Chapel of Grace

We have bought 7 day transport passes which entitles us to use all buses, street cars, light rail and cable cars. It doesn’t cover BART but all the other options more than adequately cover us for the areas we hope to cover during our stay. Most transport in the city is relatively cheap particularly once you reach the golden years but the cable cars are $7 a pop. Soooo ...... if you wish to ride the cable cars in different directions up and down the hills it pays to have the pass. It is also a benefit for us as we have to get at least two buses a day to explore anywhere other than our local neighbourhood.
With that said, today we decided to give the feet a rest, to a degree, and ride the cables.
Our first stop today was Union Square, a pretty square whose beauty was marred by the road works blocking two sides. The Holidays Rink was still in the square and the novelty of this Christmas attraction has yet to wear off as it was very busy. We browsed some of the shops around and found a Scotch and Soda, one of Neil’s favourite labels and low and behold - they had a sale on. Always a dangerous time. Neil left with a new jumper and i got a new summer top (We have managed to curb all excess spending during our trip so this little diversion can be allowed I am sure. They were also 50%off. Definitely justification!)
From Scotch and Soda we commenced the uphill climb through The Dragon Gate into Chinatown. Once we reached California St we boarded our first cable car up California then remained on to return back down to near Embarcadero. Remaining on we travelled back up to Powell to get the next Cable. This one travelled down Powell to the area near the Navy Pier. I had wanted to get off to have a look at Lombard Street but we were past it before I had realised where we were.
Once at the bottom to return on the same cable meant waiting in quite a lengthy line. We decided to walk in a slightly different direction to avoid the extremely steep hill we had just come down on and climb a lesser hill to the bottom of the zig-zag section of Lombard St. Lombard is fabled to to have the most zig-zags of any street in the world over a particular distance. That apparently is a furphy but the street is impressive anyway with lovely gardens lining the zigs and the zags. Would hate to live there though as every tourist within kooey is there to walk it, drive down it or stand in the middle of the road to take a photo of it. You would never have a crowd free day I think. But in so saying we were there too doing exactly that. I was the tourist in the middle of the road taking a photo.
From there we walked to another stop to do the back loop of Powell back to the turntable of the cable in the opposite direction taking us back near Union Square. Once all passengers have disembarked to turn the car around the driver and conductor have to manually pull and push it around on the turntable to return in the opposite direction.
We had finished our cable ride for the day and slowly headed to our bus stop.Read more