Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Something called the
Wharf Pass
(
%
415/440-4474; www.wharfpass.com;
$61 ages 12 and over, $38 kids 5-11)
is also sold for Fisherman's Wharf
attractions, but most of the places it gets you into are tourist-trap
garbage like Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum, the Wax Museum, and a
simple carousel. Are you really coming all the way to San Francisco for a
wax museum? The best attractions on the pass—the Aquarium of the Bay
and a Blue & Gold cruise of the Bay—are on the CityPass, so there's no
need to duplicate your purchase. One potential advantage of this pass is
that it also includes a day on a hop-on, hop-off tour bus, but the problem
I have with it is that there will simply be too much to do in one day for
the pass to pay off. The pass also grants the right to secure nominal dis-
counts on a few other tours around town, but chances are, you'll only have
time to take advantage of one or two. The passes are valid for 3 days, but
if you spend 3 days at Fisherman's Wharf, you'll be missing a lot elsewhere.
The
Go San Francisco card
(
%
800/887-9103; www.gosanfranciscocard.
com)
is another option. It must be purchased in day increments, starting
at $50 for a single day and climbing to $155 for a week (although there
are sometimes discounts online for cards valid for longer than 2 days). It's
highly unlikely (nay, downright impossible) that you'll be going to many
of the 45 included attractions anyway, and you almost certainly won't be
able to visit enough of them in your allotted time period to make your pur-
chase pay off. If you're tempted, it's essential that you know which attrac-
tions you'd use the card for, and then do some math and some scheduling
to make sure you'd actually be saving money and that you'd actually have
time to see enough to make it all worthwhile. A list of its attractions is
available online. The Go people also have something called the Explorer
card, which allows customers to pick three or five attractions from a list,
which is still fewer than what CityPass offers for around the same price.
Do five minutes of math based on would-be box office prices before hand-
ing over your money.
bell in the most original and interesting fashion; cable news networks like CNN
love being there for breaking news like this.
Known worldwide as the crookedest street, even if it's only for 1 block and there
are ones more crooked,
Lombard Street
55
(between Hyde and Leavenworth)
is one of those sights you've got to take in, even though there's nothing to actually
do there. The eight switchback turns were created in 1922 to mitigate the block's
steep grade, because most vehicles of the day couldn't handle it. Now it's a tourist
attraction, and residents of the street vacillate between pride (they garden the
