Alcatraz

Pier 39 is also the place to go if you want to visit Alcatraz. Which Caro did, very very much.  Caro has an inordinate amount of interest in organised crime.  I sometimes think it is only a cruel trick of fate that she is not the head of The Gambino Family.  My advice to anyone planning to visit the island is get those tickets early – even better, get them from your hotel concierge.  We were there in the early afternoon but still could only get tickets for the 7pm tour.  

This turned out to be a stroke of luck, because Alcatraz at night is a wonderfully eerie place and if you use your imagination, you can almost see the inmates shuffling about while trying to keep their arse-cheeks clamped together.  We got a very informative guide who took us around and explained the history of the place.  It turns out that Alcatraz gets its name from pelicans that the first Spanish explorer saw there.  

However, the first English explorer must have had his map the wrong way up or something and decided that "Pelican Island" was actually the one in the bay.  Hence, Alcatraz, named for the pelicans, has no pelicans on it.  Hooray for the English.  How on earth did we ever get an empire?
 
The Spanish built a fort on the pure rock of Alcatraz, and brought soil over from the mainland to improve the fortifications thus inadvertently turning it into a rockery.  Subsequently, the Americans nabbed California in the War of Nabbing California from the Mexicans and turned the fort of Alcatraz into a military prison for good ol' boys who continued to support The South in the war between the states.
 
So it continued until the 1920's when the military decided it was too costly to run and turned it over the the US government who decided it would be a good place to hide their naughtiest people such as Robert Stroud, Machine Gun Kelly and Al Capone.  As it turned out, "The Rock" was never filled and the regime was so strict that it didn’t have the same gang culture that other facilities suffered from.  As a result, it didn't actually all sound THAT bad, Shawshank-Redemption-wise.  But escape attempts were inevitable given that most of the inmates were hard men.  

The guards tried to dissuade them by occasionally bringing sharks caught by local fishmen up onto the docks and pointing out that anyone attempting to swim in the bay was just so much potential sushi.  

This was actually a fib, as most of the sharks were caught outside of the bay, but the sharks were in no position to point this out.  Still, there are only 5 (unofficial) escapes from Alcatraz.
 
We got all this from a guide who looked unnervingly like a beaver and took us around the exercise yard for a little unofficial tour.  I'd given up on the official tour by now anyway, which was given on one of those headsets as you followed a Blue Line.  I would have followed it because I am English and therefore enjoy following instructions, but Caro is a Tour Rebel who goes rushing off on her own agenda, and I didn't want to lose her in D block or anything.  As we followed Beaver Guy around the outside of the prison, the shadows lengthened, the sun went down and I looked over at San Francisco so temptingly close.  

It was hard to shake the thought that at one time Clint Eastwood had escaped from here. 

(We HAD to watch "Escape from Alcatraz" after being there.  In which Clint makes a small yacht out of three coats, a length of rubber tubing and some toilet rolls.  Or something like that.)
 
So Alcatraz was GREAT.  Caro thoroughly enjoyed herself.  There was also a small display commemorating the occupation of Alcatraz by Native Americans in 1969 (7 years after the prison closed) which focussed attention on the land rights of the local tribes.