Duck, Duck, Rooster!

Hey Hannah, Zac, Garrett, Mommy, Daddy and Everyone!

We are having so much fun! Mrs. Jane and Mrs. Elaine wanted to go to the mission in San Juan Bautista and I was actually able to show them around because I had already been there! It was fun being their tour guide.

San Juan Bautista has roosters roaming the streets and we ran into a bunch of them on the mission grounds.

you can click any picture to make it bigger
Mrs. Juli said that it looked like this flock of roosters was playing duck, duck, goose and I told her that it looked to me like they were playing "duck, duck, rooster"!:
There is an old stagecoach museum at the mission and I was so excited to see this stuffed bobcat. Mrs. Juli doesn't know if it is a bobcat or mountain lion, I think it is a bobcat.

I'd like to be him for Halloween!
Do you have your Halloween costumes yet? I can't wait to hear what everyone is going to wear for trick-or-treat.

Love,

Flat Stanley

I Escaped From Alcatraz!

Hey Hannah and Everyone!
I am having so much fun on my San Francisco adventure and today, I got to visit Alcatraz! We had to get there by boat because it is a prison on an island. Alcatraz was known for being the toughest prison in the United States and it housed the most dangerous criminals. It was also known for being "escape proof" and I got to see the jail cells up close. Alcatraz is no longer an active prison and is now the most popular tourist attraction in California. Alcatraz is awesome!

This shows the prison on the island. The picture above shows the Golden Gate bridge in the distance.

Because Alcatraz is open to visitors and tours, we were able to take a boat to the prison on the island.

These girls greeted me on the boat. They were wearing prison uniforms!:

There are three stories of jail cells inside the prison walls:

Here I am with two of the most famous Alcatraz inmates:
"Birdman" had a movie made about him and Al Capone was a famous gangster inmate.
This is what a typical jail cell looks like:

Here I am behind bars!


I had fun pretending to be a prisoner and Mrs. Juli even pretended to visit me:
This is where the prisoners would meet with their family members:

Each prisoner could only have one visitor per month.

Many prisoners said that the worst part of being on Alcatraz was that they were so close to San Francisco and could sometimes hear the sounds of the city. Freedom was within sight but impossible to obtain because the San Francisco Bay water is freezing and can be shark infested.
The best escape attempt occurred when these three men made up dummy heads after they scraped away at their cell walls with crude materials and steel spoons from the lunchroom:

This is what the prison guards saw when they went to wake the prisoners up one morning. The guards got suspicious when three men never got out of bed or moved and they were shocked to find the fake heads and no inmates.
The inmates made these dummy heads out of soap, toilet paper and other craft materials and they got the real human hair from the barber shop floor.

You can see where they scraped the walls with their steel spoons. The guards think that it must have taken the men at least one year to scrape and scrape until they finally made a hole big enough to squeeze through.
They would cover their hole every night after digging away and then, finally, they were able to escape through this area behind the cell walls:
They crawled out of this area and made it out into the San Francisco Bay. It is suspected that they drowned in the freezing cold water but their bodies were never found.

This lady used to live on Alcatraz as a little girl; her father was the warden of the prison and she had to ride a boat into the city for school every day:
Mrs. Jane and Mrs. Elaine bought her book.
Here is a picture of her when she was a little girl and lived on Alcatraz island; she is the one wearing the hat:
She told me that they had so much fun growing up on the island and she was friends with other prison guard's children. She told me a secret about how to escape and Mrs. Juli let me try it and it worked!
This was the old prison yard and I found a pipe and slid all the way down like a really big slide and ended up coming out at the bottom and near the boat landing! Mrs. Juli took pictures of me escaping! Can you see me in the little drainage pipe?
Here I am up close! It was so much fun escaping from Alcatraz!

I sure am glad that blackboard fell on me and made me flat so that I can do all of these fun things!
I am experiencing so much with Mrs. Jane and Mrs. Elaine! I hope you are having a good week at school.

Love,

Flat Stanley

San Francisco Treat!

Hey Hannah and Everyone!

We are having so much fun! Mrs. Jane and Mrs. Elaine arrived safely on the airplane and we drove straight to San Francisco!

This nice man greeted us at our hotel:

This is Mrs. Elaine, Mrs. Juli and Mrs. Jane within minutes of arriving in San Francisco:
This was the view from our hotel. That is the Bay Bridge in the background:
Our first stop was the cable cars. These nice people were waving at me:
Here I am riding on a cable car:
This is the brake man for the cable car; he was so nice to me:
We noticed some commotion while we were on our cable car ride and as we got closer, we realized they were filming a movie or commercial.

They had the streets blocked for the filming:


This actor was wearing a ski outfit and had on fancy roller skis like he was roller blading on the steep hills.
Here he is waving at me!:
Here is another view from our cable car ride, you can see how steep the hills are in San Francisco:
This is the entrance to Chinatown:
We did so much shopping!
San Francisco sure is a busy city! There were so many policemen on motorcycles:
This nice man said to tell you "hello"! He also let us know that Joe Biden was giving a speech, he said that there are always hundreds of secret service people and police officers to help protect any presidential or vice-presidential candidate.
When we got back to our hotel, we noticed this man changing light bulbs out of our sky scrapper window. He was so high and didn't seem scared at all!

He only had a small rope clipped on his belt to keep him from falling thirty stories to the ground! He saw me looking at him and he waved at me!:
Thank goodness he wasn't on one of the tallest buildings in the world! This is the famous Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco:
There is so much to do and see in San Francisco! We even went on a boat ride:

That is a view of the city of San Francisco from our boat on the bay.
You can get a better idea of how crowded the city is and also see the steep hills from this vantage point:
The next picture shows the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. Past the Golden Gate bridge, is the Pacific ocean. The ocean rushes into the San Francisco Bay so the current is really dangerous and the water is freezing. San Francisco is often foggy because the frigid water temperature and the warm city air temperature mix together to make fog.

The Golden Gate bridge is spectacular!

It was so cold and windy while we were out on the boat. I thought I was going to lose my new shiny tooth!

A taxi driver took us down Lombard Street and it was awesome! Lombard Street is the crookedest street in the world!

My next adventure is going to be on Alcatraz Island!

I am learning so much on my adventure! I only have one more week here and then I will be back in South Carolina. I hope y'all had a nice weekend!

Love,

Flat Stanley