Day 11 Recap

I woke up in the morning and took a shower to see if I felt any better than I did the night before. The only thing that made me feel any better was the possibility that we could get out of there that day, so that’s what we did.

But we did take the time to see the city first. I had a 49-mile driving tour that I got from the San Francisco travel guide (about the only thing any of those were useful for–that and HotLips Pizza) that we more or less followed.

First though we went and walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. Because we had driven over it at night the previous day, we hadn’t gotten much of a view of it or of the city from it. Besides, the driving tour started from there and there was free parking in the golden gate park, so why not? There were a lot more people walking or riding bikes across than I expected, especially on a day as chilly and foggy as it was. I guess it was just because it was Saturday. The fog was really intense at first–you couldn’t see the top of the bridge even when standing on it, let alone seeing any of the city.

The fog did clear up somewhat as the day went on. Eventually we could actually see the city from the bridge although not well.

I should point out that it was in the parking lot at the golden gate park that we realized that my front driver’s-side door wasn’t actually locking. I’d noticed it being weird for awhile, so it had probably not beeing working for a few days. When we figured out that it wasn’t working, we protected two things: We hid the GPS and I kept the memory sticks with all our pictures on them with me at all times. Everything else was free to take for anyone who realized the car was unlocked. Unfortunately no one took my computer…

From there we drove around and saw some of the things on the driving tour, without actually following the tour’s route (49 miles through the city would have taken all day!). Strangely the tour did not include the stretch of Lombard Street called the “crookedest street in America.” Our tour did include that stretch:

The street twists because it is far too steep to drive straight up or down (27 degree grade). Based on some of the hills they did build roads straight up and down, this one must really have been bad. Of course the little stretch is a big tourist attraction, and of course the speed limit going down is only 5 mph, add to that the fact that the intersection at the top is probably the only one in the city that is not a four-way stop, and you get a long wait going up a steep hill before you get to the twisted part.

Like the fog, any stories you’ve heard about the hills in San Francisco are unexaggerated. On one hill there was no traffic around, so I decided to see how fast I could go up it. I pushed the pedal to the metal and made it all the way up to 15 mph. Here are some more pictures of our driving tour of the city:

Now that I think about it, there were very few buildings in San Francisco that look like Illinois buildings. Even with all the diverse neighborhoods, there was no Illinoistown.

To continue relaxing my nerves (even though I felt a lot better by this point), we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 at an Imax theater east of San Francisco. We wanted to see it on the Imax screen, but they were only showing Spiderman at that time. In the second Pirates movie, they decided that they didn’t need actual characters or a sensible story and instead relied on bad jokes from the first movie to carry it because they knew they would make millions of dollars from the name regardless of what they put in the movie. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the third movie wasn’t like that. I still didn’t like it as well as the first one though–it just wasn’t as pirate-y. Instead of lying and stealing ships to get back their ship and/or girl from the person who stole them and then dueling to the death with swords, they spent their time fighting large battles and lying to government officials in order to rescue people from mythological deities and demigods. That sounds like Homer, not Pirates.

We were going to stay in a hotel about an hour away from Yosemite National Park. Unfortunately, because this was late at night on Memorial Day weekend and we didn’t have reservations, we couldn’t find anywhere to stay. We eventually decided to drive right to the edge of the park and slept in the car in the parking lot of a hotel. It wasn’t the most comfortable or restful night of the trip, but you can’t beat the price.

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