This trip is now included in all my posted photos.
On Sunday we set out for our trip to San Francisco --- first one for me. The original plan was to go to the San Fran zoo, but that will probably happen another time. In terms if people, it was me, Brendan, and Tina. Before we left we stopped for lunch at the Oakridge mall. I had some Japanese chicken teriyaky and shrimp with steamed rice. I was relatively impressed by the size and quality of the meal. Not a bad value --- unlike IBM kitchen.... After fueling (or some might call it stuffing) our stomachs we set out for our trip at around 1.30 in the afternoon.
The trip didn't start as smoothly as might be expected. Once we were driving along the 280 highway we heard strange flopping sounds coming from the road or tyres. I became suspicious thinking one of our tyres might be flat and that steering is a bit strange because of it. We pulled over, after some search for an exit (never a close offramp when you need it!) we ended up very close to San Jose downtown. All tyres were perfectly fine to my relief. The sound was simply the not-so-smooth road surface coming in contact with our tyres at 70+ mi/hr. Yes, the roads here aren't the smooth NZ (or just Wellington?) motorways. Our transport was now proven to be relatively crash safe, but getting back on route took a little time... Now, it could have been me turning into random streets or it could've been our designated map reader misreading the map in the wrong direction... Either way, we ended up having to do a U-turn after driving for about 15 minutes in one direction and thankfully were back on the 280 highway heading north to our destination, San Fran.
Driving on highway is nice... five lanes each way, everyone is doing 75-80 mi/hr (=130+ km/hr). Feels fast, especially in small car. I didn't make a note of the time it took us to get to San Fran, but I think it's under one hour. However, it took us a lot longer to get to the Golden Gate Park as traffic was pretty slow -- it wasn't a highway anymore. And I don't think there is a highway that goes through San Fran, all of them morph into normal streets while in San Fran down town. It was pretty hot that day too --- over 25 degrees celsius. But in the car it was nice and cool --- the air conditioner, our new found friend in California heat, kept us from boiling over. As it turned out the A/C is always operational --- another thing to fix in the car.
Before we got to the G.G. Park we saw some guy dressed only in his thongs holding a sign advertising car wash. I think he may need to work on his advertising campaign a just a little bit more to have any kind of hope for customers.
The G.G. Park is huge, but I still needed to parallel park (my first time in this country) as it seemed all of San Francisco decided to spend their Sunday here. There was nothing really outstanding about the park. It was big, it had a lot of tall pine trees. It had some large open areas where people were half naked playing frizbee and others walking their dogs. A group of "hippie-musicians" were randomly drumming something in the middle. You think Wellingtonians are relaxed about their attitudes and clothing style? Well people here behaved like you would on a beach --- super relaxed. We got drinks/water from the nearest McDonalds (which charged 28 cents for a non-water refill!) and headed for Botanic Gardens --- still inside the G.G. Park. The gardens were ok, nothing flash. Ironically, we decided to walk around the New Zealand and Australian part (as well as some others). Squirrels were here too (they are around apartments and outside my IBM site). We walked around for a while and I think photos speak for themselves...
Slightly disoriented after the walk we finally managed to find my car. It was time to see what I came here to see, the Golden Gate Bridge. Ok, it's big, but the size wasn't shocking. To be honest I expected bigger. I also forgot that it's actually red in colour, not yellow or gold as the name might suggest. As most people do we drove through it ending up on the opposite side with a view of San Fran.. As an aside a lookout here is called vista point, and that's where we stopped. Struggling for, but luckily finding, a car park, we walked under the bridge first, crossing the road. You can see the construction beams and feel just how much the bridge actually shakes as the cars drive on it (3 lanes each way). After that we walked for about 80 meters on the bridge and stopped when we got to the place where we were actually above water. A lot of photos were taken, as everywhere else --- Tina is a keen photographer, a lot of the time taking photos while we don't notice --- which is great! But I do delete some of the more awkward ones, especially of myself (as some of you know my facial features do show most bizarre expressions at times :)).
The Bridge was followed by another hunt for car parks, this time on San Francisco waterfront. All hope was gone, but a small gap between cars appeared and we tried to squeez in there (this time parallel park was easier as it was on the left on one way street). Luckily the car behind us moved back to give us enough room and even told us to turn the tyres away from the curb as it was a hill sloping backwards (you get fined for that pretty quickly). It's strange, but that particular side of the street didn't have any parking meters. Everywhere else there were parking meters and even then the limit is 60 or in some places only 30 minutes. Parking buildings were expensive, for example, $5/hr or $12/hr, but later discovered there was a whole day parking for $10/day. Most of these were full anyway... After finding such a lucky spot we carefully read all the signs about parking, there were two or three. All the hours and days didn't apply to us and we didn't have our engine on (that was punishable by some ridiculous fine, from memory, $1000).
The time was around 6.30 and we decided to walk around the waterfront before we got food. There are a LOT of tourist shops and entertainment as well as endless amount of people. And this was Sunday evening in the first weeks of spring! I think the photos here are self explanatory too. The guy who painted live for some techno music was cool. He uses only spray paint to paint his art! We saw him do one right there. Brendan says he saw him on YouTube --- that's how famous this guy is!
For food we went to Fishermen's Wharf, where all the sea food is sold. Brendan tried a whole crab, I just had a crab sandwich. I don't like to wrestle with my food for hours. I did try a little though. As for taste I didn't think crab is that different to shrimp. I guess all sea food tastes similar. By the way, the crab was $9.95/lb and Brendan had an average one, which set him back around $15. I wasn't too impressed with the prices, but I ought to have anticipated a little better what "cheap" sea food really means here. My sandwich cost me $6.00...
The night time drive back through San Fran was great. A lot of illumination on the streets, bridges, and buildings. Once we got on the highway, but still in San Fran, it was cool because we were above the city as the highway is elevated tens of meters above ground. It felt a little freaky as you couldn't see the sides of the road. One wrong move and we could be flying many stories down... I did manage to keep us safely on the ground.
It's getting late now. I think I've told you most of what's happened that day.
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