San Francisco Segway Tour!

My friend Kennedy was just recently hired by Electric Tour Company as a segway tour guide. Oh. My. Gosh. You cannot imagine my excitement.  I have always wanted to do a Segway tour! Saturday afternoon, she had some room in her tour group so I was able to go and watch her in action!

First of all, segways rule. They are so fun to ride and are surprisingly easy too.  I was so nervous that I'd fall or roll off a cliff or something, but alas, I survived!  AND now that I've officially mastered the segway, I can go on the advanced tour that goes down Lombard Street, up to Coit Tower, and various other super cool places.

Secondly, for a girl who moved to the Bay area just a few months before we did she sure knows her stuff! I was seriously amazed at how much cool San Fran knowledge she has and dang do I live in a cool city!  I have compiled a list of a few of the most noteworthy San Francisco factoids that I learned during the tour:

• Cable cars were invented by the Scottish man who invented cables.  They operate by having a continuously moving cable underground that the car grips onto and releases at each stop.  The cable moves at 9.5 mph which means... you can beat it if you're racing it on a segway!
• Many people believe that Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe at the famous Sts. Peter and Paul Church because they had a ton of photos taken there on their wedding day, but they actually got married at City Hall because the church would not recognize Joe's divorce from his first wife.
• The tour guides at Alcatraz tell you that no one ever escaped from Alcatraz, however, there were 3 men who made it off the island by making a raft out of raincoats.  They were never found, but their raft and clothes were all found. Sounds like an escape to me!
• The verb "Shanghai" (as in: "He was Shanghaied") originated in San Francisco during the gold rush.  People would kidnap (or "Shanghai") men and throw them on a ship headed to far-off locales like Shanghai to gather more people to return to America and dig for gold.
• Bonus factoid: Kidnappers would identify men in bars as having crew experience (and therefore be ideal for kidnapping) if they were eating with their elbows on the table because that's what you'd have to do at sea to keep your plate in front of you when the ship was rocking back and forth.
• Russian Hill is not named for the Russian population here (Russian Hill doesn't actually have a significant Russian population).  It's named Russian Hill because when people were settling here in the 1800's they discovered a cemetery with Cyrillic (Russian) writing on the headstones.
• During the gold rush, people most often arrived to California by ship and were in such a hurry to get to Sacramento to dig for gold that they'd often abandon them in Yerba Buena cove.  Some ships just rotted there, some were turned into hotels, saloons or brothels, some were stripped for materials, but all of them were eventually covered over with sand when the coastline was extended.  Today, builders have discovered many ships beneath the city (one was discovered as recently as 2005!).  There are "Buried Ships" plaques all over the city to denote where they have been found.

Now that you've all learned a little something, I'll conclude with some photos.  The first two are just sightseeing photos I took on our segway breaks (you're not allowed to take photos while on the segway for safety reasons).  The rest are self-explanatory...

Fisherman's Wharf

Golden Gate Bridge

Read it and weep!