zZzZ The bumblebee tÖur zZzZ: San Francisco (19th to 21st of July 2013)

We started our trip to SF on Friday morning. We took the bus to go to the rental car place and then picked up Lore's mom and sister. The original plan was to start very early in the morning (around 3am) to avoid the LA traffic. But we failed to pick up the car on Thursday evening, because we missed the last bus. So finally we started around 9 am on Friday. We decided to take the inland route to be faster, instead of the coastal route like planned (we would do that route coming back). It was actually an interesting travel, because we passed through desert like places, very green spots with palm trees or grapes and immense herds of cows (meat cows :( ). Also the temperature shift was interesting. We started with about 20 °C, passed the 40°C in the desert and ended up in cold and cloudy SF with 15°C!! We stopped several times on the road and we arrived at about 20.30. Once arrived and after checking in at the hotel, we took a walk to fisherman's Wharf and had something to eat.

Cable car ride

The following morning we started with the historic cable car ride to downtown SF. After taking some pictures at Union Square we walked through China Town until we reached Pier 39, where we met our friends (and Lorenzo's far relativs) Pamee, Chris and Stephanie Collette. We had met Pamee, her husband Steve and one of their sons Josh the last time we where in the US. And we hosted Josh ans his brother Chris in Sion in summer 2012. So the only family member we didn't meet before was Stephanie. We all had lunch at a mexican restaurant at Pier 39 and then took a Bridge-Alcatraz boat tour. It was freezing cold on the boat, but the view from under the Golden Gate (of course with fog) and Alcatraz was worth it! After the tour we stopped at a coffee shop and had a warm drink over some more chat with the Collettes. After saying goodbye to our friends we wanted to go to the Golden Gate bridge. We took the street car, but we had to wait a long time for it to come. When we finally got downtown it was already getting dark, and we were all cold, so we did not go to the bridge but stayed in downtown a bit longer.

Before going back to our hotel we took some more cable car rides and we even got to see a car towing. In fact a car had parked on the cable car rails blocking it. We waited for about 45 min for the car to be towed away. We just could have jumped out and continue on foot, but we wanted to see that!! It was a long day but we appreciated it.

On the following day we already had to drive back to SD. But first we stopped at the bridge for some pictures :) We also stopped in Mountain View to see google's headquarters with the Androids statues.

This time we drove partly on the coast and we passed through Santa Monica and Malibu. We did not exactly see the beaches because it was already dark, but we stopped in front of Bruce Wollis' s house, without seeing him of course :)

We then also drove through LA and Beverly Hills! We arrived in SD at around 1 am all exhausted. But we all had a great time!!