San Francisco and stuff

We're sitting outside a little cafe in MILL VALLEY, California right now! Any die-hard M*A*S*H fans will get a kick out of that. By the way, Mill Valley is a suburb of San Francisco. It's nice here - the sky is blue and full of fluffy clouds, and everything is green and lush. We passed by about a million vineyards on the way into town and I'm sure we'll see more this afternoon. This is as far south as we are going on the coast - we don't want to get into the mess that is Los Angeles! We're heading inland later today and might make it as far as Sacramento.


California drivers are crazy. I'm not just saying that because we're here. They all have huge SUVs (mostly white, proof is in the pictures in this post) and speed a lot, and almost nobody signals. Oh, and everyone cuts everyone else off all the time. I think it's normal driving etiquette here. Here's an example of California driving etiuette - please note the white lines this driver is parked on, and the adjacent handicapped spaces. The picture doesn't show it, but there were a lot of empty, legal parking spaces close to him:


We saw some beautiful giant redwood trees yesterday, but we didn't enjoy them that much because we were too busy being stressed out about the ominous signs at the side of the road that said things like "FLOODED" and then didn't give any more information.

We got off the beautiful redwood tree road called "Avenue of the Giants" after that and went on the nice safe freeway. Well, I guess it wasn't that safe, but at least it wasn't flooded.

I've got to sign off for now, but I'll write more later on...

...LATER ON:

I'm back!

After we left Mill Valley, Mark put forward the strong argument that we were only about ten minutes away from the Golden Gate Bridge, and even though we’re not crazy about driving in cities, we decided we had to go take a look. It was cool! Except that the marked out viewing area was way up a very windy and extremely steep hill.

Our little truck did great because the speed limit was low, and as we drove up the hill we could see the bridge and all the pull-over areas that were accessible to downhill traffic. We got to almost the tippity-top of the hill and there was a big scary sign saying “ALL RVs AND TRAILERS, RIGHT LANE ONLY!” or something almost exactly like that. So we went in the right lane, and it took us…back down the back side of the hill we had just climbed. Mark was optimistic and assumed that a visitor info centre was at the bottom of the hill. I had a sinking feeling that that was not the case. When we reached the bottom of the hill, we seemed to be in farm country. We had a quick fightscussion, did a u-turn in some dirt, and went BACK UP the hill AGAIN. This time, we were able to drive down the correct, exciting side, and we got to pull out into all the pull-out areas and take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the pretty city of San Francisco behind it.


Then we left town.

We pulled off the highway for a break about halfway to Sacramento, and Mark’s hawk eyes spotted a sign that said “Jelly Belly Factory Tours”!!!! Eeek! Of course we went. The tour was amazingly cool in spite of the fact that we were the only people that were not accompanied by hyper little kids. They gave us each a free bag of Jelly Beans at the end of the tour, and there was another line we could get in to get free samples of any flavours we wanted. They’ve started making gross flavours, inspired by the Harry Potter candies no doubt. Did you know this? I didn’t know this. They had stuff like “Skunk Spray”, “Pencil Shavings”, and “Moldy Cheese”. The bad part is, all the gross ones really do taste very accurately like what they’re supposed to. I only got one gross one. Mark got about four. Mmmm Jelly Bellies!


We made it to Sacramento with lots of time to spare, so we wandered around the Ikea store that was near where we had boondocked for the night and – on our friend Jeff’s recommendation – bought the Ikea Café macaroni and cheese for supper. (Only 99 cents, and it comes with a drink!)

Tomorrow: Nevada.