You can't go to San Francisco without visiting Alcatraz.
Alcatraz is a national park, and you don't pay for entry, as such, but there's only one company that's allowed to land ferries at the dock on Alcatraz, and they charge around $50 per person for a return trip. From memory, they send ferries to and from the island about 4 times a day, plus a night trip that heads over at 6pm and returns at 9pm. Your ticket doesn't tie you to a return time, unless you're on the night ferry. We opted to head across on the 10:30am ferry, which boards at 10am. Apparently having a valid ticket doesn't mean you'll get on the ferry either, if you're stuck in the queue when the gates close, too bad. The island is insanely popular, and the queues are very long, so it's a good idea to be in the line at least 10 minutes before they start boarding. We left San Jose via the I280 nice and early, and ducked across to the US101 along the way. The scenery along the I280 is pretty cool, and although it's a longer route to San Francisco, there's usually less traffic. Unfortunately, not long after we left, the Caddy decided to pop the lower radiator hose off it's fitting. Luckily for us, after assessing the situation in the middle of the Interstate with traffic flying past at 75 miles an hour, we were able to make it to the next off-ramp and found a servo about half a mile away. This was one of the few servo's we found that doesn't charge for air and water, and on closer inspection, it turned out that the hose, clamp and radiator were all fine, and with a borrowed screwdriver, I was able to refit the hose and tighten the clamp. Several litres of coolant and a tank of gas later, and we were back on the road. We probably lost about 40 minutes all up, and still managed to pull in to a carpark on The Embarcadaro at about quarter to 10.
When Alcatraz ceased to be used as a Federal prison, it was briefly occupied by local Amercian Indians (the basis was a claim that an 1868 treaty agreed to release all 'retired, abandoned or out of use federal land' to the Indians. About a year after the prison was closed, the government declared it 'surplus federal property', which by the terms of the above treaty, would have returned it to the Indians.). The first occupation lasted about a day, and another one in 1969 lasted about a year.
Before Alcatraz was a Federal Penitentiary, it was a military base. These cannons pointed out into the bay to protect the city of San Francisco from water based attacks during the US Civil War. While the island was being used as a military base, it was decided to build a prison on the island for military prisoners. In the 1930's, the military prison was upgraded to the federal penitentiary everyone knows from the movies.
If you've seen 'So I Married An Axe Murderer", then you probably remember Phil Hartman's role as "Vicky" the Alcatraz tour guide, if you haven't, the following link will take you to a youtube clip of the scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmFVeeLL01c
In solitary at Alcatraz. These cells were the second worst cells you could be in on Alcatraz, if you misbehave here, you go into 'the hole' - cells similar to these, only with another door in front to exclude all light.
"The hole" - if you end up in here, you've done something _really_ bad. No one got sent straight to Alcatraz, you had to stuff up at another federal maximum security prison to get yourself a ticket here, to end up in solitary, only the worst of the worst would end up in these cells.
