Day 40: Traveling home

Today was a sad day - the end of our holiday :-(

We managed to get everything packed and with our six individual luggage/backpack thingies we headed towards the SF airport. Flight was completely full and without problems, and now we are trying to find matches to keep our eyelids open.. 

After around 8000 miles, 40 days and a trip from the east to the west coast of the US it is time to recover for few days before getting back to work. This is the final post of the travel blog, and next year we will do 8 weeks instead of 6 :-) 

P.S. Ending with a insider-joke picture of a piece of underwear that I could not leave to the store, but had to buy :-)

Day 38 - 39: San Francisco

On Tuesday we went to have breakfast in Lori's diner, which was just around the corner of our hotel. The breakfast was again amazingly big. Basically you can survive the whole day with that kind of breakfast. We had some scrambled eggs, hash browns and toast. With the breakfast giving us sufficient energy, we started walking towards the wharf. We walked through Chinatown which provided a bit less hilly walk to the harbor. On our way we spotted the crooked Lombard street, lots of Chinese shops & banks and of course the nice townhouses of San Francisco.

Various foods from SF

When we got to the piers, we first walked to the pier where the Alcatraz cruises take off. We were able to get tickets for the morning on the next day. Apparently in the summer/holiday time the lines can be as long as week to get there, so we had quite nice timing! As remembered from last times when visiting SF, there were lots of homeless people again on the streets. One person had few bushes that he was holding in front of him, and sitting behind them. From a distance they looked like somebody had planted them on the sidewalk. When people would walk close enough, he would scare people by suddenly shouting 'boo' from the bushes. It was like watching candid camera, when people would always jump two meters when this happened. He also managed to probably collect quite some tips :)

On our way back to the center we took the tram, which got us to Market street. This was a good point to start our shopping trip. One of the most lucrative stops we made was a place called 'Designer Shoe Warehouse' - perfect! After quite some trying-ons and one boyfriend parked on the bench of the shop to play games in the mean while we actually managed to get out of there, with quite some more shoes to pack to our suitcase.

For the evening we went to a nearby Italian restaurant, with a really nice atmosphere. We managed to say practically hello's, when the waitress asked whether we are from the Netherlands. It turned out she was from Haarlem, and the owner of the restaurant was also from the Netherlands. We got nicely service in dutch for the evening, and the food was also really good. After this we still stopped by at our corner pub, which also has the organic apple cider. Lekker!

Almost like being in the Netherlands with dutch service & dutch people all around.. 

Wednesday morning we got up early and went to a breakfast place near the piers. The breakfast was again very good, and this time we tried to regulate even better not to eat half of the food, that worked. The cafe was for some reason filled with dutch people. It feels like they are everywhere in San Francisco.

After this we wondered to the starting place of the Alcatraz cruise. After 20 minutes boat trip we stepped to the infamous prison island and spend nice afternoon there. We walked within the main cell building and got a very thorough guided audio tour (in dutch!) and learned all about the routines in the prison, the prisoners and multiple escape stories. Our favorites were a guy who starved himself in order to fit through the iron bars and a another guy who was called "Creepy" because he would always creep around on his toes. At the same time there was Al Capone's niece giving autographs to her book he had wrote about his rather famous uncle. We tried to do the math and could not exactly get to him having such a young niece, but who knows..

After Alcatraz we took the old fashioned cable car back to town and got to hear and witness some interesting stories varying from stressed Italian tourists to a 89-year-old local lady who was still going strong and doing her groceries around the city. Once at the hotel, we booked our airport shuttle at the front desk. We did not go and see any stand-up comedy, but hanging out at the lobby was enough comedy for us. The most amazing conversations took place there between a bit strange hotel staff and maybe even stranger guests. This was also the only place where the wifi was working so we spent every now and then some time there to check where to go next. The hotel staff was amazingly skillful in making everything sound like it is somehow the customers fault. One lady was changing money, and it took quite some time and in the mean time the hotel clerk picked up the phone. The lady then said that well it would be nice to finish this transaction since it has already took quite some time now. The answer to that was "Well if you would have provided your room number right in the first place it would have been lot faster". Another one of our favorite was a long conversation with lots of misunderstandings when checking in with two rooms. It ended up with absurd conversation where the customer was suspecting the hotel clerk was getting mad. She kept responding in a tense 'on-the-brink-of-a-nervous-breakdown' voice "No, I'm not mad at all now. But if you want me to be mad, I can do that."

For the last evening of our trip we went to a nearby sushi restaurant, which was very popular, and we enjoyed some very good sashimi & sushi. 

Day 37: Muir Woods & San Francisco

On Monday we enjoyed nice breakfast at our hotel and started slowly heading towards San Francisco. Our first stop was on the "wrong side" of Golden Gate to visit the Muir Woods, an ancient forest that has been turned to a National Monument. It was relatively busy there also, on the website the recommendation was to visit early in the morning on a weekday, we did our best to adhere.

