17 July: San Francisco  (cont)
Our Uber picked us up at 7.00am and drove us into the CBD by a different route through a magnificent park filled with joggers and cyclists so we were at the nominated hotel for the pick-up for the Muirwoods National Park and Sausalito trip we had booked some months ago. An enormous coach transported us to the Grayline central office where hundreds of tourists were trying to be organised on all the huge coaches driving on numbers of different SF tours. Chaos reigned. This has to be the most inefficient piece of organisation we have witnessed. The only thing that got us all through the tangle was the antics and banter of the one black American who had the job of controlling the traffic so that all of us could cross the major street to be safely  loaded on to the correct bus. The worse it all got, the harder he worked to entertain increasingly frustrated tourists.
Our poor coach driver was so apologetic. The amazing thing is I guess this performance happens 24/7.
And off we went in a magnificent huge vehicle that had a computer management system that was way beyond the understanding of the driver who was our age. This year California  has seen rain and snow above any recorded for the last 120 years washing out many of the roads in the Park, so the Redwoods tour has not been offered. However now enough of it has been repaired to give us access via a different route so we were able to get in to this glorious collection of coastal Redwoods and Sequoias which rely on the Coastal fog for their survival. The Park is home to foxes, deer and mountain lions but none appeared today. We attempted to photograph stands of these majestic trees but no photos captured the splendour.
After an hour we boarded our luxurious coach and commenced the extremely long slow journey to Sausalito which is actually close but with the roadworks and the traffic and an accident with a cyclist we didn't reach our destination until after 1.00pm. Our driver asked us to board the coach again at 1.30. That wasn't what I had in mind at all, so we decided to abandon the tour, spend the rest of the afternoon in this magical town and then
catch the ferry back to Pier 39. So we bid our driver farewell and settled in for lunch at Copita Tequilera y Comida .  Much more our style. And then we wandered into all the wonderful shops displaying the wares of the creative artisans who make up the population of 7,700. Some of the inhabitants live on the 450 houseboats which lie in the sheltered anchorage. All in all another day of fascinating discoveries .