On the third day of our trip, we crossed the California State Line and fortunately for us, it was on a Sunday. That's the only day of the week when they close the Agricultural Checkpoint Station so we didn't have to worry about that. We managed to sneak into California with a couple packages of gound beef, and a head of lettuce :-)

California is somewhat different than the others states we visited; for one it's the one of the largest AND most populated states in America, and also they have a very unique way of doing things there. There are no numbered exits on the freeway which makes it difficult to calculate distances without a map, and California has tons of 'Call Boxes' spaced evenly apart on the side of every major highway. One gets so used to seeing these call boxes that in the event of a real emergency, they would probably be driven right past :-) Also, freeways are very common in this state and the 'Do not Enter' sign is rather taken to extremes. The people in California tend to be a lot more direct than in other states, as we noticed. One might get the impression that everybody is "down each other's throats" as conversational pleasantries are kept to a minimum. This is probably because there are so many people in the state.

The first major city in Cali. is Crescent City. After this city, the Redwood Highway begins, which twists and turns its way south through giant Redwood trees. Some of these trees are thousands of years old and are a feature landmark of Northern California. One such tree named the 'Chandelier Tree' is so big that cars are able to drive through the trunk by paying a small fee, provided by the Drive Thru Tree Park service. We got a picture. As we tried to buy a soda from the vending machine, it ate all my quarters, and I asked the clerk to see if she could help. The clerk was a very nice person, and did everything she could to try and give me a soda, even going so far as to kick the machine and hope the can would fall out. I was going to say jokingly, "Why don't you bring your shotgun out?" but I didn't because I thought she might actually do it!

Some exceptionally beautiful coastal scenery is present at the start of the Redwood Highway also. Ideal for a scene of a romance movie, this scenery involves gorgeous sunlight with pounding surf on miles of sandy beach. Great stuff.

We camped that night in a mediocre campground called Elk Prairie in the heart of the Redwoods. Some of the elk wildlife are so tame they stand on the road and don't move when you drive up to them! There was some informative literature and videos on the history of the Redwood Empire, but we didn't have time to indulge in them. The next morning, we continued south on US 101 and stopped for breakfast at a place called the Samoa Cookhouse, located a few miles east of Eureka, California. This was a great place to eat! For a very reasonable price, you can eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner and be guarenteed that you will *not* leave hungry. Essentially the place is like a full-service buffet, where servers bring you selections from the menu and seconds are always on the house. All of this was confirmed by a TV news crew who happened to be doing a story on the Samoa Cookhouse, and presenting the public with a look at how great this place really is. Jamie and I appeared on national television (NBC) enjoying a nice meal of chicken, "eating with our mouths closed so it looks good for TV" as the reporter joked.

After Samoa, we hit the highway south for a loooooong drive to San Francisco. US 101 swiches between limited-access freeway (divided blue on a map), cross-traffic freeway (divided red on a map) and two-lane highway (solid red on a map) so we could figure out where we were by looking at the map and comparing it to the type of road we were on. Yeah, we did get pretty bored driving that stretch of road :-)

We reached Santa Rosa in late afternoon and we could tell we were in the Bay Area suburbs when we got stuck in miles and miles of busy rush-hour traffic. We pulled off the freeway and set up camp in a place called China Camp State Park, which is about 10 miles north of San Francisco. Much to our surprise, we saw somebody else there with B.C. plates, as we didn't expect to.

For the next five days, we stayed in China Camp, and the hosts started to get to know us, as most campers make this a weekend-only spot. For a few days at a time, we were the only campers in the park and had the entire shower facilities to ourselves. Every day we'd "commute" into the city during rush-hour, explore places around San Franciso, take pictures, and then drive back to the campsite all exhausted from doing so much stuff. We literally did so much sightseeing in San Francisco, we were starting to feel the big-city stress known all-too-well by locals there. I'll describe some of the places we saw in San Franciso.

• Golden Gate Bridge
  As US 101 includes this famous 4200 feet bridge, we had the fortune of crossing it every day we headed into San Francisco. The weather was not the greatest, but it was clear enough for us to take some good pictures of the bridge. There being many viewpoints overlooking the bridge, we didn't have a hard time finding one. We also paid tolls crossing the bridge, and I was probably the only motorist who asked, "Uh, can I get a receipt for that?" as I noticed most people just handed the money to the tool-booth guy and drove on. This bridge is an engineering marvel and made for some great pictures.

• Lombard Street
  Being the hilliest city in the USA, everybody in San Franciso knows about this street. It is the crookedest street in the world and quite possibly one of the steepest. It is a one-way street and you can only drive down it. It twists and turns about six or seven times before ending up at the bottom. The sounds of brakes squealing must be a common occurence for the people who live in the houses which line Lombard Street. This street and also Nob Hill are among the craziest hills to drive with a standard-shift transmission. I was stopped at a light facing upwards on Nob Hill, and when I attempted to engage the clutch, nothing happened and I rolled back about ten feet. I tried again. Same thing. Then, above the roaring of my engine Jamie shouted, "It's not in gear, damnit!!"

• Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf
  Another famous tourist attraction in San Francisco (aside: the locals can identify a tourist in a snap if they call the city 'Frisco', or 'San Fran') is Pier 39 which is a large outdoor cornucopia of more than 100 specialty, shops, arcades, restaurants, 2-level complex, family amusement centre, and movie theatres containing "The San Francisco Experience" detailing the city's history. It is located right on the ocean, and the entire boardwalk is made up of wood. We happened to spot a magician practising some fairly cheesy acts, apparently he was nearing the end of his bit as he was starting to sluff off on some of the tricks. I noticed an error in one of tricks and shouted it out to him from the back row. Big mistake. He called me up on stage for his next act, in which he pretended to slice swords through me. That was not a fun experience :-(

• Postcard Row (Victorian Houses)
  We were talking to some locals in the park surrounding these houses. And learned that the purple house in the middle is used for filming the TV show "Full House". Very popular in the early nineties, this show was filmed in front of half a dozen or so Victorian style houses in Alamo Square on Fillmore Street. We managed to get a few pics here. Jamie looks a bit like Bob Saget, so his picture in front of the houses looks just like from the show :-)

• Haight & Ashbury
  Everybody knows about this famous street corner in San Francisco, which was and still is famous for its large hippie population. They have an Ben and Jerry's ice cream shop on the corner where it's the only place in the world you can buy "Wavy Gravy" ice cream. Wavy Gravy ice cream is named after a famouse hippie who still lives in this area of San Francisco. Of course, we just had to try some.

• Cable Cars
  We rode on a few of these cars, operated by the San Francisco MUNI Transportation Network since 1873. They have no power of their own, but run by gripping a large continuous cable loop underneath the streets. There are seven of these cable loops throughout the city, and the central motor which runs these loops is located inside the Cable Car Barn. Since San Francisco has so many steep hills, cable cars provide the ideal way to get around the city. There are two attendants on board each car: one controls the gripping of the cable, the other is the brakeman who operates the brakes going downhill. The best part about these cars is their social nature; we got waved at by many people on the streets and from other cable cars, it was easy to start conversations with other people on board the cars. On a side note, this is the only surviving cable car system in the world.

• 49 Mile Scenic Drive
  We never did the entire 49 miles, seeing as the route was impossible to follow on our map, but we covered a few of the major points of interest along this drive. Some of them were Twin Peaks, where you could overlook the entire city from this famous movie backdrop. Others were Golden Gate Park, the Broadway Tunnel and the famous Bay Bridge. One of the longest bridges in the world, the 8.5 mile stretch is actually two bridges and a tunnel in the middle through Treasure Island. One of its concrete piers, anchored 240 feet beneath the Bay, is larger than Egypt's biggest pyramid.

• Alcatraz
  This is one of the most historic places to visit in the San Franciso Bay Area. For those of you who don't know, Alcatraz was a maximum security prison in use during 1934-1963 set atop an island in the middle of the bay. Prisoners came to Alcatraz from other jails, to be released back to their former jails after having served time at Alcatraz. This was a place reserved for the baddest of the bad. Al Capone was one of the inmates at Alcatraz. Also, the movie "Escape from Alcatraz" was filmed there. We bought a tour package which included a boat ride to the prison island, an hour-long tour of the cellblocks, and plenty of time in between to walk around the island and talk to a former inmate at the bookstore. The cellblocks themselves were very bleak looking and served as a grim reminder of the psychological roughness the inmates went through as they served time in Alcatraz. The main row of the cells was called "Broadway" and alongside Broadway were three levels of cells, all about the same size in dimension and each having the exact same layout: army cot, shelf, and toilet. Inmates were locked up in their cells 23 hours a day, with the only free time used up for showers and dining. On the weekends, especially good prisoners were allowed outside to the Recreation Yard, and those involved musically practiced in the Band Practice Room. Especially misbehaved prisoners were sentenced to do time in "The Hole", which was a completely sealed off cell involving no light and sound and the inmates were confined there 24 hours a day. That must have sucked :-) We caught the last boat off the island back to the city; the captain joked that if we missed this boat, we would have had to spend the night on Alcatraz :-)

• Cultural Hubs
  San Francisco is known for its multiculturalism, and it has many places within the city for which people of different nationalities can congregate. Some of these are the famous Chinatown, Japantown, and the Palace of the Arts.

• The Embarcadero
  This is probably the only road in the city where it's possible to drive more than 25 miles per hour and not get stuck in gridlock, or stop at stop signs every block. It's a four lane divided road, speed limit 35, and it goes between Market Street and Highway 101. One evening on the way back to the camp site we spotted a lady having car troubles. We decided to stop and lend a hand. Jamie noticed that her radiator hose was disconnected, after a quick fix we were both on our way again. At the Market Street end of this road, a guy had a table set up and was luring a crowd by enticing the public to gamble on one of his card tricks. The card trick this guy was doing was the classic one where you guess which color the card he was holding face down was. If you guess right, you win all the money in the pot. If you guess wrong, you lose what you bet (minimum $20). Unknown to us at the time, one of the people betting in the crowd was an accomplice of the card dealer, in which the dealer would make it extremely obvious to win, and his accomplice would consistently win big bucks, and make a huge comotion about it. This was to draw crowds, of course. I got hustled into betting twenty bucks, and figured it would be a cinch to guess the card. Wrong. This guy was apparently very good at dealing and made it so my guess was wrong. Miserably, I lost my money. I was going to attempt to win it back when Jamie then clued in as to what was going on. I quickly left that B.S. and headed back to the campsite.

We left San Francisco, sadly, on the weekend just when the weather was getting nice to head eastbound towards Yosemite Park. We followed the San Mateo floating bridge across the bay, which was also an extremely long bridge. After this bridge it was all eight-lane freeway for miles and miles until we cleared all the Bay Area suburbs and eventually the scenery became more rural as we neared Central California en route to Yosemite. San Francisco has a way of sticking with people, and it sure did with us. Undoubtedly a friendly oasis in the middle of California, this city defininetely carries the charm with which so many tourists can remember.
--by Steve Ruelle

Some links...

• USA Vacations - Order FREE Brochure!
• Cal-Parks: California State Parks
• BayCityGuide.com
• SanFrancisco.com
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