Day 11: San Francisco and a surprise visit!

For today's trip: San Francisco!

We drove out of Modesto (very original street names.. Horizontal: 1st Street, 2nd Street, 3rd Street, 4th Street,... Vertical: "A" Street, "B" Street, "C" Street, "D" Street,...)  for about 2 hours to get to San Francisco. Strangely enough, instead of taking the direct route through Oakland the GPS had us go through San Jose to get here instead.

With L.A. having been fairly quiet due to Labor Day weekend I got a taste of real city driving in San Francisco. It's a bit stressful since I was used to just driving on mostly empty roads, or when busy roads the route was fairly straightforward so the twisting and turning of San Francisco was quite a surprise and I had to watch out carefully.

After finally finding some parking space (expensive, but every parking space I find here is expensive) near the hotel we checked in and I am surprised to say, for being the most expensive hotel on our trip it is the least well kept one. It's cleaner than some other rooms, but it has a very rundown feel to it.. Again the shower could have used a bottle of Antikal (sorry, can't come up with the English word right now) to get it clean, but it was in pretty bad shape with dents and small damages to the renaissance style cupboards and the top cover on the bed had a few rips (not that we use it anyway) and also the first room with only one bed (the other bed pulling out from the couch).

But anyway, it is San Francisco after all so after we checked in we looked around for a reservation for Alcatraz but to our great dismay, everything was sold out for the days we stay here! :( So no Alcatraz for us... We'll be using the 2 days then to mostly explore the city. I want to post pictures, but sadly I can't as this is the second hotel where we have no free WiFi (they'll charge us 12,95 dollars + tax per day if we want it) so I'm using the computer in the lobby to make this post.

What we explored today.. We visited Union Square. We walked through part of Golden Gate Park, viewed some things, watched a game of Jeu de Boules (which they call Lawn Bowling here), not to be confused with Petanque and walked around the various sights and scenes this large 3 mile by 1 mile park has to offer. After that we headed on with our tour to some other sightseeing places and of course.. The Golden Gate Bridge. I wish I wore more than just a T-shirt, the wind on it was SO freakin' cold, especially compared to the constant heat we've been through. But it was a nice sight to behold.

While we were there I was contacted by Johan! Thomas' (my best friend) father, who by accident (of business) was in San Francisco and we met up for some dinner in Chinatown. We had a very good meal at Danny Ho's with good service. It was very good, authentic (not touristy) Chinese food.

We're not thinking of still taking a late tram ride on the cable car system tonight before we continue our trip tomorrow with visits to Lombard Street, Fisherman's Wharf, more of Chinatown (since we only walked through it to get to the restaurant tonight) and we'll see what else we encounter, maybe Little Italy?

Anyway, I'll try to post on this PC again tomorrow and if not you'll have to wait until we get to Santa Maria on the 13th. And of course, not to forget, tomorrow on the 12th is Christophe's 25th birthday! So we need to look for something special for him.. I'm open to suggestions :-)