Arctangential

We left San Francisco Thursday morning, first thing. Instead of driving back on the I-5, we decided to drive north on the 101, the more scenic route. First, of course, we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, which wasn’t nearly as exciting as I’d hoped. I mean, it’s a nice bridge, quite big, pleasingly shaped, and in a pleasant color, but I guess I was expecting something really amazing, like Godzilla would come smash it down, or a blimp would careen into the center tower.

Driving through Marin was nice, very pretty. Our first goal was to eat at an In-n-Out Burger, which I haven’t done for many years. We were going to stop at the one in Petaluma, but due to poor planning on my part, we didn’t have a map or any directions to the actual place. I assumed I’d be able to see it from the highway, but I either missed it or pulled off too soon. This precipitated a long and aimless drive around the city in question, eventually ending when we luckily found a way back on to the highway again. We decided not to head back and try again, and luckily we DID see an In-n-Out from the highway on our way through Rohnert Park, and stopped there. I had an “animal style” burger, which was not nearly as exciting as I had expected, but was quite good. The hidden message on the bottom of the cup is a little bit disturbing, though.

Back on the 101, we pretty much drove straight through, winding lazily around the foothills, remarking often on the suffusion of cows We stopped… well, somewhere. I’m not really sure the name of the town, if it was a town; it was more of a widening in the road, really. The 101 had turned into a small two-lane highway by that time, so there was no exit name to tell us where we were, and we just stopped because I needed gas and there was a gas station. While I gassed up, Meg ran in to use the bathroom and came out with a story of great woe, which I’ll allow her to relate at a future date, should she feel the need.

After this pit stop, we enter the redwood forest. These trees, they are big. Really, really big. And there’s a lot of them. They’re really everywhere out there, and the road got (once again) all twisty and uppy and downy, and the farther north we went, the snowier it got. It wasn’t a super fun drive, especially as we started losing light. We made a quick stop in Eureka (not Yreka) to grab a tour book from a AAA office, and then off again. We drove the rest of the way up the coast to a town called Crescent City, where we spent the night. There are some really gorgeous coastal views on the section of the 101 between Eureka and Crescent City, but increasing fatigue and failing light forced up to just fly past them. Some other day.

We ate dinner at the restaurant attached to our motel; it was pretty amazingly bad. Partly it was because we were used to eating at all these extra swanky SF places, but it was also partly that the food was just terrible. I ordered halibut in what was described to me as a “shrimp and Grand Marnier sauce”, but it was just a badly overcooked piece of unidentifiable whitefish swimming (NPI) in a flavorless béchamel, with maybe a cup of undercooked bay shrimp dumped over top. Meg had a steak, which she pronounced passable, and some sea scallops, which she took one small bite of and then placed as far away from herself as possible. After choking down the food, we retired to our room and watched a Good Eats DVD before bed.

The next morning, we went for breakfast at the same restaurant. We weren’t really looking forward to it, but a free breakfast buffet came with the room, and we thought to ourselves, how badly can you mess up breakfast? It turns out, you can mess it up really pretty badly. The meats were all limp, the scrambled eggs had been overdone and were all runny, and I am pretty sure the waffles were the frozen, toaster variety. The only thing that was even kind of good were the biscuits, but the country gravy had no flavor at all. Come to think of it, the country gravy was probably just the same nasty ass béchamel from my fish, but with a tiny bit of pepper added, instead of a vanishingly small amount of Grand Marnier.

Now that I’m done complaining about the Northwoods Restaurant in Crescent City, CA, I can relate how we set out eastwards from there, on the 199. This is a very skinny road, very windy, going through a lot of mountains and alongside a lot of canyons. Add in the snowfall, which in some places had collected on the roads, and you have yet another fairly unpleasant drive. At least this time it was light out, which helped, and after about 2 hours we made it back to the I-5, and well out of the snowy area. The rest of the trip was quite uneventful; we stopped somewhere in northern California (or maybe southern Oregon) for lunch at Carl’s Jr., later got gas at another full service station in Oregon, and then onwards. We hit some kind of weird pre-rush-hour traffic on our way through Portland, and were delayed by about 40 minutes because of an accident near the Tacoma Dome. Then, we arrived back home, and collapsed.

Because I don’t fly (wings not strong enough), we drove to and from San Francisco. It’s between 14 and 16 hours each way, depending on the route and the driver. We got up around 9am on Friday, and were out of the house before 10. Stopped at Burger King for a quick breakfast, and then onto the open road.

Let me stop for a second and talk about fast food breakfast. Now, I’m a big fan of fast food burgers. They are good. I would eat them every day if I didn’t think it would kill me. But the breakfasts — they’ve felt like a bolt-on since the first time I tried them. The meats never come out quite right, the ersatz eggs are unpleasant at best, the constant attempt to have the bun represent some other kind of breakfast food never works… they’re just almost always horrible. Maybe it isn’t possible given the constraint of the American fast food restaurant, but I think if one could come up with a truly palatable fast food breakfast, one could make a good amount of money.

Anyhow, crappy food in hand, we hit the I-5 southbound and didn’t stop until Keizer, Oregon, where we got some lunch (a disappointing sandwich at Shari’s) and some gas.

In another aside, I discovered on this trip that gas stations in Oregon all seem to be full service. I haven’t seen, much less visited, a full service gas station in probably 10 years, so I was a little bit confused at first. I pulled up to the wrong pump, and I tipped the gas pumping lady, which I guess isn’t normally done; it’s not that she didn’t take the extra money, but she did seem very surprised by it. I’m not sure why Oregon has full service stations, but it’s weird and I don’t really like it.

