10th September 2009
It’s Fleet Week in San Francisco. Somehow we’ve managed to be heading for San Francisco on an extremely busy weekend, so it’s up early to leave Santa Rosa and get to the city for a decent time.
Fleet Week is a celebration of the armed forces in the USA and features the Navy, Army, Marines and Coast Guard, they have recruitment stands and navy ships alongside the piers and on Saturday and Sunday an airshow featuring the Blue Angels as the star act (the American version of the Red Arrows).
I have been very excited about seeing the Blue Angels, and it was even one of the “wouldn’t it be great if” wishes I had on leaving the UK - never dreaming that we would actually be able to see them.
In San Francisco we’re staying out near the airport because we had trouble finding accommodation in the city (probably because of Fleet Week), so we got to the hotel and parked the car before catching a shuttle bus to the airport and the urban rail system the BART into San Fran. This was quite an expensive way of doing things, but by far the easiest given the high volumes of traffic and people about in the city.
We wandered along the Embarcardo which runs alongside the Piers which make up Fisherman’s Wharf, grabbing a burger, then heading on upto Pier 39 where most of the touristy stuff is. Not our scene, even if there were hundreds of sea lions, so we moved on, coming to Aquatic Park with its small beach area and a lovely view over the bay so we decided to stop and watch the air show from here.
It has been a lovely sunny day, but with a cold wind and we’re definately starting to wonder where the famous California weather is, but wrapped up in several layers we managed to sit on the beach and wait. While we waited we watched the pelicans circling in the air above then diving into the water to catch some fish and there was also a sea lion swiming around out there. The beach was packed.
The air show started with 4 prop planes which took it in turns to climb vertically before turning downwards and zooming off in different directions and flying low across the water.
Then the airship which had been circling the bay took a turn, before a United Jumbo flew low across the bay.
We saw a few jets of varying descriptions before 4 Blue Angels turned up. Truth be told we found them a little disappointing, only 4 jets, not much formation flying and they only flew for about 15 minutes. The Red Arrows are much better!
Then, as we were walking back to try and make our way back to the hotel, another 6, slightly smaller jets flew over, doing some passes and some formation flying. This made us unsure as to whether the first group or second were the Blue Angels, but both only flew for a short time and then disappeared.