San Francisco or the land of the weird or something along those lines....

Dropped anchor in Petaluma California today. It's about 40 miles or so north of the freaky deaky city of San Francisco. We are chillin' in the San Francisco North KOA for the next week or so. For those of you that might be taking notes and want to do this crazy travelling thing we are doing someday, KOA's are generally way overpriced and way to tight for RV spaces. This one is no different in the price category, but we do have a LITTLE more space between sites. It might seem like a bit far out of town too, but it's really not. We are just outside Sonoma and Napa so we will get to do some wine country, of which we saw a boatload of wine bushes on the way down here today after we got back on 101, and we have easy access to the city of San Fran itself. There are other campgrounds around the city, but the ratings that we read on them were not what I wanted to put up with in an area that can be dangerous. The KOA is safe and secure for our sleeping time and safe to leave the rig during the day when we head into the city or elsewhere as they have 24/7 onsite security, etc.....

The ride up and out of Fort Bragg was as interesting as the ride into it. We had about 3o miles of small curvy two lane road to get back out to 101. Think about bankhead parkway both up and down pulling an extra 32' of vehicle for 30 miles. My butt is still at the 12+ pucker factor and Karen has squeezed finger grips in the handhold above her door. A couple times I had to ask her and Forrest which one of them made a mess.... :-) Both times it was both........

Oh Well, we got here......

Technically we've been on the coast since we left Seattle and got into Long Beach Washington. Since then we have seen either rain or fog, mostly fog everyday except for yesterday. It could be that in this particular area, that won't be such a bad thing...
Today it rained or drizzled on us all the way down here as you will see in the video's. Tomorrow is supposed to be only partly cloudy and Sunday is supposed to be clear. We will get to see San Fran in all it's various glories I guess.

So, once we got about 60 miles out we started to see lots of wine bushes....

This is a small piece of the Sonoma Valley. Those are vineyards in the valley.....




We will be doing some of the tours so will have some more pics as the week goes on. The country up was beautiful with the rolling hills and wine bushes ......

So we get through this beautiful country and get to the KOA here and find that it was a 60 acre farm back in the day. They still have some beef critters around, some sheeps and some goats in their petting farm. What this equates to is a fly rich enviroment that smells like shit.......old mcdonald shit to be exact. Now don't get me wrong, being from Abalamma, this kinda smells like home so it ain't all bad, it's just a surprise......besides, the goats are kinda cute.......

After we got settled in here and took some of the pucker of highway 20 out of Ft. Bragg outta the britches, we decided we'd take a shot at the San Fran traffic and see what we could find. Guess what.....

:-)




As we were coming in we saw bridge over the bay and I mentioned to Karen that I was kinda disappointed and that I thought it would be "bigger than that". It WAS BIGGER THAN THAT after we got around the next bend. The "gate" is worth every penny of the admission and you must all see and drive/walk over this wonder before you die, or before it falls into the bay. It's not that long a drive and there are probably longer, bigger bridges in the world, but it's the Golden Gate.

You can walk it from either end, and we will probably do one end or the other to the mid point and back before we leave, just cuz it's there and we can......

Our goal this afternoon, since it was so late when we started was just to get the lay of the land so to speak. We ended up going on to Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf anyway. After we drove through all that traffic and got to the Marina district we were not gonna just head back to the porta crib.....

Pier39...... well this is a taste of it.....





And this......




Now I realize that you've already seen these, but these are the PIER39 versions of them and they are different than the other ones. They pose better.......... and they make more noise for us touristas....... We heard ooh's and aah's in 10 different languages while we were standing there. BTW, europeans are dickheads. Some of us in the Wallace family already knew that based on our earlier travels. They have not changed. The french stink and are rude. Germans are still trying to get over the fact that we kicked their asses once and can do it again at will. The spaniard women are hot and their men are scared.. :-)

Love those big cities.....



This is walking back up the pier towards the street. We headed up to Fisherman's Wharf after we left here. This was just a quick pass through. We definitely have to do a more thorough job of wandering the pier than we did tonite....

This is walking up the street towards the Fisherman's Wharf area. There are a ton of resturants up here and we picked one at Fisherman's Grotto. It was not bad, although we have had better along the way. Here's a shot of the sidewalk goings on along way. We both say that it's like the French Quarter in NOLA without the stink and on a slightly larger scale......

This is a shot up that street....




San Fran has the required sidewalk musicians... This is a taste of a Jamacian Steel Drum band..... Pop, remember Chuck in Iran and his band that I played in...... :-)




This is the general direction we were heading.....


This is where we had dinner. It's been here since, well since Jesus was a corporal or somewhere around that time frame. Dinner was not bad, but it could have been better considering all the miles we put in to get here, and the length of time the resturant has been a fixture here. We'll find better I'm sure, and I'm sure we can find worse. The view was interesting on two compass points though......

"THE" bridge is obvious in this shot, but there's also a three master in there two. I REALLY like boats..... :-)

Now in this one.... what's this?




C'mon, someone knows what this is....

And from another window in the resturant, isn't it cool how the fog "eats" the bridge...



While we were sitting in the resturant, the view of the bridge kept changing into and out of view based on fog and clouds. Amazing.....

After we finished eating we decided to shoot the gap back across the bridge before it got dark. This is a shot coming back across the bridge headed north....


We could spend a BUNCH of time here just shooting this bridge. It would be different everytime we shot it too.....

This is the city from across the bay....



You have to get the concept of just how many people live and work and travel in this city everyday to get the feeling of what it's like to be here. Now, I'm a country boy at heart, and I could have lived out the rest of my life in Logan Alabama, but this is amazing to be in for now too.


This is looking back south across the bridge towards the city. You might say that those clouds make it look not so appealing. Not so kemosabe. I suspect that no matter what the weather, this view would be beautiful.........

Also, a common view of this exit to the sea are these vessels.....


We saw another freighter heading out while we were coming across the bridge. Could not get a shot of it but the sucker was full ahead rockin' to get out the bay....

And there's also the view of the famous island.......

What's this?.....


The replacement of this is up in Cresent City.......

Now, at the southern end of the bridge, there is a monument. What did we find there. A monument to some of the country's finest.....

Shot two....

This is a good shot to finish up this post with. This area is going to be a lot of fun exploring. Ya'll stay tuned now, ya heah..... ;-)

I did NOT spell check this post, so if it's not right, and you have a problem with it, kiss my lily white butt.....