July 3, 2001
Eureka, California — Modesto, California
Waking up in the parking lot of the mall in Eureka we looked at the calendar and the map and realized we had two days to cover 750 miles, including San Francisco and Yosemite National Park, in order to reach Los Angeles in time to be let into Win’s half-brother Maxwell’s apartment before he left town. So apart from a quick, customary stop at McDonald’s for what, my like eighth bacon-egg-and-cheese of the trip, we had to hit the road.
Four hours down the 101 put us at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, where we climbed out of the van and got a great view of the beautiful bridge and the city off to the left, behind it. We had a few plans in San Francisco, but not so many that we couldn’t spend a while ogling the bridge on a rare day without significant fog making such an exercise futile.
I can’t remember if Wes or Win had been to San Francisco before, but I’d been back in the summer of 1996 on a family vacation. That was my first time in the west and informed some of our plans for the northern half of California, as we’d been to Yosemite on that trip, as well. Anyway, the Giants were down in LA playing the Dodgers, so we didn’t get to check out the new ballpark right on McCovey Cove. That’s ok, we’d missed out on the Mariners in Seattle as well, but we were going to make up for that when we got to Los Angeles in a few days. So, we proceeded into town and went straight to lunch.
We hadn’t had a non-McDonald’s meal since lunch two days prior back at the Owens’ house in Seattle, so we needed to get something substantial now that we were in a world-famous city. But, we were still handicapped by youth and by it being 2001, so we found a place to park, walked to Pier 39 and then straight into the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company at the far end of the pier. Looks like I got barbeque, which must’ve been a disappointment compared to what I was used to eating in Durham, North Carolina over the previous five years. But the view out into the Bay was cool, and we could even see Alcatraz. We didn’t have time to go out there, but as I’d been out there in ’96, that was ok by me.
After lunch we wandered around the Fisherman’s Wharf area, where we really should’ve had a seafood lunch by the way. And how did I go to Bubba Gump and also not even get seafood? Anyway, after doing some ogling of another variety, we drove up to Lombard Street to carefully maneuver the massive van down the curviest street in America. I wish I could remember who was driving at that part of the afternoon. Lombard Street is awesome, and a great photo op. So of course, I don’t have a photo to accompany our hilarious trip down in the van.
Unlike most of our stops throughout the trip, we stuck around San Francisco for a while, doing some shopping, including adding to the postcard haul. One interesting prompt in my journal is “things too large, fragile, or expensive to buy,” which I haven’t really mentioned to this point. Amusingly, on this day, what I wrote down was internet access. It’s possible we hadn’t been able to check email since we were in Grand Bland two weeks earlier. This was the era of the internet café, and so maybe we saw one but couldn’t justify the prices, but either way I’d found it significant enough to note that we specifically did not have internet access in San Francisco.
After a fun afternoon on a hot day for San Francisco, we hit the road to get a bit closer to Yosemite before dark. After filling up with America’s most expensive gas (the average in San Francisco that week was $1.94!) we took the Bay Bridge over to Oakland, for the first time in sixteen days on the road heading east. We made it ninety miles, passing the infamous Altamont Raceway Park and crossing I-5 before reaching Modesto. We stopped at Mall De Modesto, just on the edge of town, sat down for dinner at Sbarro and got another DQ blizzard.
Having spent the three of the previous four nights in the van, and with a strong possibility of another coming the next night, we ponied up for a hotel room for the first time on the trip. That meant the Ramada two miles from the mall. And this was real luxury. Seriously! Our own bathroom, air conditioning, a pool and hot tub outside. Another consideration was that it was 108 degrees in Modesto that day and sleeping in the van would’ve been brutal. We didn’t have a ton of money but treating oneself is always relative.
We chatted up some folks out at the pool for a while, but with a long day ahead, we crashed pretty early. For the first time on the trip we’d gotten the touristy big city overstimulation in San Francisco, and now it was just too hot to do anything else but go to sleep.
