$an Franci$co...

We left Hollywood headed to San Francisco after the Warner Brothers tour. I was sad to leave Hollywood but left with a better understanding of how I would spend my time during the future trip that I was already planning!

$an Franci$co was the most expensive place we visited. I accumulate Holiday Inn points so of course we stayed at what else, a Holiday Inn by the wharf. I had enough points to cover the expensive room but it cost $40 per night to park my car in their garage. I didn’t plan a trip to Alcatraz. Gary and I discussed it and since he retired from teaching in a prison he had no desire to go and I didn’t really want to spend my time in a dark, stinky, musty, moldy, run down prison either. However it was the destination of most tourists it seemed. We took a tour of the bay by boat and circled the monster and got a lot of the history from our tour guide. It actually was pretty interesting so if you ever go to San Francisco you might want to take the whole tour.

The most interesting thing about the Golden Gate Bridge was the size of the cable. I guess I never gave it any thought to what size cable it would take for a bridge that size. And then we saw all the other tourists stuff – trolley cars, Ghiradelli chocolate factory, etc. etc.

It was time to keep moving up the coast if we were going to make it to Seattle in time to pick up the rest of the group from the airport and board the boat. Now something I haven’t mentioned is that we started looking for whales off the coast way back in San Diego. I never thought about whales being that far south but they actually have whale watching tours from Catalina Island so I guess they go that far south or at least those tour companies have tourists believing they do. So as we drove up the coast we were constantly checking the waters for whales. I finally spotted one as we were driving along north of San Francisco. Gary immediately threw on the brakes (remember he is one of the zoo lovers) and we found a place to pull over – no easy task when the highway drops off into the Pacific Ocean! Since I did not have the forethought to take along some binoculars, I popped on my big zoom lens and zoomed right in on the black movement in the water that had caught my attention. You can see by the picture what it was – this was almost as disappointing as looking all up and down Hollywood Boulevard for celebrities!


After some time watching these guys playing in the water we headed out in search of the giant redwood trees. I really wasn’t any more excited over the trees than I get over the zoo until I saw them. After stopping shortly we pushed on ahead to Seattle….

Leave me a comment to be entered in the drawing later tonight for $25 in Glamour Bucks. What’s the most you would pay for parking?