Day 01 - California

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This day began with Saket and I going back to SFO airport to pick up our rental car. We rented a Chevy Suburban which is a pretty big SUV, and we were excited to get our hands on this beast. We picked up Santosh, Abhishek and Rama from the hotel, and headed towards the biggest attraction of SFO - The Golden Gate Bridge! Rama and I were experimenting with our DSLR cameras, and hopefully we would have clicked a few decent pictures.
As we moved towards downtown, we came across the popular sloped streets of SFO. It was quite a roller coaster ride, at 10 mph though. Next, we went to the crookedest street in SFO, which is Lombard street. It's a very steep, twisted road and cars can barely manage to get down without scraping the sides.
Next, we headed towards Santa Clara to pick up Kartik and Rashmi. Lunch at a local Indian restaurant, Mazzbaan was delicious, and we headed out to get down to business. The drive to Big Sur scenic coastal highway (route US-1) began, and we stopped by a few times to take pictures. We happened to spot a beautiful rainbow, nice bridges and got great views of the ocean and rocks along the way.
Getting past Big Sur in day light was good as it started raining and got dark pretty soon. Next stop and stay over was Bakersfiled, CA. It was a pretty uneventful drive, though we encountered really narrow, curved roads and thick fog for a stretch, that slowed us down a bit. We checked in at the Marriot in Bakersfield. We reviewed the day's pictures, and Rama tested everyone's patience as he explained in detail the light conditions and unlimited settings used in the clicking of his photographs. He then proceeded to display his bed-diving (this will be a new entry in the urban dictionary soon) skills on the poor bed in our room. Bed-diving involves a dash and jump (like a high jump) that could also include a twist and a turn while in motion, where one ends up thumping into the bed, coming pretty close to breaking the bed, in addition to dislocating one's shoulders. After his enthusiastic show came to an end, we got a good night's sleep, all excited about heading towards SIN CITY!

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Comments

[suparna]

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[shegde]

China Town
I was completely shocked to find a street full of Chinese ppl. Just imagine, most of the shops had their names totally in Chinese, as if discouraging the non-Chinese customers! Check out a photo on this page for proof.