Yesterday was kind of a rest day for us in San Francisco, but we did manage to get down to Fisherman’s Wharf 
again in the evening and came across the ‘Musée Mécanique’ 
at Pier 45.
It describes itself as “One of the world’s largest privately owned collection of coin-operated mechanical musical instruments and antique arcade machines in their original working condition.”
All of the machines are playable from the antique exhibits (some of which are over 100 years old) through the the most recent machines from the 80’s, some of which I remember playing as a kid such as ‘Pole Position’ and ‘Super Sprint’ and really enjoyed playing again. We also go to play on an original ‘Pong’ machine with paddles which was one of the first proper video games in 1972.
After grabbing some food in San Francisco’s famous Boudin Bakery and learning about how their founders travelled from France to set up a bakery during the gold rush and how the bakery survived the 1906 earthquake in their own mini museum, we took a cable car (tram) back to our hotel.
The cable cars are one of San Francisco’s biggest tourist attractions and they still run the original cars, some of which are over 100 years old, up and down the hills of San Francisco. They are so called because the streets under the tracks actually have a cable running right the way underneath them which is constantly moving at 9mph. The cable car controller starts and stops the tram by causing it to grip onto the underground cable when he wants the car to move and letting go when he needs the car to stop.
The best thing though is that passengers are encouraged to hang onto the outside of the car and lean out as it zips up and down the hills. this is especially fun at night when the cable car controllers are having a bit of fun with the tourists and decide to see how fast they can go round some of the corners. The photo at the bottom is a blurry one of me hanging out of the cable car as we flew down a hill.