San Francisco

Here I am in San Francisco where I had hoped to shoot fantastic shots of the Fort Point Historic Site. Apparently, this is not to be since they are now open only three days a week, and Tuesday isn't one of those days... The best laid plans of mice and men, etc.

The drive from San Diego was a long one: I left at 9:30 or so and arrived at 7:00 or so. Our new GPS 'Carmen' was flawless and only traffic caused her estimate of arrival to be about 20 minutes late. The Interstate 5 goes pretty well through Los Angeles where the traffic was quite heavy, but moving reasonably. Carmen constantly talks to the world to find out if there are traffic delays where we're going. She was very accurate and warned of 10 or 20 minute delays here and there. Since there were no alternate routes, she just added our expected delays to the expected time of arrival. Clever girl!

Around Los Angeles, the smog was quite visible and visibility was far short of where the horizon should be. Eventually the hills became mountains and we quickly rose to 4000+ feet, where the mountains were snow covered. After these mountains were crossed, we went back to sea level very quickly: trucks had a 35MPH speed limit and were provided with 'no-brakes' escape lanes on the right then the left of the three lane highway. These escape lanes go up a 45 degree incline in about the length of two trucks that is 'paved' in very coarse gravel. Theoretically, this will slow the truck to a safe halt.

I wouldn't want the experience an escape lane, that's for sure: stopping from an uncontrolled speed of possibly 100+MPH in a two-truck length is not my idea of fun. It might be a good test for seat belts though...

Some of these steep downward hills were 6 or 8 miles long. The smell of burning brakes was definitely in the air, with occasional trucks and other vehicles at the side of the road, broken down.

After we regained sea level, there were possibly 100 miles of agricultural fields. Some were into Pecans, grapes, [wines?] citrus, and other crops. There were even fields of cows grazing on miles of grass, a much better sight than the few feed-lots I saw. These agricultural fields were the mainstay between Los Angeles and San Francisco, quite a sight!

Today was a 'transit', so there were as few stops as possible and no pixels were sacrificed. i.e. no pictures.

I'll try to charm [?] my way into the park tomorrow, but I expect contingency planning should take over. We'll see.

I'm staying at a Travel Lodge and it looks like an affordable solution for the night. $69 a night within walking distance of the San Francisco waterfront seems like a good deal to me. I walked down towards the waterfront a dozen blocks or so to the recommended Amici Italian restaurant; it had a great veggie pizza and allowed me to take home the remnants of a good Chianti Classico. What more could you possibly want?

I was amazed at the amount of traffic and the amount of people walking the streets nearby. The next few hours will tell if I'm able to stomach the street noise, but other wise, this motel is just what I needed. Now that the Chianti is almost gone, it's a good time to hit the pillow.