California: Third Leg of the Trip

This is part three of a four part report on my recent trip to California.  Part one is here, part two is here, and I’ll write part four later.

I made customized Google maps for each leg of this trip. 

Here is the one for this part, which covers my return from Yosemite to the Bay Area, and my weekend stay in Marin County.

The second part of the trip ended when I left Yosemite National Park, which I loved.  It was great to go midweek, it was great to be there in April with the waterfalls, and I enjoyed my stay at both Curry Village and Wawona Hotel.  The only change I would make in retrospect is being there at the full moon, which would have been really cool, but then I would have stayed up even later and been even tireder.

So the third part of the trip begins as I was headed back towards the Bay Area on Friday, April 11.  It took me a little bit of time to wind back through the Merced River canyon as I was stopping to take pictures of wildflowers.  I mentioned that they were blooming in the last entry, but I didn’t mention that there was barely anything in bloom in Yosemite.  I guess the elevation change between the two makes for that kind of difference in the growing season.  Anyway, I was hungry when I got to Mariposa and decided to get a veggie burger at Burger King, which tasted really good in that way food does when you’re super hungry.

Then I wound back down the mountains until I came out of the foothills by the watchtowers of Amon-Sul.  They were just as cool leaving as they were when I entered the mountains a few days earlier.  Back into the San Joaquin Valley, through Merced, and I got on California Highway 99 and started north.

At about this point, I had to close my ever-open sunroof and turn up the air conditioning, which didn’t seem to be working.  Oh right, it wasn’t working because it was still set on defrost from that same morning!  While in the Central Valley, it had to be over 85 degrees that day.  It was hot and bright and sunny, and the road was straight and level and pretty boring after the dramatic scenery of the mountains.  I called my mother and chatted with her as I drove through Modesto and turned onto Highway 120 to Interstate 580 towards Oakland.  We hung up when I became mesmerized by the wind farm at Altamont Pass, and had stop both the car and the call because photos were in order.  I took the exit and drove around through there.  It was very pretty, because the Altamont Pass is in the Diablo Range of mountains that I’d seen, driven through, and loved earlier in the week.

Once past that, I was heading into major suburbs.  My goal was to go to Berkeley to see the city and the campus and get some dinner at a vegan restaurant, and that’s what I did.  Berkeley was exactly what I expected it to be.  It was a little grubby, a little hippie, a little hipstery, and crowded with students.  I was there around 5pm on a Friday night, and I was very surprised that the campus was just hopping.  Our campus here, while not a commuter school at all, is pretty dead by 5pm on Friday, but Cal-Berkeley appears to be in the center of things and I’m sure it also has to do with the appeal of the school itself.  Anyway, I got a little lost driving around campus and, before I knew it, I was winding up a road to the Lawrence Hall of Science, which had a just spectacular view of the entire Bay Area from its courtyard, which was accessible at the time and had several empty parking lots nearby (the science center itself was closed, but several families were playing on the playground equipment in the courtyard).  This is where I got my first glimpse of both San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, although I was facing into the late afternoon sunlight.  That would be a pretty amazing view for photos in the early morning, I bet.  I still took some.

I wound back down the hill and found my vegan restaurant, Herbivore, though it was still early enough that I wasn’t particularly hungry, so I got the seitan schwarma wrap to go.  I was thinking that I would pick up a sweatshirt from the University for my sister, so I then parked at the campus to walk around, but I couldn’t find a bookstore.  I moved the car and tried again, and then decided that the whole thing was stupid because I’m not sure my sister even wants a Cal sweatshirt.  So I gave up.  Then the sun started to get all golden and I decided that I wanted to get to the an overlook by the Golden Gate before it set, so I booked it out of there completely and headed over to North Bay via the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge on I-580.

