Sonya's Blog - Day 304 - Driving to San Francisco

Sonya’s Blog - Day 304 - April 21st - Driving to San Francisco

Today we are off to San Francisco. It should be an interesting drive. First we have to get off this mountain and then as we get closer to San Francisco, the traffic will be super busy. Hopefully, all will go well.

We finished packing up, had our breakfasts and made coffees and food for the road. I decided that I would start with the driving. I figured that if it was going to be a white-knuckled drive for me, I may as well be the one doing the driving. Blake helped me get the rig out of the campground (some of those corners were super tight) and then we were on our way.

Driving through the Sierra Mountains:

The drive out went pretty good, I did a speed I was comfortable with and didn’t worry too much about the line of traffic behind me. I wasn’t going super slow, but was not doing 55 m/ph all the time, especially downhill. Of course all the passing lanes are on the uphill rises (well, not all of them), but I slow down on the downhills because the trailer pushes us so much and I feel like we can get out of control faster. I have no problem doing the speeds on the uphills, our truck can keep up speed, even with the RV attached. The first part of the drive had far less passing lanes, put did have long turnouts, so I pulled over into these to allow the cars to pass. Once we got through Mariposa, there were far more passing lanes. In the end we made it down to Highway 99 without incident.

I continued to drive and ended up driving all the way to our campground. The rest of the drive was fine, the roadways just got larger and larger. We went from a 2 lanes, to 3 lanes, to 4 lanes and at some points there were 6 lanes (this is just our side). We had to go across the San Rafael Bridge to get to our campground in Greenbrae. It’s an 8 mile bridge, or something, so that was pretty exciting. We had to pay $20 for the privilege of driving on it, it would have only been $5 if we were not towing. After we crossed the bridge, we were at our campground in about 10 minutes.

Our new campground, not much room:

It is not the most exciting campground ever, just a parking lot. It is, however, within walking distance to the ferry, which will transport us to San Francisco in about a 1/2 hour. There is also a bus we can take, the ferry and the bus are about the same time and price to get us to the harbour. We can also drive, but parking is expensive in San Francisco. After looking at all the options, we are going to try the ferry tomorrow. We also bought our City Passes, with the Alcatraz option on them. We booked Alcatraz for Saturday, as that is going to be the warmest and sunniest day while we are here. The City Pass also allows us to ride the MUNI system in San Francisco (so busses, trains and street cars - within the city) for the whole time we are there. On top of Alcatraz, we can visit 4 other attractions (like aquariums and museums) while we are in the city.

When I took Kizmet out for a walk, I saw a truck camper similar to the one we saw in New Orleans that the lovely Australian couple had. This one was from Germany and made by Mercedes. It was much larger than the Australian one, higher and bulkier. Unfortunately the owners weren't around for us to chat with them. It looks like they are on a world tour though, judging from the map on the back. Pretty cool.

That was our day.

Sonya