Advertisement
Published: June 21st 2013
Edit Blog Post
Today's drive was about getting to San Francisco while finding a variety of caches, as well as seeing Pinnacles National Park. We saw more wildlife today and classic cars, less coast and vineyards.
Pinnacles National Park, converted from a national monument in January, protects the eroded leftovers of the western half of an extinct volcano, now 150 miles from its eastern half. There are hundreds of miles of hiking trails, and numerous talus caves that house over a dozen species of bats. The collective we aren't really up for hiking or caving, so we mostly just visited the few viewpoints available on the eastern side. We saw deer and squirrels and some beautiful birds, although they were too fast for us or our cameras. We didn't see any rattlesnakes, although the boys really wanted to.
Jeff and the boys and I did a little hiking at Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, specifically to find a cache called Do the Twist, which was originally placed in 2001. It was a beautiful walk through the cool forest, up one trail, down another, across a creek. The redwoods there grow in a twisted fashion, for reasons unknown. We definitely haven't seen
them before.
Unfortunately, we then entered the greater San Francisco traffic area. We've driven in LA on previous trips in what had been terrible experiences. This trip wasn't so bad, but San Francisco has now taken over as our worst ever, aside from the 2 hour standstill on I-80 returning from Philadelphia after a camper overturned. I also had us going from point to point for different caches, so we were a bit all over the place. We saw the Google campus, and probably illegally parked in their employee lot to go find the California Cache Across America. We stopped at the Rodin Sculpture Garden on the campus of Stanford University. We spent over an hour going 8 miles.
The final stop, after checking in and supper, was Rosie the Riveter National Memorial in Richmond. Kaiser Shipyard #3 built victory ships during World War II and employed tens of thousands of women. They developed employee insurance, sending many to doctors for the first time in their lives. They developed childcare centers, some of the first in the nation, so both parents could work or moms could work while their husbands served. Ford Assembly Plant was one of the
Cows!
When Liam was younger, on a trip to Kentucky, he spent a lot of time making this pronouncement. three centers in the country that built Jeeps and finished assembling tanks. We saw the memorial, the plant, the Red Oak Victory, the Kaiser Hospital, childcare centers and the shipyard at twilight.
- - - - -
Miles: 230
Highest Gas Price: $3.96
Low Temperature: 51 (King City, CA)
High Temperature: 80 (Santa Clara, CA
Conversation of the Day (while Dad and Cole were doing a word search):
C: Grandpa said a word was hard but I found it.
K: What word was it?
C: Argus.
K: Can you tell me what the Argus was? (followed by a conversation between us trying to remember what it was)
C: No.
K: Neither can your Dad nor I.
C: I wish you guys were smarter.
New License Plate States Seen:
Projects Completed: 0
We learned just how bad San Francisco traffic is.
We forgot how beautiful the Golden Gate Bridge looks at twilight, even from across the bay.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.17s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 62; dbt: 0.0704s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb