I recently had the pleasure of visiting the United States of America for the first time as a tourist. I had visited before for work, but I didn’t get a chance to do any exploration apart from some weird smelling bunkers near the Golden Gate bridge.
This time, I purposely set out to find and explore a bunker and compare it against what we have in Australia.
My journey started in San Francisco. So we headed across the famous bridge and drove along the coast to see what we could find.
No surprise we found a LOT of military bunkers. Some were closed, some were tourist spots such as the Nike Missile site. But inbetween, tucked between the hills we found an old artillery site that we could explore.
The first thing I noticed is how closed up and well preserved the site is. Roller shutters had been installed. Heavy iron doors welded closed. Grafitti was rife, but it didn’t look like much damage had been done.
We were only able to wander around the bunker. It was sealed up and the only window we could look in was covered in pine cones. Is this an American thing? Throwing cones to appease some sort of god? Who knows?
The base, we were told by a helpful man from the tourist info center up the road. Was used to guard the entrance to San Francisco bay. It was one of the “newer” installations. The idea is, the older bunkers are near the ocean. Newer, more powerful guns meant they could be further back keeping people safer.
This one, was completely away from the bay and behind a hill. It would lob large artillery shells at any idiot trying to take on the Americans.
Did mention how god damn beautiful this place is?
The only place we could get in was the toilets. It was full of pine cones and poo.
Like seriously. Poo. I’ve not run into poo on any of my other adventures.
We walked on from this bunker to follow a trail down the coast a bit. On the way we passed some bushes and found these stairs. They led down to what I can only think were some offices.
At this point I was on my own as my friends were up on a hill gawping at the amazing scenery that surrounded us.
