Angel Island
- Food
- Food you brought
Crowd level: Easy. Busy only at the obvious hour
Best season Weekday mornings. Ferries are seasonal in their frequency. Check the Tiburon or San Francisco schedule before you promise the day. Foggy afternoons are still worth it for the barracks.
Drive 45 min to the ferry
About 45 minutes from downtown to the Tiburon ferry in calm traffic, then a short boat. A San Francisco ferry exists on some days. Check the schedule. The boat is part of the time.
Parking. Leave the car in Tiburon and take the ferry. Do not plan to drive onto the island. The immigration station is a walk or a tram from the dock.
Angel Island is a state park in the bay and, more importantly, the immigration station where people were held between 1910 and 1940. The poems carved into the walls are the reason to go. The views are real and secondary.
The short version
The immigration station processed arrivals from across the Pacific, under exclusion laws that detained many Chinese migrants for weeks or months. Some carved poems into the wooden walls. The buildings are a museum now. Walk them before you rent a bike and circle the island like a postcard.
Food nearby
Food you brought
The island café is limited. Pack a lunch and eat it after the station, not instead of it. Tiburon has tables if you are hungry on the way back. Do not make the ferry a restaurant crawl.
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