As any smart tourist would, we took a half a day out of our hectic trip to San Francisco to see its second biggest tourist icon: Alcatraz. It’s a great place, really, even though it was a prison where unspeakable injustices surely occurred -- if you ever saw that one Kevin Bacon film, you know what I’m talking about -- but to use the prison island for timeout is too much for even a seasoned kid of discipline such as myself to endure.

When we hit the Bay Area Discovery Museum, we had modest expectations. After all, we’re hitting all the best attractions in town and some of these places charge crazy top dollar to let us in to see what they have, but this place charges less than expected while giving more than you’d expect, specifically, they sink your kids and put them on television… what on earth?

Since we were hitting the San Fran waterfront as hard as we were able, we decided to wander over to pier 41 and buy ourselves a bay cruise. At first we were disappointed because a simple “cruise” wasn’t available, but what we were offered instead was a “bay adventure”, so we took that and it was as fantastic on the water as it was rocky/rolly on the water.

We took a fine lunch break on our perusal of the San Francisco waterfront, and it recharged our batteries fully to 100%. It was a great lunch at Boudin Bakery, and we enjoyed it fully, but when we headed upstairs to the museum, we should have known that our handlers were only recharged to about 80%. What can I say, parental folks are decidedly “old”, and their batteries have memory problems.

If you’re going to do the San Francisco waterfront properly, as I surely did, you need to leave time to do the best kid-oriented attractions, and trust me when I tell you that any visit would be incomplete without spending time at the Basic Brown Bear Factory, a place I’m convinced is either an orphanage for undernourished bears or some kind of mad, plush, crazy bear creation laboratory. But which it is, I still can’t say.

No trip to an historically rich coastal or railway town would be worth it’s weight in fortune cookies, were it not for a quick visit to that town’s Chinatown. San Francisco’s got a pretty good one, I guess, and I’d really dig it if wasn’t for all the white people and rampant speaking of English.

San Francisco is rich in cultural heritage and history, at least inasmuch as it may be accredited to a city with less than three hundred years history. I’ve seen places in China with 6,000 years of history, but don’t take that as any discredit, the ding-ding-dinging trolley cars of San Francisco represent something more than an ancient and forgotten (or best forgotten) history, and therefore, when the trollies go ding-ding-ding, so goes us tourists.

What a neat place this is! If you have a chance to visit San Francisco, you need to make the chance to visit Fort Point. It’s a 19th century defensive emplacement complete with bricks, mortar and cannons too. If you’ve ever done business with an obscenely profitable dot com business, you know they only have two of those three things, and they aren’t nearly as much fun.

Even if you’ve been to a zoo before -- which I am told that I have been, though I have no personal memory of it -- everyone says you need to see the San Francisco Zoo. And by “everyone” of course, I mean everyone I know. My parents, my brothers, the people at the ticket counter at the zoo; everyone!

The biggest icon (by height, weight, length and cinematic popularity alike) is the Golden Gate bridge, and I’ve seen it, touched it, even smacked it with an open palm to test its metal, but I have to say I’m not impressed. It’s big, sure, but I have to beg the powers that be (and were a hundred years ago), isn’t it perhaps a bit too big?

I’m a child of the modern era and one not easily impressed. Today’s kids got Electro Games of Boy, Stations of Play, Boxes of X and more extreme sports than you could shake a broken leg at, though we don’t actually have any of them personally. Still, with big TVs everywhere and endless cartoons on demand plus another million things on the TiVo, it’s really hard to show me anything with the hope it will overwhelm me, but IMAX may be the one true exception.

It was the end of an already long and dragging day when we peeled off from our already tiring and tiresome series of reviews in the San Jose adjacent area. We’d seen more things than I’m already capable of remembering and we were a smidge starved to boot. For some reason my handlers took us to The Jungle Fun and, despite my un-ignorable exhaustion, my batteries were quickly recharged.

I’m not normally one to speak out on the matter of politics, in fact, the one time I did I got more than a mouthful from more than a handful of our troops serving overseas, but I have been known to speak out on both stairs and inclines, so that’s what I’m being critical of in this piece.

Right in the heart of tourist-central, waterfront San Francisco, there are tons and tons of attractions that beg you to visit, and typically charge you a hearty fee to do so. It was refreshing to find one different one, Musée Mecanique, which is right on the tip of pier 43, and it’s free for admission to anyone and everyone.

I’ve traveled this grand continent of Northern America far (though not wide) and I’ve seen everything from wicked, steep mountains to tapers in heat, but I’ve never found a place capable of knocking me off my feet quite like the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz. Call me one year old if you like, but I know gravity, and this place has it all wonky and then some.

When I first learned that we were coming to visit San Francisco -- which was a full two days after we’d already arrived here -- I was excited. There’s so much history, heritage, events, attractions and other things to see, but the thing that excited me most was the nightlife. Sadly, it’s let me down; it’s much too late.

I’m told we have a similar tour group back in our hometown of Seattle, but we’ve never tackled it for review purposes. San Francisco offers tourists and locals alike an unprecedented view of the city, in a single vehicle, on both turf and surf, all rolled into one. But where’s the crackers?

When walking around in the armpit of San Francisco’s touristy sweat-pit, it’s hard not to get drawn in to the many museums that abound in that area. Right in the heart of it all on Jefferson Street just up from Fisherman’s Wharf is the Ripley’s Museum, which I found to be more appealing and as curiously interesting as any of them… Believe it… or not?

We skated in to The Tech Museum, located right in the heart of San Jose, late in the afternoon despite the fact that not one of us had any wheels on our feet. We’re techy folk for sure but we had no idea what this place had in store for us. With all their crazy, technological exhibits, honestly, the whole place made technology and innovation seem new to me; and I’ll be the first to tell you that I ain’t easily impressed.

Around the time we got sick of San Francisco’s hills, we took it upon ourselves to hop a trolley for a quick spree up the hill, but it got me to thinking about history. Well, okay, not really, but the question was forced on me like the question of which hand is my dominant one, but the reward in this matter is even greater than that, so we went to the Cable Car Museum to get all our answers.

If you are going to take a trip to San Francisco (or live in the area in the first place), you owe it to yourself to take a quick trip down to San Jose. Not just because it’s a funny name for a city, because the city itself isn’t as funny as the funny sounding name might lead you to believe, but because it’s got almost as much history as San Francisco has itself, and there’s no greater history (or mystery) to be found than the architectural singularity of the former home of the reclusive plutocrat Sarah Winchester who built the fabled Winchester Mystery House, formerly known as Sarah’s house.

On the San Francisco waterfront is the most grand of trap de la tourist, and it’s called Pier 39. It’s nothing to shy away from, it’s popular for a reason with all its specialty shops, unique eateries and uncommon attractions of interest, but the one that took me in the most was the Aquarium of the Bay.

Just across the bay from San Francisco lies a thousand acres of what was once a military installation, but now there’s so much more over there, things that are more critical to the everyday survival of people like me and everyone I know. Yes, I am of course talking about the Bay Area Discovery Museum, which is less of a museum and more of a ridiculously fancy playground that somehow manages to teach kids a bunch of things while we think we’re just playing.