North Bay is the peninsula just north of the Golden Gate Bridge on the west side of the San Francisco and Richardson Bays.  It is home to a lot of suburbs, naturally, but also the Golden Gate National Recreational Area, which is a huge area of mostly undeveloped coastline and coastal mountains, with small roads and trails running throughout.  It includes the area directly north of the Golden Gate Bridge and then most of the Pacific Coast north of that.  It’s really several parks in one, including the Marin Headlands, the Muir Woods National Monument, Mount Tamalpais State Park, Point Reyes National Seashore, and the Presidio District of San Francisco (which I’ll discuss more in part four of this series).  It’s interesting to note that there is much evidence along the coast of the military that was stationed here from the late eighteenth century until the 1960s (with a huge increase during World War II).  You can see many examples of artillery batteries throughout the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. 

Of course, that’s when I got lost a couple of times.  It’s not an easy transition to Highway 101 South from West I-580, and then I have to say that the highway signs for the exits on Highway 101 are not very easy to read.  I thought the last exit before the Golden Gate was the first Sausalito exit, so I ended up going all the way through Sausalito and up the Sausalito Lateral Road to the first turnoff west of the Golden Gate Bridge.  By the time I huffed out of my car with my bag and my tripod and made it to the lookout, the light was gone even though the sun had not yet set.  I didn’t realize that there’s a mountain between the sun and the bridge, so the bridge does not get the last bit of sunset every night.  So that was frustrating and resulted in nothing.  I got back in my car and drove north to San Rafael, where I checked into my hotel.

The hotel was kind of irritating too.  It was way nicer than I needed for the night.  It was one of the last things I’d booked, because I kept reading Trip Advisor and Yelp reviews and getting scared away by them.  Any hotel that cost less than $100 had terrible reviews full of bedbug scares, bad management, and safety concerns.  The rest of the hotels cost about $150 a night.  I decided to go with the cheapest nicer hotel that I could find, a Sheraton Four Points which still ran me about $130 a night.  I should have been more adventurous and picked the Travelodge or whatever else, because I seriously didn’t need a Sheraton Four Points for those two nights.  Don’t you worry, though; I will be taking my opinions to Trip Advisor myself.  And lesson learned, too.  Also, the person at the front desk who was checking me in was really offensive, telling me all about his friend who was also from Missouri, only he kept pronouncing it ‘Misery’ on purpose, and how his friend hated ‘Misery’ and would never go back.  And I was like, hello.  It is my home.  I should not have to tell you not to insult my home.  But I just smiled coldly and he didn’t get the point and I just took my card and went upstairs to bed (after burning the requisite DVDs and eating the cold soggy seitan schwarma).

I was exhausted on Saturday, Day 6.  I was just exhausted.  I let myself sleep in a little bit, but still got up early and ended up at the waterfront in Sausalito for pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunrise.  A few other people were up and about, and there were fisherman on the pier nearby.  At one point, I heard rustling on the cliff far above me and looked up, thinking that some idiot was crashing along a very steep hill, but it turned out to be a coyote.  We stared at each other a little bit and then he went on his way.

I drove around the Marin Headlands after that, but the light was wrong for the bridge and the city behind it, so I waited to see if the Visitor’s Center would open soon.  It finally did at 9:30am, and suddenly the area seemed to be getting very busy with families and people who were readying for hikes on a pretty spring Saturday.  But I, who had spent most of the past few days in solitude or near solitude, was not ready for so many people.  My plan for the day was to see Muir Woods and maybe go on up Highway 1, so I left the Marin Headlands and got back on Highway 101, only it wasn’t that easy.  I went the wrong direction and ended up going through Sausalito again.  (I now hate Sausalito.)  This time, however, it was late morning and my car was surrounded by hundreds of cyclists who had come up across the Golden Gate Bridge and were headed into Sausalito or beyond for the morning.  It was kind of scary, but I finally managed to find the highway and rid myself of them, only to then get very disillusioned by the number of cars backed up for the Highway 1 exit.  Apparently, all of San Francisco and the Bay Area was spending its Saturday in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

You know I’m not a crowd person, and I was really tired, so I left the line of cars and headed north again, with no real destination or purpose.  However, I was in need of some clean pajama pants and a new box of DVDs (I’d already used nearly all of the 25 I’d brought with me), so I stopped in Corte Madera at a shopping mall to see if I could find some cheap and reasonable pajamas.  No luck.  Then tried another shopping mall across the highway from the first.  No luck.