The woods were really beautiful, filled with trees older than 2000 years. The forest was mainly of california red wood, and it felt like only thing missing were the dinosaurs. We enjoyed hours just walking in the forest and the further we went the more quieter it got so that you could just hear the birds around you. Really cool place!

After Muir we drove on serpentine roads and found the Golden Gate with remains of an old fortification. We took some touristy pictures of the bridge, Alcatraz and San Francisco. After this we took the bridge to reach SF ($6 per time!). Our hotel is located just around the corner of Union Square. After changing rooms once (the smell of tobacco was not exactly what we were looking for...) and walking to the car and back 6 times to get everything unloaded, it was time to handover the car. After 36 days we saw some cool places, drove around 8000 miles and did this all with our trusted Chrysler 200. The farewell was short but sentimental :) Feels really strange to not jump to the car in the morning, take the map out and start thinking where should we head next.

36 days worth of American insects in the front

For the evening we found an excellent sushi place with few tables, and enjoyed good sashimi, avocado and California rolls. More of this!!

 

Day 35 - 36: Yosemite & San Rafael

On Saturday morning we thought we were early birds in Yosemite. When we reached the South entrance we spent a nice half an hour just on the line to get in to thr park. Apparently the nice weather and Saturday had lots of people thinking that this makes a nice National Park day. In the Yosemite park magazine was a story of "red bear is a dead bear" which means that for every bear that has died in the park mainly due traffic accidents there would be a red bear marker by the road. However we did not see any of those.

We went to see the Bridalveil Falls, which were especially spectacular this time of year with all the water flowing down. While taking the pictures we were covered in fine mist. The temperature was rather high (at least 33C) and with a roof down for several hours it is likely to cause at least a minor sun stroke (at least to some :) Yosemite was a really big park, and the views were spectacular. However also inside the park it was as busy as at the entrance, and taking pictures of "pristine nature" without a group of 30 japanese tourists and 20 americans was rather challenging.

For the evening we headed to the town of Lodi, which is bit like Napa, but not as touristy. The road there was really beautiful going through big fields. Again within few tens of miles the scenery changed from the mountains of Yosemite to the fields and hills near Lodi. The challenging part is that always the one who is not driving tends to get some motion sickness as the roads are quite curved and twisted.

In Lodi, we first went to a place that had Wine and Roses in the name. The price for the night was "a bit" more than we were willing to pay (and we forgot our Burberry outfit and Bottega Venega clutch back home so we did not really match the other guests.. :). Surprisingly there were no hotels in downtown so we decided to go for a motel by the side of the town. After some strange conversations ("what are you looking for?" "A room" "What kind of room?" "Anything you have is fine" "Well what do you want?") we got ourselves a decent room for the night and headed for the downtown. We ended up to an microbrewery/winery and had some pizza & pasta for dinner. It seemed to be also some school ending (prom??) party on-going where teenage kids would drive with wild limosine's and listening to some Kanye West type of music. We felt ourselves old ;-)

On Sunday we wanted to get a good breakfast, and after trying few places and noticing it is relatively busy because of mother's day, we ended up to a place called Omelet House. A real American diner! We sat on the counter and ordered omelets. The twist was, that the omelets would come both with potatoes (we chose hash browns) and dessert (eg. A stack of Donald Duck pancakes!). We were extremely full after the breakfast, and the waitress said afterwards that "You did really good". Needleds to say, we could not finish everything. Apparently our five weeks in the US have not been wasted ;-) Across from the breakfast place there was an adult store, that also offered "dancing" - this itself is nothing new but the place looked so sad, falling apart and just bad, that we just had to take a picture of it.

We continued the day with some wine tasting. As we were driving, we tried to limit the amount of actually drinking the wine, but this turned out to be really difficult. At one place we were encouraged to really take mouth full of the wine and swallow everything, since the taste buds are located on the back of your mouth. Also spitting/throwing the wine out from the glass was not really the habit there. After three places (with min 4 tastings per place) we decided it is probably better to quit :) during the tastings we also heard some interesting stories of how the vineyards are doing, and surprisingly many were started within the last 10 years. In the evening we did some googling, too bad that the vineyards and wineries are priced starting from $1 million and up.. We learned also, that we really really really do not like Zinfandel, even though apparently Lodi is the Zinfandel-place-to-be.

For Sunday evening we went to the city of San Rafael, which is half hour drive from San Francisco. We drove to the downtown to enjoy dinner in a nice Italian restaurant. Next to us sat a family who were of dutch descendance, but we kept quiet for our dutch connections :) We also saw some pretty interesting characters wondering around the streets, which has not happened so much in the smaller cities. We ended the evening with some pretty good ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery.