San Francisco on foot

July 21

 

We did San Francisco on foot by following the walking tour route in Ursula’s Lonely Planet.  The bus dropped us off near Union Square where we soon found Grant Avenue and the official entrance to China Town.  We visited many shops, walked down the alley where the Chinese revolution was allegedly plotted, bought fortune cookies at the factory and then our stomachs told us it was time for lunch.  While we were debating where to go, the perfect restaurant found us in the form of a woman handing out menus on the street.  She led us off the main drag up a hill about a block and a half to a little place where we had Hong Kong style chow fun and shrimp dumplings that were the best Chinese food I’ve ever tasted.  A really friendly local guy who sat at a table beside us told us we lucked out by finding the best place in San Francisco.  Everyone seems so friendly on the west coast.  We ended the walking tour at Coit tower and came down the east side through a hillside garden walkway with loads of exotic flowers and beautiful trees.  We missed the ferry back to Larkspur and had to walk back across town to union and Van Ness to catch the bus. 

 

The next morning we packed up and headed out to crawl along the beautiful cliff-strewn coast again to what we thought would be a sunny and sandy destination: Caspar beach (5 miles from Mendocino).   The cold ocean mist forced us into jackets, but the beach was pretty and had a group of seals playing in the surf and pelicans plunging in front of a really nice sunset.  The next day we had planned to spend soaking up the sun in the sand in the nice little cove beach, but gray skies settled in and we got on our bikes to ride into Mendocino.  Ursula and Devin decided to turn back and take the bus into town while Aidan and I pedaled our way there.  We had a deliciously warm clam-chowder lunch, bought some bread and pastries (the blackberry cheese Danish was really tasty) got tired of waiting for the other half of our family to show up, (the bus didn’t run until really late) and rode back to camp.  

 

At the moment, I’m sitting in the camper while Ursula is driving through Redwood forests on 1 and 101 about 150 miles south of our next campsite: Del Norte State Park.  The road is a seemingly endless series of curves and I’m fighting motion sickness to type this.  The sun is shining and the air is almost hot.  What a difference in temperature there is just a few miles east of the ocean.  We’ve already seen some big redwoods from the road, but we’re going to get up close and personal by this evening.  We’re still having fun and can’t believe we’ve done all the things we have in just two weeks.