Basic Cable

I have to backtrack in my San Francisco narrative now, because I left out soemthing from Saturday night, that followed our Chinatown visit.

One of the things on the SF "to do" list was to ride a cable car. Pretty cliché, I admit, but these are the things you do when you're a tourist. But it seems that time has taken the old notion of the San Francisco cable car and fractured it in two.

On the one hand, you have a number of trolleys that travel around the city. These run on tracks, and get power from an overhead line. But they don't look like the cable cars conjured in your mind when you think of San Francisco. In fact, they deliberately evoke other cities. On the interior of each trolley car is a poster that tells you which U.S. city the car originated from; the exterior is painted up to evoke the mood of that city.

On the other hand, things that look just like "old fashioned cable cars" still run limited routes around the city. But they have no overhead connection to any power cable.

The former mode of "cable car" was what we rode down to the Castro, but that left us still wanting to do the touristy thing we'd set out to do. So Saturday night, we were searching for a place to get a drink. (Actually, we were trying against impossible odds to find a sports bar that might be showing the Avs game. But on college football night, that was an enterprise doomed to failure.) We found a candidate online, and decided that even though it was walking distance, we'd ride the cable car for six blocks or so, so we could cross that off the list.

We didn't realize the protocol for boarding a cable car. Basically, you have to lay down on the tracks in front of the thing, or it is NOT stopping. At least, that's what it felt like. We stood under the sidewalk sign where the car was marked to stop... and it flew right on by us. Some locals then informed us that you have to jump out in front them to get their attention, but we'd already been waiting for ten minutes, and didn't feel like waiting any longer. I mean, we'd already waited longer than it would have taken to walk the distance.

When the bar was a bust (as I mentioned earlier), we decided to try one more time and grab the cable car on the way back. When a cable car finally rolled by, it looked like it might be out of service, but I still dutifully jumped out into the road and flagged it down. In service, it turned out... just empty. The operator and the money taker were aboard, and that was it. I imagine they wondered why we were so lazy to pay for the seven block trip to the end of the line, but they took our money all the same.

The up side was, we got a whole cable car to ourselves for a few brief minutes. A cool experience that perfectly satisfied our original touristy instinct.