Day Six

In our first full day in California, we woke up around 8 am, and got packed up to prepare for our journey westward. After loading up the car, we headed over to the main lobby of the Miner's Inn for the continental breakfast. They had a pretty good selection, waffles, bagels, cereal, eggs, fruit, toast, oatmeal… but I went out on a limb and had a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats. Since we saw most of what there was to see at Yosemite, and the hotel was quite a bit further away from the park than we thought, we decided to travel on towards San Francisco.

We had taken a family trip to San Fran in August in 2008, and as a matter of fact I turned 21 in San Francisco. No I didn’t go out and celebrate my 21^st in SF because we went home that day, and I ended up spending most of my 21^st birthday on a plane. I did order a beer on that flight though just because I could. But since we had taken that trip not too long ago, we didn’t feel like we needed to spend a ton of time in SF as we saw most of what there is to see there on that trip.

But that was 2008. Here in 2011 we drove through lots of fields as we headed westward, fields of avocados, strawberries, and other stuff I’m forgetting. A lot of cow too. In fact, the places we saw over the past 24 hours made us think that they probably could have filmed Lord of the Rings in Eastern California. I think New Zealand worked just fine though. So we drove on Route 120 towards the major highways, incidentally enough, Route 120 is also the one that goes through Yosemite. Not sure where it went in between then and now, but it was interesting to see that.

Anyway, we got close to San Fran around noon, we drove through Oakland, and over the rather long Bay Bridge into the city. We were kind of playing it by ear and were unsure what to do right away, so we plugged in Pier 39 into the GPS, as we were familiar with the place. After narrow, hilly roads, we reached the Pier 39 parking garage and walked over to the pier itself. We decided to have lunch at the Hard Rock Café, always a cool place to eat, though this particular Hard Rock was quite expensive. ($15 for my turkey burger!) I mentioned before that I don’t think I have ever had a “relief” waiter/waitress so to speak before Applebee’s in Reno, but what do you know! The same thing happened at the SF Hard Rock!

After eating we walked around the pier a little, got some great views of Alcatraz, the water was coming up pretty high and splashed over onto the pier a few times, so it was funny to watch some people running away from it. Then we went over and looked at the sea lions sitting on their rocks…..doing nothing…..guess they’ve seen better crowds than the one gathered that day. One unusual thing of note was that two fire trucks and an ambulance passed by us on the pier itself while we were on it. I thought it was difficult for emergency vehicles to get through bad traffic, never mind crowds of people walking along with nowhere to go to get out of the way.

After strolling around the pier a little more, we decided to head up to the Golden Gate Bridge. You gotta go to the GGB whenever you’re in SF. We parked by the viewing area at the base of the bridge, where you can walk out onto it and take pictures and stuff. So we walked out on to it and took pictures and stuff. I’ve noticed Hollywood likes to make us think that the GGB is always clear and beautiful, with the sun radiating down over it, but in my experiences in San Francisco, that is hardly the case. Like much of our trip in ’08, the bridge was covered in clouds and fog. It definitely is cool to see that up close, but it makes it really difficult to take a good picture from far away, or of the city skyline from the bridge for that matter. After walking on the bridge for a bit, we drove over, and then drove back just so we could say we drove across the bridge again. We then proceeded to begin out drive along the Pacific and got on Route 1.

But it was not to be just yet. The traffic down Rt. 1 getting out of San Fran was horrible, but eventually we made it out.  There was this really bizarre but cool looking cloud covering the mountains in the distance and extending into the ocean. Not sure what exactly it was, but it was quite a sight. Anyway, drove for a few hours along the coast, and stopped for the night in Monterey, and stayed at the Howard Johnson motel. Decent little place, great value though, we got a 2 queen room for only $60. Not sure how we managed that considering everything else in town was wicked expensive. We explored the town a little bit, got some Papa John’s pizza (which took kind of a long time I might add), then came back, watched Conan and Seinfeld, and I worked furiously to get this blog updated before going to bed.