Michael and I were on the road by 7:30am on Thursday, June 30th, as we set off on our grand birthday / Fourth of July adventure to San Francisco. The weather leaving Portland was gray with some light rain / mist, but by the time we stopped for lunch in Grants Pass, the sun was out in force. Ahhhh, the sun. It was heaven to be headed down I-5, with my bare feet on the dash, talking with Michael as he drove. How I love road trips! It had been quite awhile since I'd been much further south than Albany, so I enjoyed watching the countryside change along the way and taking note of each new little town we passed through.
Since it was such a beautiful day, we had an amazing view of Mt. Shasta (seemed so close you could almost reach out and touch her). There was still some snow on her sides, but definitely not as much as we'd seen on her northern neighbor, Mt. St. Helens, just the week before.
After we passed Mt. Shasta, we went through a really windy section of highway and saw deer at two different places along the side of the road. It was a bit heart-stopping as both times the deer were walking toward the freeway, like they wanted to try to cross, then bounded away at the last minute back to the safety of the forest. The last two deer we saw were a mama and fawn. The baby was so little it still had the light-colored spots on its back--so sweet.
We changed places and I took over driving for a couple of hours once we hit the straight, flat section of freeway that seemed to emerge almost as soon as we crossed the border into the sunshine state. Michael kept track of our progress using the Garmin and was able to get the picture I'd been trying to get while he drove: a sign showing how many miles left to San Fran. It seemed like every 10 miles or so there were signs announcing how many miles left to get to Sacramento and how many to San Fran. We would announce them to each other as we saw them, "258 miles to San Fran!" The Garmin also kept track of our estimated arrival time, and for most of the trip it was around 6:00pm. Once we came into San Francisco, however, we hit rush hour traffic and our ETA kept getting later and later.
I was so thankful that Michael was driving when we got to San Francisco because suddenly there were six lanes of traffic and many people seemed to be driving aggressively, suddenly changing lanes without signaling. I think the motorcyclists scared us the most as they rode between lanes of traffic, zipping between cars in order to get where they were going as fast as possible.
We got a great view of the bay as we came into San Francisco and crossed the Bay Bridge ($6 toll!) and daydreamed about what it would be like to live in a place where so many days of the year yielded bright, sunny skies.
When we made our online hotel reservations for the trip at the Holiday Inn Express by the San Fran airport, we weren't sure if we would be able to make it all the way in one day, so they weren't expecting us until Friday. We figured that if we got tired, we could stay somewhere a couple hours from San Fran and finish the trip the next morning. But since we got there with no problems in about 10 1/2 hours of driving, we thought we'd see if we could check in at our hotel early. Unfortunately, they were booked, but we were able to get a room at a Holiday Inn just down the street.
We didn't end up eating dinner until pretty late that night, but luckily there was a restaurant / bar attached to the hotel so we didn't have to go far. Initially we had talked about eating at the Cheesecake Factory at the top of the Macy's building in downtown S.F. (recommended by a friend), but after driving so long and battling rush-hour traffic, neither of us felt like trying to navigate the downtown area and find parking. The food at the hotel bar was pretty good and we split two kinds of dessert for my birthday: a "Snickers" type of ice cream dessert and banana cream pie. After that it was off to bed as we had plans to get up at the crack of dawn (for the second day in a row) to go wait in line for Alcatraz tickets. I'd been unable to find any available tickets online (websites all said they were sold out until after our stay) and when I had tried calling the number for the ticket office, all I got was a busy signal. But I had read online that it was possible to get standby tickets if you were willing to wait in line, and so we decided that Alcatraz would be our first order of sightseeing business in San Francisco on Friday.
