The plan was to stay in San Francisco on Monday night. It was about the halfway point from Eureka to LA, and a cool spot to check out since neither one of us had ever been there before.
Well...long story short... we stayed in San Francisco no more than 4 hours and then we left. It's kind of a complicated story.
As we were approaching San Francisco we caught sight of the Golden Gate Bridge. Yeah, it's pretty big. And long. Ever since I was in middle school I have done this thing where I hold my breath while crossing bridges. I'm pretty good at it, but I knew it was not happening with this. It literally took almost 2 full minutes to get from one side to the other. That's a long bridge! AND it cost us $13 just to cross it and get into the city because we had the trailer. Yikes! So that kind of set the tone for our San Francisco visit.
As soon as we got into the city we headed to Guitar Center to bring Mark's guitar in to get fixed. It wasn't going to take too long, and he had called ahead of time to see if the work could be done. So we found a spot to park on one of the hills and had to pay on two meters, once again because of the trailer. And a quarter only got you 5 minutes in the meter. No joke. So it was $3 an hour per meter. So this trip was adding up pretty fast.
We went to a Starbucks that was close by while the guitar was being fixed. Mark was doing some and I was editing the vlogs and our time on the meters was winding down so Mark went to go plug the meters again. When he came back he said that there were cop cars on the street in front of where we parked and a guy was getting arrested. So he went up to one of the cops and asked what was going on and he said that this guy was breaking into one of the cars parked in front of us! Now we started to worry a bit. We were planning on spending the night in the city, but totally did not feel comfortable leaving the car and trailer out on the street all night with all of our equipment, in addition to the major cost it was going to be. Mark started looking into parking garages to see what their overnight rates were, but nothing was protected, there wasn't security or anything, so it was almost as bad as just being parked on the street.
We were faced with a tough decision. The plan had been to stay with Matt, a relative of a friend of Mark's, for the night and head to LA in the morning. We had already driven 5 hours, and it would be another 6 to LA. But when it came down to it, we just couldn't take the risk. We decided that we would continue driving and get to my sister's place in LA in the middle of the night. But since we were already in San Francisco (and had paid $13 to get in) we wanted to go at least meet Matt before heading out. So we went over to Matt's place and got a little tour, Mark walked out on the roof, and then Matt gave us a route to take on our way out of the city so we could see a few sites. We made sandwiches outside of the car and got ready to start part two of our traveling journey for the day.
I was so happy to get out of the city, everything had brought about high levels of anxiety. The hilly roads did not mesh well with our manual car with the trailer attached. There's no way I could have driven in the city. I was really appreciative of Mark doing that. We went to Lombard Street, the famous really windy road that's on a steep hill with eight hairpin turns, an adventure in itself.
And we could see Alcatraz in the distance and headed towards this bridge, which is much cooler than the Golden Gate, in my opinion.
San Francisco was not quite what we expected. It was a 4 hour long whirlwind trip that was very stressful. I'm glad we went just to be able to say we've been there, but I was relieved that we were going to Los Angeles, even if that meant I had to drive the late night shift.
Until next time,
Jordan
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