Mike the tour guide is doing his best, but his patter is playing like handball against a haystack with a coachload of exhausted Irish people. His jokes aren’t bad.
"There's a famous store called Neiman Marcus. I call it Needless Mark-up," he says, as the coach drives through the heart of the shopping district. There is almost a groan when he says he is related to Tony Bennett and he might just give us a blast of I Left My Heart in San Francisco if we're lucky.
We are all spectacularly lucky. I'm with a group of 44 people who have won this trip to San Francisco by sending in a scratch card to the National Lottery's TV show Winning Streak. There are a further 44 guests, spouses, friends or children who have come along as the winner's plus one.
There is the press pack of us journalists chosen by their editors to cover the trip. There is the team from the National Lottery who are looking forward to their first visit to west coast America (until now the US trip has been to New York), 2FM’s Rick O’Shea and Cormac Battle, who will broadcast a show from here, and the man who will become the group cheerleader, presenter Marty Whelan, with his wife, Maria.
It has been a long road to this trip of a lifetime. There has been an 11-hour flight, US immigration, two security queues to snake through, a group photograph in the departures area, the packing, the plan of attack for the shops, the goodbyes and the congratulations.
Waiting to leave Dublin Airport, Ann Higgins "from Blarney Street in Cork" talks about Winning Streak. "We're addicted, we love it. I just love it because there's nothing else on the telly and we might know somebody on it."
She has been spending €20 a week on the Lotto since it started. At more than €1,000 a year, does she feel she has paid for her prize? “I don’t look at it like that. I don’t drink or smoke.” Every week they watch, hoping to win, “hoping and hoping and hoping and hoping”.
The cheque for the €2,500 spending money arrived five weeks ago. “A holiday to me is relaxing,” she says. “We’ll have one day for trips and the rest for shopping.”
So, on the first evening sitting at dinner in the Crown Room on top of the Fairmont Hotel on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, it is surreal to watch the city’s famous fog swallow buildings and blanket the bay as the sun sets.
Then Marty gets to his feet and aces the welcome speech. His opening line? “Would’ya look at the state of ye, sitting here drinking at four in the morning.” The room erupts in laughter. It is barely 9pm local time, the end of a never-ending day. A raffle for a helicopter trip over the bay elicits the first group whoops of the trip. The fun has begun.
Downstairs in the vast marble lobby of the Fairmont Hotel, student teacher Michelle Brett from Sligo and her mother Rita are swaying with tiredness but delighted to be here. The biographies of the winners tell us that Michelle gets a “welcome home” from US immigration because she was born in New York. Her family lived in Yonkers until she was four. Rita’s son will visit them from New York while they are here. Their plan for the morning is to just start walking and see where they end up.
For several other winners, this is a first visit to the States. Retired soldier John Hardy and his wife Elizabeth from Castlecomer in Kilkenny were a bit taken aback at their first glimpse of America. The drive from the airport showed them lots of unglamorous industrial areas and the ramshackle flat-roofed houses that line the freeway. John is a well-travelled man. Later on in the early hours of Sunday morning, his experience in the Congo with the 32nd Irish battalion will mean he knows exactly what has just happened.
It starts at 3.20am like noise from an adjoining room and then the bed judders as if the world’s largest bowling ball has just rolled through the downstairs lobby. People who turned on their lights saw the heavy light fittings swaying. John was sleeping on a light stretcher bed on a concrete floor in 1960 the last time it happened and he and his fellow soldiers were thrown from one side of the room to the other by the jolt of the African earthquake.
Over breakfast the next morning, the news dawns that this wasn’t a regular Bay experience, but the biggest quake since 1989, with its epicentre 38 miles north. Jokes about the earth moving are coming thick and fast.
David and Liz Brophy from Thurles are counting their blessings. It is their second trip to the States with the National Lottery. They won a trip to New York two years ago “and now we’ve survived an earthquake”, David says with a grin. The TV news gives us rolling stories from American Canyon and Napa city, where the earthquake buckled roads, toppled houses and emptied wine barrels.
At dinner in the St Francis Yacht Club later, RTÉ producer Michael Cahill becomes our chief seismologist, thanks to his time spent with rolling TV news pundits. There is a 5 per cent chance of the big one hitting in the coming days or weeks, they have said – “which means there is a 95 per cent chance that it won’t”, Rick O’Shea adds.
Marty gives another speech, a stand-up riff around the lottery’s history of brushes with global catastrophes. They had a booking in the Windows on the World restaurant a week after the Twin Towers crumbled in the 9/11 attacks. There have been several trips on Concorde and now the Napa quake – “and next we’re going to bring you right to the epicentre, but we’ll have the crack”.
The days go quickly. The group meets every morning over breakfast and then scatters to shopping or sightseeing. Plenty of people have walked or cycled over the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf and Union Square have been visited. Thousands of dollars have been spent in outlets and department stores.
On our last full day, the Ram’s Gate winery in Sonoma is a sharp contrast to the bustle of the city. The coach ride from the city has taken through Marin County, where Robin Williams lived, and out through parched countryside (California is suffering its worst drought in a century) to a model winery. It was built by wine magnet Jeff O’Neill and his three friends, who are described by winery guide Zac as “San Francisco finance guys”. In the spectacular building clad with rough weathered timber (grey reclaimed snow fencing from Wyoming), we sit down to lunch and wine.
Rita Brett is enjoying her mother-daughter time with Michelle. The highlight of their visit was the bike trip across the bridge. Navan man Pádraig Kane and his daughter Leah say the vineyard has been the highlight of their trip. Pádraig wasn’t woken by the earthquake but had a dream about a storm that night.
Did they shop much? “I had great patience,” he says of their trips to the outlet.
“I warned him before we came I’ll be doing a load of shopping,” Leah replies.
Audrey Coakley’s father Patrick won the trip but the doctors told him he couldn’t fly for medical reasons, his wife of 44 years, also Audrey, explains. Mother and daughter travelled to the outlet by train and bus but shared a taxi back. “The driver lined up the bags on the path.” Highlight of the trip? Stopping at the viewing point beside the Golden Gate Bridge here today, they say.
Longford man Pascal Hennessy says he had a few qualms climbing up on a bike for his cycle across the Golden Gate with his wife Catherine. “I got chest pains getting on the bike. I hadn’t cycled in years.”
They bought a few bits in the outlets for their 20-month-old daughter Aisling and his jaw dropped at an amazing kitchen shop “which was just out of this world”. He is in the kitchen business at home, where the aftershock of the upturn still has to ripple out of Dublin. Catherine’s family has had a run of luck. Her brother won €18,000 in a local Cavan lottery, her sister won another local lottery in Scariff. Another brother has just got a permanent job. Do they feel lucky at the end of it all? “We are lucky,” Pascal says smiling. “Jesus, we’re alive.” I think he means it in the general sense.
Elizabeth Hardy is looking forward to getting home. “I think it’s a great gift to be happy at home.” She won’t miss San Francisco’s steep hills, but has had a brilliant trip. The best bit? “The thrill of winning in the first place, the friendship of the people in the group.” Did she and husband John shop much? “Not a lot. We did a lot of browsing.”
Queuing for the flight home, the bag count has gone up considerably and zips on cases are strained. So we board the shorter-by-nearly-two- hours flight home. After all the excitement, it is oddly comforting to be getting on a flight with 44 lucky people, their friends and family and a shed-load of shopping in the hold. Destination reality, flying non-stop.
