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Published: July 31st 2008
The warm land air mixed with the cooler sea climate caused a heavy fog to roll in overnight and it occasionally obstructs our vision as we drive north into San Francisco. We only have a day here before meeting my mom at the airport tomorrow when we'll take a sojourn down to Yosemite, so we don't want to see too much and risk ruining her sightseeing experience which leaves us with some decisions to make. Add a pinch of indecisiveness, a dash of uncertainty and a sprinkling of bad road maps for good measure and you have a recipe for frustration. We end up walking around the gardens in the lower section of Golden Gate Park, mainly because we happened to be driving through it and thought it would be a good idea to settle down and regain our composure before we continued onward. It's a great, big green area to walk about but most of the gardens themselves were cordoned off and required an entrance fee except for one which was nice but nothing special, but it did allow us to decide on a short visit to Chinatown.
Once again, we find navigating through traffic difficult as cars, taxis
San Francisco Bay
Golden Gate Bridge and the San Fransico Bayand buses cut in and out of our lane with no warning at speeds well over the ‘recommended’ limit. All the people behind us must be confused by that blinking light our car makes every time we change directions because no one else seems to know what the turn signal is for. We make it downtown (finally) and park in the first garage we see—partly because we don’t know where we’re going, partly because driving in this area is really stressful. Of course, we impulsively pulled in a grabbed a ticket before realizing we’d parked in the most expensive parking garage in the city ($32 for 4 hours or more) and it was valet parking only. On the bright side, because we have the bikes still attached to the back and the car is literally stuffed to the brim with everything we own, the parking lot attendant finds us a secure spot right in front of the entry/exist hut so it can be watched. All part of the San Francisco experience right?
We walk the block up to Chinatown and its exactly what I’m expecting. Streets lined with vendors, red lanterns, colorful wares and, of course, people. There’s not
a whole lot that sets San Francisco’s Chinatown apart from any other North American Chinatown except for its size and age. By now we’re both pretty hungry but restaurants offering dim sum, wontons and other delicacies are plentiful and it’s hard to make up our minds. Thankfully (predictably), there was a kind Chinese gentleman handing out menus and daily specials on the street corner for his restaurant and was eagerly engaging every tourist that walked by with the same script. “Very good,” he says. “Good food you will like.” Perfect! Usually we don't let hawkers persuade us but being overwhelmed with options, and getting really hungry, today we just let his offer overtake us. We were in the mood for good food so we asked where it was and he points us up the street off the main thoroughfare. His partner, a younger girl, notices we’re heading up that way and runs across the street to get our attention. She’ll lead us the rest of the way and it’s probably a good thing she did because it was several blocks up a steep hill and then off behind an old playground that we found restaurant. We might have given up
had it not been for enthusiasm and customer service we’d been given before we’d even gotten there.
The man had not lied. It was indeed good food that we liked. The fried wonton and shrimp and pork roll was filling, and Andras’ chicken and vegetable medley looked delicious. My fortune cookie said I was a "good writer" and that I should email a friend. I say writing a blog is like an email to multiple friends (and strangers) so this should definitely count. We finished our meal off with some Chinese tea which Andras’ wasn’t too fond of but I couldn’t really tell the difference between it and any other green tea I’ve had. I looked down at the tea leaves in the bottom of my glass to try to discern my future but all I could foretell was that it was time to leave because my glass was empty.
We had wanted to camp somewhere on the northern side of the Golden Gate bridge, but there was only one campground that we could get and it was already full by the time we had arrived. The ranger at the visitor station directed us up the road to
Golden Gate Bridge
From the Golden Gate National Recreational Area the Marin Headlands youth hostel here on the peninsula and we couldn’t be more pleased! It is quiet and peaceful here and if it weren’t for the fact that we’d just seen them with our own eyes, we could never imagine that just on the other side of the hill is a throng of people vying for a good photograph at one of the vista points overlooking the bridge. But here, just half a mile away, we have deer grazing outside the front door and an ocean sunset within walking distance. Even though we booked two dorm beds, it doesn’t look like there is going to be anyone else in our room so we have the whole place to ourselves.
After relaxing in the plush couches in the lounge, we take an evening hike up to the lighthouse only to find that the trail is closed. We detour out onto one of the bluffs and watch the brown pelicans soar high above us as they ride the coastal breezes up in the sky. The mist starts rolling is as we sit and stare out over the water, waiting for the sun to set. Sometimes we wonder if people
Tea from Red Blossom Tea Company
The kindest old man ran this store, helping us select among the different varieties. We settled on some Dragon Oolong Jasmine and Moroccon Mint. know what they’re missing just minutes away from their front doors. Maybe they’ve just become so immune to it that sunsets no longer hold any special wonder? Maybe they can’t appreciate the beauty of a non-material possession? We don’t have answers, but we do know that the world would be a happier place if most people were afforded the time and ability to gaze out over the calming waves of the Pacific as another day comes to an end.
Waking up and knowing that a warm shower is waiting for me is becoming one of my favorite luxuries. It's a sign of an avid traveller (and of a rather dirty person too I suppose) that I consider one shower once every couple of days "good enough." But sleeping indoors means today is shower day so we can be nice and clean when we go to pick up my mother at the airport. And, what makes this shower ever more note-worthy is the lavender scented soap they have in the rest-room. Lavender. Coffee. Ocean-breezes....perfection.
