A Tale of Two Tours — Phoenix Forties

Today we were classic tourists sitting on a Hop on hop off bus which is my favourite way to see a city for the first time: you get all the major places of interest, interesting commentary and there’s no need to stress about navigation and parking. During the course of the hopping on and hopping off, we drove over the Golden Gate bridge twice (an experience not to be missed from the open air top deck of a double decker bus), rode a cable car up and down some very steep hills, wandered through Chinatown, got slightly lost in the business district, saw lots of amazing Victorian and Edwardian architecture including the beautiful Painted Ladies and apparently drove past the football field where OJ Simpson played his first game. Fun fact: the San Francisco Cable Car system uses an under-road pulley system where the car grips onto the cable and the cable then moves the car. The cable has to be replaced every 6 weeks and the brakes, which are wooden blocks that press against the tracks need to be replaced every 2-3 days.

We also did a 2 hours Holiday Lights tour in a cute as a button VW Combi van that was a load of fun. Being a private tour, you also get a bunch of fun facts on some of the more low-key aspects of the city so here are the three best:

We stopped at the Fairmont Hotel to see the 2 story gingerbread house they put up as part of their Christmas decorations. 7,750 pieces of gingerbread are used to build the 22 foot high house and 1,500 pounds of royal icing
The Palace of Fine Arts, which rather like the Eiffel Tower was built for a World Fair and then kept living as a tourist landmark, is also right next to George Lukas’ studio. He took inspiration from its shape when he created R2D2 which has the same profile as the rotunda
The tenderloin district is so called because it was so dodgy that police were paid extra to do their shift in the district and could therefore afford to have tenderloin when they went out for dinner. So a shift in the district was named a tenderloin shift which became the informal name of the district