What a beautiful day. We woke up to sunshine and headed back to the ferry. You could see for miles on the water today. There were sailboats and yachts everywhere, and even a couple of oceanliners passing through the bay. Off in the distance was the Golden Gate Bridge, but we plan to cross that tomorrow.

Everyone is more comfortable today in long sleeves. It’s crazy windy here on the piers. We walked back to Pier 39 and took another look around. We had a couple of hours to burn before our Alkatraz tour, so we shopped and had an amazing lunch at Dantes Crab House (at least I think that was the name). Anyway, Kelly had a crab sandwiches, Chris had a lobster and shrimp sandwich, and I had the full seafood platter which consisted of two oysters, two jumo prawns, a whole whack-load of baby shrimp, and two large pieces of crab dungeness.

After getting a free bottle of wine (thanks to our Alkatraz tickets), I figured I’d attack the crab. Impossible. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get into the juicy core. Finally, the waiter brought me the cracker which he had forgotten to give me in the beginning. It was okay though. We had a good laugh and chatted with him for a while. Turns out he moved to San Fran from New Orleans only four weeks before Hurricane Katrina. Crazy.

After jogging to the Alkatraz loading on Pier 41 because our lunch ran long, we headed out. It was really neat to see something like Alkatraz. The audio tour was very informative and was very realisitc with sounds of the penetentary and even voices of past inmates. In a way it was kinda creap, but learning about life on cell block B, known as Broadway to the inmates, was very cool indeed.

We toured Fishermans’s Wharf after the tour and after some clam chowder and shopping, headed back to the ferry. A great day well spent in San Fran. Tomorrow, we’ll be driving through it to leave.

Note: We have no idea how long it will be until our next post, so please bear with us. Hopefully this new info will keep you entertained until we do. And don’t worry, we’re all still alive and kicking.

Our chatty neighbours woke us up this morning. I don’t think they stopped talking from the moment they pulled in the night before. Regarldess, we were up, and by the time we got back from the showers, they were gone.

Today we’re heading back to the coast to San Francisco. It only took about 3.5 hours to get there too, so after passing through Oakland and crossing some huge bridges, we ended up in San Rafael where we got ourselves an early campsite and then headed for the city.

A 35 minute ferry ride took us right to the Port Of San Francisco. We walked to Pier 39 and scoped the place out. We were all in shorts and t-shirts and ended up being pretty cold. We took note to wear pants and sweatshirts the next day. We also went and booked out tickets for Alkatraz, which we planned to do tomorrow. So after Ian grabbed a bag of mini donuts and Kelly scooped up some fresh fruit, we headed back to the ferry and back to the campsite for some rest. Todays max temp only hit 23.

Note: Chris is still sick.

Today we spent the entire day touring Yosemite. No driving for the first time in a while means time to get some exercise. We checked out all of the waterfalls and did a short hike around the village. There are definitely a lot of people here, but it’s still some amazing views.

I ended up taking more than 100 photos today, but unfortunately I can show them all to you. Photo processing takes way too much time. Anywho, there isn’t much to inform you of for today, other than the fact that Chris has caught Kelly’s cold. Sucker.

Caspar camping wasn’t one of our favourites. The ground was covered in woodchips, which are not nice to sleep on. There were also the largest slugs we’ve ever seen. Some stretched the longer than our hands and they were a neon greeny, yellow-ish colour. Weird. Anyway, no clouds today. We get sun for the first time in a while.

11:00am, enter Wine Country, California. Napa County to be specific. the countryside here is amazing. Rolling hills and fields of grape vines.

At noon we entered Napa. There are wineries everywhere, yet Kelly and Chris neglect to taste any. We stopped in the town of Napa and walked around for a bit. After sampling some truffles at Rocky Mountain Chocolates, we had lunch and headed back on the road.

It’s starting to get warm now. Our max temperature for the day is 33 degrees as we passed by Sacaramento on our way to Yosemite National Park.

4:20pm, spotted “Kelly’s Drug Store”.

We arrived at Yosemite only to learn a valuable lesson. Always have backup plans for camping. Yosemite ended up burning us as everything was full, it was after 7:00pm, and the we had no idea how far it was to the next camping area. We drove to Yosemite Village where we caught a quick glimps of a bear surrounded by tourists, and a whole bunch of “full” signs for the campgrounds.

After Chris’ anger passed and we all calmed down, we headed out of the park in hopes of finding a place to throw up the tent. Finally, out of the darkness, a neon sign caught our sights. “Vacancy”. We got a campsite for two nights about 10 minutes outside the park. Time for some well-earned sleep.

As a side note, we are keeping tracking of every expense and every mile, however, at the time of these posts, I do not have the mileage with me, so they will remain N/A until later. Sorry.

Finally, California. We rolled over the state line around 10:40am today. Not much of a change. The sign for Cal. wasn’t much to see, but for the next few days, we’ll be touring the California countryside. By the way, we paid $2.99/gallon in Washington, but here in Cal. gas is around $3.20/gallon. Ouch!

We drove through Redwood National Park today and of course, stopped for photos at Trees Of Mystery. We can’t believe the size of the Redwoods here. Massive and hundreds of years old. We took the Trees Of Mystery walking tour and even took a tram up to the top of the mountain for a distant lookout. This is definitely the most unique part of the trip so far.

After snapping some photos of Paul Bunyon and his ox Babe, we head back on the road to Eureka, where gas hits $3.47/g. The highways are incredibly windy here along the coast. If we had sports cars, we would be much more at home. In fact, it’s mostly motorcycles touring here.

We hit Caspar for the night where we have… shudder…. fried hamburgers for dinner. Meh, it’s food.