By this time, I was downright crabby.  (Crabby Abbie.)  I decided it was lunchtime and that I needed a nice sitdown meal of healthy food, and headed toward the Cafe Gratitude in San Rafael.  Cafe Gratitude is vegan and mostly raw, as far as I could tell, and all of the menu items are named things like “I Am Dazzling” and “I Am Generous”, even though that means Caesar salad and guacamole, respectively.  I had the “I Am Rejuvenated” juice drink because I liked the name and needed rejuvenating.  It was mostly wheatgrass with lemon and a few other ingredients, but mostly I could taste wheatgrass and lemon.  That was my first experience with wheatgrass and I have to say that it tasted mostly like grass, and the combination with lemon was not easily forgotten.  I did drink all of it.  I am torn on whether I would drink it again.  I also had the “I Am Elated” enchilada plate (made with the sprouted seed filling of the day!) 

On another day, I would have felt that the whole place was a little bit too sincere for my tastes, and I might have made more jokes and otherwise felt a little cynical about everything.  However, on Saturday at lunchtime, I had spent several days traveling and not eating very well, hiking and getting up before sunrise, and maybe I had stayed up too late on Friday night.  I was pretty much worn out, but couldn’t really afford to just go back and take a nap or something, yet I needed that kind of reset.  And Cafe Gratitude provided just that kind of reset, very conveniently.  A combination of about seven glasses of water, the juice, and the healthy raw food really, really improved both my temper, mood, and spirit that day, and I left actually feeling rejuvenated.  Enough that I checked out my maps and planned a route to Point Reyes, a northern point in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and headed that direction.

The road to the coast was a little crowded even as far north as San Rafael, but it did clear out quite a lot once I was in the mountains again.  I got to Point Reyes in the early afternoon and all the parking lots for the Earthquake Trail were full.  No matter.  It really was a beautiful, clear, sunny day.  The highs that afternoon must have been in the low 90s.  It was like summer.  I headed south on Highway 1, though it doesn’t run along the coast here like it does south of San Francisco.  It was still very pretty, and not too crowded.  Any time I felt the traffic was too much, I would pull over on a turnoff and let them all pass me, and then I would be alone again for a little while.

At least until I got to Stinson Beach.  There wasn’t much traffic coming from the north into Stinson Beach, but the roads from the east and the south were backed up for miles as thousands of people were descending on what was apparently the only beach for many miles in North Bay.  The community of Stinson Beach is not that large, either, but they were out in force to make some money off the throngs of beachgoers.  I took the road east and climbed towards Mount Tamalpais State Park, and the cars were parked at every turnoff and people were running down the fire roads towards the beach.  It was a mob scene. 

I was out of it soon enough though, and the road was twisty and narrow up towards the top of the mountains.  Unfortunately, I encountered more cyclists, and it was pretty scary to come up behind a very slow pedaling one on those roads where it was hard to pass, but even harder to follow a cyclist at less than 5 mph.  They were as fast as the cars on the way back down, though.

My favorite part of all of this was driving through the groves of eucalyptus trees, though I didn’t recognize the scent until it was named for me later on.  I just kept getting distracted by the pungent smell and would notice that it always occurred near groves of memorable-looking trees: decidious with long leaves and peeling bark.  I learned later that the eucalyptus is considered an invasive pest in the slopes of the coastal mountains there, and they’re trying to eradicate it.  But I thought the smell was wonderful.

There was no parking at Mount Tamalpais, so I went toward Muir Woods, and there was no parking there either.  Not in the parking lots, and not for miles in the turnoffs or on the shoulders of the road.  I thought I might come back later and find it less full, so I left.

