So after a pretty full on Monday and Tuesday we took it nice and easy on Wednesday chilling at the apartment, we ended up getting on the road to head up to San Fran at like 4 in the avo. It's cool here because you could take the highway called the 5 and that would take you straight through the country from LA to SF and it might take only 6 hours. However you can also drive out to the coast and take a coastal highway called the 101, but even beyond that there's a road that actually follows the coastline, its pretty small and you can only drive 50 mph or something called highway 1. So we drove out to highway 1 and drove up the coast. Hit this little town called Ventura, stopped off at the beach and took some photos. Then carried on up.. around 8 though it got dark so instead of staying on the 1 we jumped back over to the 101 and carried on. We got to Santa Cruz at about 1 in the morning, drove around for a bit and decided to crash there for the night, couldn't find anywhere to park so we drove out of town a little bit, parked on the highway next to a whole lot of other people doing the same thing, had a few beers and fell asleep. Here we are in traffic..
We got up nice and early, and took the 1 all the way up to san fran. It's a really beautiful drive, it kind of reminded me of driving around the east cape in NZ at some points, and then other times it felt like you were driving around mission bay in auckland. Here's a snap of Cody first thing in the morning.
We went straight to the Golden Gate Bridge.. it was suuuuuuper foggy! But so rad. We just walked over it singing that cold war kids song about the lady who tries to jump off the golden gate. There's these crazy loud horns on either end of it, for the most part you can only hear one or the other but somewhere in the middle you can hear them both really clearly, and the two horns are in harmony! a minor third haha, its really cool. There's also phones all up the side of it where you can call a counsellor if your up there to jump off. CRAAAAZY. here's us at Golden Gate..
I put some Quarters in the looking machine and could kind of see alcatraz but it was too foggy.. after that we hit the city!
We were trying to find a street we'd heard about called Haight St. So we put it in the GPS and left the golden gate. We parked a little while back from the street and thought we'd walk up, but at some point we took a wrong turn and ended up on another street called market street. Market street had those rainbow gay flags hanging up everywhere and every single person we saw on the street looked soooooo gay. I don't think I even saw any woman, but I saw a lot of places you could get checked for HIV etc. We hit up a sushi place down there and I had a pretty average donburi, nothing on Katsubi or Renkon, but still half the price!! We then went back to the car to figure out where we'd gone wrong and soon enough we found Haight St.
Haight St was like the center of the hippie movement in San Francisco back in the late 60s, and it still very much has that vibe. There was about 6 or 7 Record stores (not music stores, just records) just on the one street. There was heaps of cool street art, and so many crazy people. It was really the only place i bought souvenirs on the whole trip! We pretty much got stuck on Haight St for the rest of the day. Here's some Pics
So Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead all used to live on Haight St, or in the general area. There was a shot of Amoeba Music, like in LA, then a shot of the T-shirt i bought from this crazy hippy store. San Fran feels a lot like wellington, its kind of quirky and interesting, there's lots of old houses everywhere, there's lots of hills everywhere, its really cool.
Pretty soon after we took this photo I tripped and broke Cody's camera... which was really lame! So we have no photos of the rest of the day. I grabbed a disposable camera though but we won't be uploading them anytime soon.
Just so you know, we went down to the fishermans wharf where the streets were filled with people, and there was all this food and bands playing on every corner, it was so sick! All the food down at the wharf though was seafood, and I'm not the biggest fan. Cody got a fish chowder bread bowl which looked amazing, but the only thing at the place i went to that sounded good to me was a corn dog (which is kind of like a hotdog you get from a fish n chip shop in NZ... kind of) so i got two corn dogs and some chips and they were cold!! it was so gay. so I just made friends with the sea gulls, they appreciated the cold chips. Then we got back on the road, slept in the car again on the way home and made it back to LA!!
San Fran has definitely been one of the highlights so far!
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