San Francisco Caching

I spent last week in San Francisco on business and of course had to get some caching in. I was able to find 29 unique caches in the downtown area - all within walking distance from Mascone Center. According to the track log I walked 9.5 miles on Tuesday, 4 miles on Wed, and 4.5 miles on Friday. And don't forget the San Francisco terrain. This isn't Minnesota anymore. There are more steep hills than I imagined. Many of them had stairs instead of sidewalks because they were so steep. I sure had a good time, though, walking through the streets and seeing things I would have never seen. Here are some that I thought were interesting....

Franciscan Complex - Alcatraz Terrane - My first cache on the trip and my first Earth Cache. This was a pretty cool place. I learned something about Graywacke, too. Not at all what I expected.

Parrot's Perch - Wild parrot's, how cool is that. Boy they were loud, too. This as an interesting place. There wasn't a road but a set of stairs that did a "switch back" to get up the hill. Everywhere along the stairway there were walkways to the houses. It's hard to describe without actually being there.

Watermelon Hill - This is evidently a place where David Letterman rolled a bunch of watermelons down the hill. Boy it was steep!!

Lombard Street - Yes, this is the famous curvy road hill. This was a fun cache. I met a cacher from Tennessee here. Lots of great views from this vantage point. And of course tons of muggles in the area!

At the Pier - This is a Web Cam cache at Pier 39 (the tourist area). You'll have to checkout the log to see the pictures of Sokratz playing at the pier. I'm on the phone with my wife so she could take the picture from the web cam.

Bamboo Alley and Chinatown Tour - These were a couple of puzzle caches that took you on a sight seeing tour. Saw things I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise.

S.F. Cable Car Barn - This was a fun place. It's at the heart of the cable cars. This working museum is where all the cables that power the cable cars run from. It was pretty interesting to see how it all works.


Of course there a couple of DNF's (did not find) in there too. One of them really bugged me. At one point there were 4 of us there looking for it.

Union Square - We couldn't find this one at all. I came here on two different days and at one time even had one of the street vendors selling art work helping me look for it. It was maddning. After leaving I sent an email to the cacher I met at Lombard Street because she had found this one, too. Boy did I feel stupid when she told me where she had found it. Yikes - sometimes you feel like a nut, and this was that time!

Of course there were many other fun caches there too. Overall it was a great caching adventure for a couple of days in San Francisco.

I took some pictures along the way and used GPicSync to sync the pictures up with my GPS tracks. The result in .KMZ file can be viewed in Google Earth (don't confuse that with Google Maps, they're two different things). You can download the 3.6MB file from here.