A Room with a View.....

On Thursday I had to go to San Francisco for business. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. When I got to my room and pulled back my blinds, this was my view. For those of you less familiar with San Francisco, that building is the Ferry Building, built in 1892 and one of the few buildings that remain from before the 1906 earthquake. The view is looking east with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Yerba Buena, Treasure Island and the Oakland-Berkeley hills in the background.

For any Indiana Jones fans, the white building on Treasure Island is the old Pan American Clipper (flying boats) terminal. It was used as the zeppelin terminal in Berlin in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Between 1957 and 1989, the Ferry Building was cut off from the rest of San Francisco by the ugly double-decker Embarcadero Freeway. The silver lining in the 1989 earthquake was that the freeway crumbled and was later torn down. From 1992 to 2002, the Ferry Building underwent extensive restoration. Now it is full of unique shops (not touristy stuff) and on Saturdays it hosts a farmer's market. Ferryboats once again ply the waters of the bay bringing commuters from Marin, Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland and Alameda to the Ferry Building.