And just recently we left the warm, dry climate of Death Valley with its dust and deserts and in the same day, on the way home, drove through the snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Now that we have seen much of the southern portion of the state, we have taken a few days to drive north before loading up the trailer and moving on. We crossed a valley with arrow-straight roads bordering farmland and then went up a mountain road that winds through the redwoods as if someone had built a slalom course around the trees.
In retrospect, that road through the forest was merely a practising ground for our drive down the coast.
Hwy 1 north of San Francisco is an interesting, but very narrow, road that clings to the edge of the mountains high over the shores and beaches of the Pacific Ocean. The highest part even had us in the clouds, looking down on the soaring vultures - who were obviously waiting for a distracted driver to come around the next barrier-free curve. Yeah, I was a little nervous. Especially as I was in the passenger seat and therefore inches away from the drop-off side of the road.
Hubby made several stops along the way to loosen me up, thankfully, and we walked some of the headlands along the coast. We saw many, many seagulls and other seabirds and even got to see the spouts of whales that were migrating up the coast. We also saw succulents and other flowering groundcover growing right on the side of the cliffs by the water. As the headlands are solid rock, I don't know what holds them on.
The first day back, we took the bay ferry to San Francisco. It was kinda like taking a plane, turbulence and all. We took one of the early ferries with the commuters, but we were on our way to enjoy the Golden Gate Park delights.
The Japanese Tea Garden was our first destination. Instead of taking the tour bus, we hopped on a city bus like natives - or rather like the cheap tourists we really were. The Tea Garden was lovely, the cherry trees were starting to blossom and they had ponds with koi fish and streams with stepping stones. We went downtown and walked through Chinatown and were amazed when we crossed one street and it suddenly became Little Italy. No gentle transition between the two, just a huge contrast in lifestyles between one side of the street and the other.
But the biggest contrast now seems to be in our own "neighbourhood". The trailer park we are staying in is a friendly, quiet oasis in downtown Vallejo. Many evenings we have heard sirens and helicopters foretelling of a crisis merely a few blocks away, but our little spot seemed unaffected. And then one morning we came out to find our locked bikes missing.
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