My brother has been visiting and as we planned our adventures, Sausalito topped my list since I can’t even remember the last time I was there! And when I have been, it was just taking the ferry from the city for a nice lunch. Having never gotten beyond the downtown waterfront, I had to look up ‘what to do in Sausalito’ like a tourist. Here’s what we got up to:
The houseboats were terrifically charming, I could have spent hours walking all of Waldo Point Harbor.
Marin has been inundated with record tide this week, so it’s good that the harbor was our first stop — any later, we’d have been wading back through flooded roads. I was having a hard time keeping my shoes dry as it was! Fish, our lunch spot, had an entire patio partially submerged.
Researching this day trip also led us to the Bay Model, a working scale model of the Bay and Delta waterways that simulates the currents and tides with hydraulics. As the children of a civil engineer, this was basically required viewing.
It was originally conceived to test the ‘Reber Plan’, an absolutely bonkers idea to fill in and dam large portions of the Bay. The plan would have created two channelized freshwater lakes and use reclaimed areas to build airports, a naval base, and industrial projects. The model, built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s, ultimately proved it would be an ecological disaster, and cost 10x the original estimate. Remember, kids: all models are wrong but some models are useful!
Then a short visit to the waterfront to for a coffee and a view, because no trip to Sausalito feels complete without seeing Alcatraz and the San Francisco skyline. I also picked up an excellent retro multi-ink clicky pen at a great little shop named Karl the Store. It was a good day!