We arrived in San Francisco late on Wednesday night and spent Thursday getting our bearings and getting over our jet lag after a long flight from Singapore.  We are staying in a beautiful apartment a few blocks from Union Square.  It is an art deco building with a cage lift and a marble foyer.  Our apartment has a murphy bed, one that flips up into the wall.  A bit of a trick for young players as to where the bed was when we got to the apartment at around midnight.  Today (Friday) we played tourist, riding the cable car to Fisherman's wharf and then taking a boat tour to Alcatraz.  The Alcatraz tour was excellent and quite creepy with an audio tour narrated by former inmates and wardens.  We hadn't booked the tour which you need to book at least 3 weeks in advance but we paid a premium and bought the ticket from a "travel agent".  It is now the cocktail hour and Kirk is putting his cork removal skills to good use since the US doesn't appear to have discovered screw tops even on $11 bottles of wine...