highway to terminate my life on prematurely in quest of my objective. Much later on the next day, while on the bus, I realised I could just of walked down the waterfront some more for a short distance. Doh!

Anyway, defeated, I hopped on a bus and made my way back to...

2004-10-11T04:27:00.000-07:00

I took this picture from Fort Mason Hill. It looked more remarkable in real life, with sunlight sparkling on the water running alongside the patch of green in the centre of the photo, where a team of pro footballers was playing. Ok, amatuer footballers. American Football. While I taking this pic, a homeless hobo wandered by carrying his blankie and garbage bag, hiccupped at me and said conversationally, "Fujifilm, best colour of the lot, I reckon" before shuffling off...

2004-10-11T04:21:00.000-07:00

View of the Golden Gate Bridge, from Alcatraz, approx 11 am. San Francisco dawned grey and foggy every morning that I was there, with the fog lifting at 11 am, and rolling back in around 6pm via a pass between a break in the mountains. I don't have any photos of this so you'll just have to take my word for this (and if you're me reading this many years later, well... you just have your own word for it) - it's truly a magnificent sight to behold.

2004-10-11T04:16:00.001-07:00

View of San Francisco, from Alcatraz

2004-10-11T04:16:00.000-07:00

The Prison Exercise Yard, taken from the baseball diamond that dominates a third of it. Apparently prisoners used to come out here and play baseball. The majority of them just vegged though, and some even played chess (historic photo on wall, not visible in this picture)

2004-10-11T04:13:00.000-07:00

I call this one Jail Cell. It's a jail cell. Nice and spacious, compared to a typical London Flat. Nifty folding table and seat in the side wall too, positively high-tech! All doors are automated to boot, no locks, no hinges.

2004-10-11T04:12:00.000-07:00

"Broadway", the central row of cells in Alcatraz. The area at the far side is called "New York Square", with a small clock mounted on the wall above it. The dining hall adjoins this, where up to 200 deranged prisoners armed themselves with metal knives and viciously attacked their chicken and chips (actually, fruit and cereal, according to a sample menu left behind). There was a single instance of a near-revolt in the dining hall because prisoners got fed-up of their endlessly repeating menu and started overturning tables in protest. Apparently the prison officers decided to be kind and not activate the cyanide gas-pipes in the ceiling (no joke) which would have killed two of their own anyhow, and instead went in and blew a few windows out with their tommy guns. For some reason, the prisoners became, according to the audio recorded virtual tour anyhow, "tame as sheep" after this.

2004-10-11T04:08:00.000-07:00

I call this one Big Water Tank. It's a shame I couldn't persuade someone to climb it to give the viewer a sense of the sheer size of this monstrosity. Ah well, next time.

2004-10-11T04:07:00.000-07:00

Golden Gate bridge, taken from the boat on landing approach.

2004-10-11T04:05:00.000-07:00

Lighthouse on Alcatraz Island. The burnt out buildings are a relic of the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz after it was put out of service. Nobody knows how the fires started, with both antagonists (Indian civil-right protestors and US government) blaming the other. Today, many of the buildings are burnt out wrecks. Interestingly enough, Alcatraz is considered a National Park (heritage) and there is no eating, no drinking, no shagging, no snogging, and next to nothing to do there at all except goggle at jail cells. (see other pics)

2004-10-11T04:02:00.000-07:00

On landing approach. There was only ever 1 successful escape from Alcatraz. Officials figure that the escapees drowned / froze in the frigid waters during the 1 mile swim to shore. They never did find the bodies though. Funny, that.

2004-10-11T04:00:00.000-07:00

San Francisco by Sea, en route to Alcatraz

2004-10-11T03:53:00.000-07:00

They look scho schweet don't they. You wouldn't guess that every so often one of them sticks out a flipper and surreptitiously shoves a snoozemate into the sea now, would you? (they really do! without opening their eyes either!)

2004-10-11T03:51:00.000-07:00

I call this one seal Raising Head. A rare occurrence. (see other seals for reference as to favourite daytime activity)