Day 4

Wow, so after the long day of sight seeing, Paige and I crashed in our motel and woke up on day 4 around 8 or 9am. We headed down to the hotel gym (which had everything we needed!) and worked out for an hour. It felt good to do a little physical exercise after 3 days of only walking and sitting and eating vacation food. So, we got ready for the day, and headed back to Fisherman's Warf to meet our scheduled tour of Alcatraz Island. I was pretty excited about visiting this awesome place and ended up loving the experience! There is so much history to learn about. I didn't know that it was originally used as a military post and then military prison before it was ever used as a high security prison. I also didn't know about the few times that they had attempted escapes and therefore guards killed and the post prison indian "reservation" or whatever they called it when they decided they wanted to occupy the "land" there. So INTERESTING! Here's some fun pictures of our visit... of course they aren't too "serious".

This is us waiting in line :)




...arriving on the island...



...one of MANY photo shoots! Looking good Paige! Work it! Work it!




Then we started on the actual tour. The audio tour is just a tape with 8 people talking about things that happened in the prison. It was four guards and four ex-prisoners. INTERESTING to see what they say about their experiences there... don't think I'd of liked it either way... and on a side not - the prison guards often lived on the island with their families! Yeah, there was a small community of families, and the kids would take a boat to shore to go to school, and boat back home afterward. So different from what I think they would do today! But the family members said it was a "good life". They never 'mixed' with the prison inmates and so it was their own 'private' community.
This was a cool photo at the beginning.



These are the men that were on the tape telling stories...




I feel TRAPPED! Oh, wait the door is open:)



This is the cafeteria where they had to all eat at once. They had the place set up with gas so if the prisoners tried to "rebel" they could gas the place! Only catch was that the guards would have died too... One time they almost had to do it! But luckily it worked out that nobody got hurt!



Here's another PHOTO SHOOT! Lookin' Hot ladies!







And here are some plain strange pictures, but we had a lot of fun taking them... people kept looking at us like we were crazy while we were doing it though... maybe we are crazy!








After the tour, we headed back to the main land and I decided to see if i could touch the sun! Worked!



Then we hit Ghillideri Square - the Chocolate Store! I'm the only one who enjoyed the free sample they gave as we came in.



Then I got a free ride back down the hill! Lucky me!



At the end of the day, we decided that we'd like to try to be more like the locals - so we pulled up a bench!




After all the fun, we walked back to our car and headed back to the hotel for another nights sleep! We enjoyed some graham crackers and milk and hit the sack because day 5 was going to be a LOT of driving!