Day 2 in San Francisco: Hop-on Hop-off Buses, Apples and Macy’s
By traveltripz on Mar 12, 2008 in San Francisco, USA
Today we made our way down to the City Sightseeing office to buy a couple of tickets for the hop-on, hop-off bus. These buses are available in a number of cities around the world and have the advantage of allowing you to hop off the bus at any of the stops on the route to see the sights and then hop back on at a later time as the buses run at regular intervals.
There are two companies running this sort of tour in San Francisco ‘City Sightseeing’ and ‘Grays’. We chose City Sightseeing because we found a voucher in a free tourist guide booklet that offered $10 off the All Loops Tour. This included the Downtown Loop (which is valid for 48hrs of unlimited use), the Golden Gate Tour and the San Francisco Night Tour. Normally the cost for the three was $49.95 but with the discount it came to $39.95 each.
Although our choice was based on the voucher we are glad we chose City Sightseeing as our bus had actual tour guides who 
gave us interesting snippets of information about the history of the city and the commentary was spontaneous and funny at times…. plus you can ask questions if needed. The Grays Line who run the other company only have an audio guide.
One thing we found odd was that you have to board the bus from the left hand side which is in the path of traffic. Our guide told us that this is because the topless double-decker sightseeing buses were purchased from London. So here we have a topless
London double-decker bus which is a right hand drive being driven on an American left hand drive road. You soon learn to be careful hopping on and off the bus.
One thing we did notice however was that the Grays Line buses appeared to be in better condition than our buses which looked quite old in comparison.
Once everyone was on board the bus we headed off along Fishermans Wharf and through the Financial District and Soma and then on through Tenderloin to
Union Square where we got off. The bus stops directly in front of Macy’s but we were on a mission to get to the Apple store to pick up a recording attachment for Wanda’s Ipod so we walked around the corner and down to Stockton St to the store.
We have found that the Apple staff are always quite helpful and this is no exception. The staff member suggested a Belkin microphone which we found out later did not work with our Ipod although the box indicated that it was compatible.
After a quick look through Bloomingdales and the other major stores in the City Centre we headed back to the hotel to experiement with the microphone. As mentioned, it did not work so now we need to make another trip to the Apple iPod store.