Long before we left on this trip I asked my parents if they could travel anywhere in the country where they'd want to do so
that we could arrange to travel there together. My dad said Grand Canyon (
Rock Bottom and Loving It) and my mom said Yosemite, so San Francisco was the logical meeting point. The phrase "pack lightly" means different things to different people. To me, packing lightly means I am confined to a small backpack I can sit on my lap, so I told my mom she probably shouldn't take anything more than that. She responded by saying she was taking her purse and "just one duffel bag." How big can a duffle bag be, really?
I thought nothing of it until I see her walk through the gate with this
enormous (packed to the brim might I add) duffel bag we then spent the next 20 minutes trying to fit in the car amidst everything else. But it worked. And I can't say much because much of what she brought she intended for us to use throughout the trip and so we added a few more soup and pasta mixes to the pile and were off! And me, knees to my chest in the backseat sitting on blankets and sleeping bags with a duffle and camp foam enveloping me nearly entirely save for a
place to poke my head through, I was off too.
Back downtown we drove and headed towards Fisherman's Wharf. My mom had lived in the San Francisco area previously but long before I knew her as my mother so in some ways she was our guide but in many others we were all newbies to the area. Tourists and visitors everywhere, is all I can say. We saw the "bushman" who camoflagues himself up and hides behind fake branches before jumping out and unsuspecting passers-by. One of the more creative ways to make a living, that's for sure! And of course we had to stop and try some freshbaked sour-dough bread (heavenly!) and get our fill of chocolaty goodness at the Ghirardelli factory. The line for the soda fountain and the famous hot-fudge sundaes was out the door but it was soo worth the wait in the end. We also saw the cable cars in action winding their way up Nob hill but the line for those was much too long; clearly if they were intended as a quick mode of transportation the waiting an hour in line defeats the purpose in my opinion.
After an all too
brief survey of San Fran we packed back into the car and headed east towards Mariposa. Didn't stop to think about rush-hour heading out of the city so what should have been a three hour drive took nearly five and it was dark well before we pulled into our hotel ride outside Yosemite National Park.
Campsites are first-come, first-serve and being a weekend we didn't want to risk not being able to arrive bright and early in the morning to stake a claim. Even being as early as we were it was still a bit of luck that we were able to find a stop. All campsites in the valley proper were full. There was already line for the Camp 4 campground, a walk up site which doesn't take reservations and is also an extremely popular base-camp for climbers of El Capitan. I think we had a 50/50 chance. We would have probably gotten a spot but it would have been one of the last few. And, to make things worse, unlike the rest of our camping this year these campsites had NO privacy and all campfires were communal. I looked around and saw a sea of people, mostly
young and loud (three footballs has whizzed by my head in the 15 minutes we stood in line) and my mood was taking a nose-dive. Certainly not the peaceful Yosemite Valley experience I had envisioned. After grouping up discussing our options vetted the chance there would be a spot open in one of the more remote sites on the ridge.
It was a calculated risk that worked well. White Wolf campground itself was nearly full but after circling for available spots once we noticed quite a few more cars pull up behind us and took a large wooded campsite near to the entrance. In the end, our neighbors ending up being just what we had tried to avoid (young and loud; I do believe they had some sort of foam air-gun they kept shooting at one another at all hours of the night) but at least we had
some privacy.
The next few days were spent hiking around the valley, hiking the ridge to a small lake and exploring the surrounding red-wood forests. Many of the waterfalls for which Yosemite valley is so well know weren't running as they are mainly snow-melt seasonal falls, but we did hike
up to Vernal Falls and completed some of the Valley Loop trail.
On one of our last days we drove down to the Mariposa grove and took the shuttle over to see the grove of giant sequoias. Although there was a tram that would drive guests through the groves, we agreed we didn't go all this way to sit on a tour-bus so opted to walk to the groves. There were so many giant trees, each with their own story to tell, but the wildlife is what will make this trip so memorable. Towards the end of the day hiking up to see a smaller grove a deer ran out into the trail nearly 10 yards away and following her were two young fawns, probably several months old jumping over one another to suckle right there on the trail. Such a rare moment to see in such a well travelled area and something I'll likely never see again.
We rewarded ourselves with pizza and beer at the cantina and with one last night in a tented room before we departed and locked all the food up in the bear tins. Being only slightly tipsy we did manage to
discern which white canvas tent was ours among the dozens of identical tents which I think is remarkable.
The only difficulty we had here was removing all the food from our car. Having three months worth of food in your backseat and having to haul all of that to the bear bins and back took some muscle! Yosemite is know for having an avid group of bears on the lookout for food scraps but we didn't spot a single one (although that last night we did hear quite a commotion in the middle of the night which very well could have been the rangers wrangling one up). I shouldn't be disapointed -- bears are wild afterall and it was the visitors desire to see one decades ago that led to their taming and introduction to human food.
Overall it was a very pleasant trip. Three hours later my mom is back at the airport and on her way back to Seattle while we are heading up north. Well rested and eager for more, we're heading off to Napa.
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San Fran Travels
Nicely put and very good pictures. Keep up the good work. Makes me want to pack-up and go visit.