Sweating Bullitts: Driving Divisadero Street in San Francisco, California

 "Bullitt" has what's considered the best car chase ever filmed.

 Steve McQueen drives a hopped up 1968 Mustang...

 ...in pursuit of a boss Dodge Charger.

While trying to get to the south of the city, we wound up on  Divisadero Street...

 ...which looks like this...

...but felt like this (that's us in our Subaru Forester. Catch us if you can, Steve McQueen). 

Our previous blog post mentioned the fun of seeing famous movie locales while travelling. We had another such outing in San Francisco, although it was unintentional. We were visiting Bodega Bay, about 60 miles north of S.F., and wanted to get to our next stop, a hotel near the San Francisco airport south of the city. Normally when you're on the outskirts of a big city, you just hop on the interstate and it will loop you around the urban area. Without really scrutinizing the map, we assumed this would be the case in S.F., too. Au contraire. The city population didn't want to wreck their awesome landscape with super highways, so the way to get from north to south is to go over the glorious Golden Gate Bridge and then be dumped off right in the thick of the city. Mrs. Eccentric was driving (white-knuckled at the wheel) and I was "navigating" ( I use that term loosely) and we found ourselves going up and down those famous mountainous S.F. avenues like you used to see on the old Rice-a-Roni commercials. I noticed the street we were on was Divisadero, and I was about to say, "Hey, honey! Guess what! I think we're on the street where they filmed the "Bullitt" car chase!" but I thought I'd better keep my mouth shut, at least until our hearts were out of our throats. Sherry did a Steve McQueen-worthy job of driving and we made it to our hotel slightly damp from the flop-sweat but in one piece. Turns out the "Bullitt" car chase was mostly filmed on Fillmore and not Divisadero, and people drive these streets every day and it's no big deal if you know what you're doing. In fact, by the time we left S.F. four days later, we (and by we, I still mean Sherry) had those city streets down pretty good.

Now about that driving trip through Monaco...

Now, that's Muir like it: "Vertigo" locale Muir Woods, north of San Francisco, California

 Here's Jimmy, Hitch, Kim and me hanging around Muir Woods...

 ...which was a location in the Hitchcock masterpiece "Vertigo" (poster by the great graphic designer and Hitchcock collaborator Saul Bass).

 Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak emote among the giant redwoods...

 ...and they checked out a tree segment showing how really old those Redwoods get...

 ...even going all the way back to 900 AD.

 The trees really are magnificent at Muir Woods.

 Poor Jimmy just can't get Kim out of his head.

 Hitchcock used lots of locations around San Francisco for "Vertigo" including the Golden Gate Bridge.

 This was as close as we got to that scene where Kim jumps into the drink near the bridge.

 And you thought you were having a rough day.

Whenever we're on a trip, if the opportunity to visit a location seen in one of our favorite movies arises, we try to grab it. Back in 2011,we were lucky enough to stroll through Muir Woods National Monument, a spectacular old-growth coastal redwood forest 12 miles north of San Francisco in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. If you're an Alfred Hitchcock fan, you'll recognize the place from his 1958 masterpiece "Vertigo". Jimmy Stewart, as unhinged height-phobic ex-police detective John "Scotty" Ferguson is hired to follow the mysterious and equally disturbed Madeleine Elster, played by the dishy Kim Novak. These two tortured souls spend a day together that includes a stop at Muir Woods, where they observe an old tree segment dating back to 900 AD. We were delighted to find the same segment in the park where Jimmy and Kim stood, looking just like it did in the movie. The only wet blanket in this whole endeavor is the fact that Hitchcock didn't actually film "Vertigo" here -- he used Big Basin Redwoods State Park in Boulder Creek, California instead, and the tree segment was a facsimile created by the prop department. We knew this going in, though, and we still had fun in the park enjoying the outstanding beauty of the trees and nature's splendor and were left to ponder the philosophical question, "If Jimmy Stewart has fear of falling in the forest and there is no one is around to hear him, does he still have vertigo?". I guess we'll never know.

Welcome to the machine: San Francisco's Musee Mecanique

Among the busy seafood restaurants, gift shops and tourist trolley and boatriding kiosks of San Francisco's Pier 45 sits a warehouse full of one of the world's largest privately owned collections of mechanically operated musical instruments and antique arcade museums. The Musee Mecanique is Mr. Edward Galland Zelinsky's astounding collection of over 300 items, dating back about 100 years, including coin operated pianos, antique slot machines, animations and instruments (there's lots more about Mr. Zelinsky here). Want your fortune told? Take that up with Grandma, the Gypsy Fortune Teller. Think you're pretty strong? Challenge the Arm Wrestler. Amorous? Put your libido to the test with the Kiss-O-Meter. The Musee, with its grotesque characters and old, old school entertainment, is like stepping into the movies "Hugo" and "Pee Wee's Big Adventure," not to mention a "Twilight Zone" or two. The warehouse is also a tribute to the Playland At The Beach amusement park, San Francisco's beloved seaside version of Coney Island, popular from the 1920s until it closed in the 1960s.

Be sure to check out these marvels of yesteryear if you're ever in San Francisco, where it's free to get in and you can party like it's 1909.

I can't believe it's not Buddha: Scenes from San Francisco's Chinatown

Mao you're talking!

The Chinese section of San Francisco, California is the largest Chinatown outside of Asia and the oldest Chinatown in North America. It's also a cacophony of visual over-stimulation where every nook and cranny is filled with something exotic, crazy or unusual. An eccentric roadside attraction fan could spend weeks gawking and photographing all it has to offer. Our time was limited when we visited last spring so, alas, we skipped the fine eateries, but we did have a hoot browsing through the wacky and wonderful gift shops and taking in the colorful facades and street decorations.

And now, with apologies to Confucius, the obligatory Chinese proverbs, each with a roadside bent:
Man who run in front of car get tired and man who run in back of car get exhausted.

We will, we will "Rock" you: Greetings from Alcatraz

This is the cell where an escape was perpetrated in 1962. Note the big hole in the wall.

This is the view of San Francisco from The Rock.

Clint...

...Burt...

...and many others have been to The Rock.

All aboard.

Say "clink!"

Every so often, it's nice to visit a place that makes you appreciate your lot in life a little bit more. Take Alcatraz, for instance. That notorious island a mile and a half off the shore of San Francisco gets this job done because, no matter how hard things might seem, they must have been much worse for the "guests" of this harshest of federal prisons from 1868 until it closed in 1963. The roster of convicts reads like a who's who of the worst of the worst of yesteryear: Machine Gun Kelly, Creepy Karpis, Doc Barker, Robert "Birdman of Alcatraz" Stroud. Even the au courant Whitey Bulger did time on The Rock. But Alcatraz's most notorious detainee was "Scarface" Al Capone, who served four years before being transferred to another prison due to his tertiary syphilis. Ouch.

Several escapes were attempted, and three prisoners actually made their way out in 1962 through an ingenious use of dummies, tunneling, air vents and accordion music. It's likely they drowned in San Francisco Bay, but their bodies were never found, so who knows? The 1979 movie starring Clint Eastwood leads you to believe they made it, and what Clint says goes. A few years after the government shut down the prison in 1963 (it was deemed too expensive to maintain), the island was seized by a group of Native Americans to protest U.S policies regarding Indian affairs. After 19 months of occupation, a new policy of self-determination was negotiated with the U.S. government. Now the island is run by the National Parks Service and tours are of the prison and island are given daily. We were there on an appropriately miserable, rainy day last spring and the boat was absolutely mobbed with tourists eager to see how bad bad can be. All in all, it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.