I still had a couple of hours before sunset, so I decided to go up the highway to Novato to the Target there to get my pajama pants and DVDs.  That turned out to be a successful venture.  Novato is on the way to Napa Valley, and looked to be very beautiful.  Maybe on a return trip, I’ll go there, but I headed back south again instead.  I decided against Muir Woods (I’d just spent several days in the mountains, after all), and just went back to the Marin Headlands, where I picked out a place along Cozelman Road at an overlook where I parked the car.  I staked out a spot on the cliff where I could get a good panorama of both the Golden Gate Bridge and the city of San Francisco, and I waited for the good light for almost two hours.  It was extremely pleasant, cool and, yes, it was packed with tourists, but I had my spot and my tripod and everything set up, and I knew the shot would come.  So I called Tracy and talked to her for awhile, and then was ready when the light did come.  It was very beautiful and I think I got my shot.  I didn’t wait until the light was gone, but continued on through the Marin Headlands to a beach on the western side, where I stopped and took more pictures of the area and the sunset.  The sunset there was pretty special, as you could see it disappear at the horizon on the ocean, and it seemed that nearly everyone on the beach at the time was watching it drop.  Then, everyone made a move to head out together.

I had a half a mind to go back to Cafe Gratitude for dinner since it had made such a difference on my day after lunch, but I couldn’t remember if they took credit cards or not.  By the time I found an ATM, it was really late and I just went back to the hotel and ordered the vegetarian option on room service.  (I’d never ordered room service before.)  It was my last night in North Bay, and I had to return the rental car in the morning, which meant that I had to be able to consolidate some of my luggage.  Lots of time was spent forcing things into groaning bags, but I did my best.

In the morning, I was up way before sunrise and checked out of the hotel.  It was still mostly dark when I reached the Marin Headlands, so I drove up to an overlook to eat some of my breakfast items and watch the sun come up.  I didn’t even take any pictures.  It was another clear sunny day.

I wanted my drive across the Golden Gate to be in full morning light, so I tooled around the headlands some more and finally stopped at a bathroom.  On the way out, I saw a wild turkey in the median of the road.  It was still early so it wasn’t in much danger, but a cyclist went around me as I was stopped to take pictures, and the turkey got upset.  It started to run down the road in my lane of traffic, pausing every couple of seconds to gobble, with the surprised cyclist following behind, and then me trailing both in my car.  When another car passed us all going the other way, I could see the driver laughing at the sight.  The turkey must have run 1/4 mile in total, by the time it finally got tired and left the road to poke around in the grass on the other side of the road.  It gobbled at me again as I passed.

I left the Marin Headlands then and drove across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco.  I had specific directions from there to the top of Twin Peaks, hills with an overlook in the center of city, so I drove there and took some pictures.  There was a model shoot going on up there, with models doing yoga poses on with the city in the background.  I think it was for Lululemon.  (I’d also seen another photographer doing a model shoot in the Marin Headlands on Friday night, also yoga poses with the panorama of the city behind him, but I don’t think that one was for Lululemon.)

From there, I wanted to head to my hotel in Fisherman’s Wharf to see if I could check in, but it was still too early, so I drove through Golden Gate Park.  I stopped at the Japanese Tea Gardens because the cherry blossoms were supposed to be blooming, but the gardens were not open yet and you couldn’t see anything over the gates.  So I went back to my car and drove around a little more before finally deciding it was a good time to go to the hotel.

I have had luck before when trying to check into a hotel early in the morning, because sometimes they have empty rooms that are clean and they’ll let you have it.  This was one of those lucky times: they had a room available.  I was able to unload everything from the car so that it was completely empty when I took it back to the airport, which I did.  I took the Super Shuttle back to Fisherman’s Wharf afterward.

And that ends the third part of this series.  The fourth part consists of the days spent in San Francisco city before I came home again, and I will write it soon!