So, gas tanks and stomachs full, we got back on the road. Oregon was mostly pretty nice, until we got into the more southern part of the state. It turns out, and I had not been aware of this, but it turns out that southern Oregon and northern California are populated by an embarrassment of mountains. And of course, where there are mountains, there are windy roads, even major interstates like the I-5. The fact that we hit this section of roadway at nightfall didn’t help any, and I was really not enjoying driving up and around and down and around and up again and around some more. However, we’d picked out a good town to stay the night, and there wasn’t anywhere between where we were at that point and our destination, so we just pressed on.

In order to take a little break, we stopped in a town called Yreka for gas and food. We ate at a “wonderful” restaurant called Grandma’s House. We thought it might have some good home cooking, but in fact it was just a cheesy dive, filled to overflowing with ugly knick-knacks (all for sale at absurd prices), and food that reminded me more of a college cafeteria than anything else. We did pick up a recipe book from there, which I plan on sharing in part with my loyal readership, later on. After leaving Yreka, we pressed on through the night and mountains to a town called Redding, where we stayed the night at a wholly unremarkable Holiday Inn.

The next morning, breakfast in Redding at a wonderful diner called simply “Lumberjack’s”. the whole place was done up like a log cabin, with tree-felling hardware festooning the walls. More importantly, the food was excellent. I had what was described as an “egg tostada”; basically a thin round omelette, cooked with onions and jalapenos, topped with beans, ground beef, salsa, sour cream and guacamole. Yum! We left Redding, and 5 or so hours later, we were in San Francisco!

This turned out longer than I thought. I’ll write up the trip back in a later entry.

A belated update to my trip story. I think when I last left off, it was Sunday night. On Monday we went down to Mountain View to see my parents. With them, we visited some book stores, got some coffee, looked around the Stanford Art Museum and then had a very good Indian dinner. I have some pictures, to be posted later, of one of the sculptures there.

On Tuesday we took a boat to Alcatraz and walked around there for a few hours. Pictures also of that to come. After we got back to the hotel, I was pretty tired from spending the past 4 days on my feet pretty much non-stop, so we just sat around the hotel and watched DVDs. Later in the afternoon, Meg went out and picked up some food for dinner, while I just laid in bed feeling tired.

We were both a lot more energized on Wednesday, so we first walked down to this historic pier with a bunch of old ships on it, although we just looked at the ships from the outside since it cost money to go on them, and there were a bunch of oddly-dressed children running around them carrying a big length of rope. We then walked over to Ghirardelli Square, which is mostly just overpriced restaurants and tourist shops, like everywhere else we’d been in the city. The factory tour was closed for some reason, so that was a no-go. We decided to walk from there to Lombard St. (the really twisty one). This turned out to involve walking up a really long and steep hill, but we did end up at the top of the twisty street, which we then walked down, and then back to the hotel. All of this had used up whatever energy we’d regained, so we spent about an hour resting in the hotel, and then we decided to go driving and see the rest of the sights on our checklist.

This did not go as well as it could have. First on the list was Rainbow Coop, where an lj-friend works, but we couldn’t figure out where to park to go in, so we just kind of drove past slowly. Next was Fantastico, a store we saw on a recent episode of Mythbusters. Once again, there didn’t seem to be anywhere to park, and the place actually didn’t look even half as cool as it did on TV, so we went on. Our last stop was to be in the area near SFMoMA, where we planned to visit that museum, and the Metreon, and the Cartoon Art Museum. However, we couldn’t find anywhere to park there either; the difference was that in this part of town there are plenty of parking garages, but they were all full. Then I realized — Macworld! So not only was all the parking gone, but the streets were absolutely thronged with people, and I’m sure the museums were all just packed, so we just gave up and drove back to the hotel. We went back to Scoma's for dinner on Wednesday night, because that place really is awesome.

We left Thursday morning. I’m going to make another post a little bit later, talking more about the drive there and back, so that’s it for now.

It’s almost the end of our second full day in San Francisco. We’re having a good time so far: we got into the city around 2pm yesterday, the drive was fine apart from some horrible traffic at the Oakland Bay Bridge. We met my folks near our hotel for lunch (Alioto’s) and walked around the Wharf for a little while. They left to go home and then for dinner we went to a kind of out-of-the-way place called Scoma’s, which was very good.

Today, we first went to the SF Zoo, which is a pretty good zoo, and we enjoyed the visit. I might write more a more detailed zoo entry later, once I see how the pictures turn out. After the zoo, and sore feet from walking, we went over to Chinatown, had some mediocre and touristy dimsum, and then back to the hotel for some rest. Episode I was on HBO, so I explained in detail to Meg (never having seen it) why exactly it was so very bad. After this, a very nice dinner at Bistro Boudin and now, sleep.

One observation from today; either San Francisco is just a particularly beautiful city, or I got very lucky today in my choice of driving, be we got to see some very pretty sights during our drives around the city. On the way to the zoo, we drove along Great Highway, which just follows the shoreline and provides a wonderful view of the beach and ocean. After the zoo, we took Portola down the hill, which allows for an incredible view over the whole city. We must have passed half a dozen people taking pictures from the side of the road. Portola turned into Market, which took us across the very interesting Castro St, and then after Chinatown, a scene in its own right, we drove down Broadway St at night, which boasts a truly amazing array of strip clubs, each having its own multi-story neon sign, many animated.

I hope the rest of our trip is this fun.