The Small Epic San Francisco Bay Area Adventure

     Emily Cox, one of my most epic best friends I met through my involvement at the national level of 4-H, traveled out to San Francisco to visit her boyfriend while he was there on a work trip.  There was no way that I was going to allow her to be in California and not hang out with me.  Especially since we have not seen each other in two years.  Last time she came out to visit, we went camping in the eastern Sierras (see blog post).  She just happened to be in San Francisco the same week as this years 4-H State Leadership Conference (SLC), which worked out great for me.  It was planned that I would drive up to hang out with Emily a few days before SLC.  From SF, I would drive out to UC Davis for the conference.  It was one amazing small trip, and this is how the trip went.  Not only did I get to hang out with Emily, but I also got to see another awesome old time friend I met from 4-H, Jess Falkenthal, who had just recently moved to San Francisco from Indiana. 

July 21: The Drive & Night Photography

     Most of the day was spent driving up to the city.  I usually drive the 101 all the way up, but I decided to follow the wisdom of google.  Google said it was faster to drive through central valley on the 5 to get to SF.  I arrived at the hotel around 4:00 pm.  Because I am poor, I stayed at a hotel by SFO (the airport).  I got out of the car at the hotel, and the cold hit hard.  Down to the bone.  It was 58 degrees, which the rest of the state was in the high 90s.  I quickly checked into my room, changed out of my sport shorts, and put on a jacket.  At first, I was planning on just spending the entire night in the hotel room, but I pushed myself to go out there.  I first went to Denny's to have dinner, I grabbed my camera, and headed to the Golden Gate Bridge.
     
     

     My original plan was go up to Hendrik Point, to re-attempt a night shot of the Golden Gate from the last time I was their with Sarah.  That shot was in extremely high ISO, and ruined the shot.  That plan was foiled by mother nature.  The bridge was covered in fog.  Instead, I stopped at the Golden Gate Bridge Vista Point in Sausalito, and walked out onto the bridge with camera.  Not many were walking onto the bridge that day.  Just a few tourists and bicyclists.  I don't blame them.  It was cold, foggy, and windy.  There was not much of a view from the bridge, but I went anyway.  What else was I going to do?  Plus, all the times I have been to the bridge, I have never walked across it.  Along the way, I took photographs with a wide-angle lens, which was amazing.  Never truly have taken anything with the wide angle before.  It was amazing.  I could be standing just feet from one of the support towers of the bridge and fit the entire thing in the photograph.  I was hoping to take some night time photographs while out on the bridge.  Sadly, it seems they close the bridge to pedestrians at night.  Automatic gates closed at 9:00 pm, well before it was dark enough to have any night shots from out on the bridge.  Not sure why they close it down for the night.  Stupid if you ask me.  They allow bicycles on the bridge at night.  Whatever.  

     Afterwards, I headed back to the vista point, grabbed my tripod, and prepared to take night photographs.  Since you could not see most of the bridge due to the thick fog, I choose to focus on photographing a long exposure of the traffic crossing the bridge.  At the vista point, there is a 4 foot high rock wall to keep spectators from falling into the ocean below.  I looked for the perfect spot where I and the camera would be positioned straight at the traffic of the bridge.  It just happened to be at the end of the wall closest to the road.  Had to wait for others to move out of the way to set up, because many people were attempting to take photographs with their smartphones.  I knew those photos would not turn out at all, since smartphones are not designed for low light or long exposure.  I set the tripod on the wall, put on my 80-300 mm telephoto lens, and began taking photographs.  I spent a good hour taking long exposure photographs.  I would of stayed out even longer, but I had to be awake in the morning to hang out with Emily, and I have been out in the cold 50 degree weather for too long.  As I was taking one of my last shots, right after I opened the aperture, I saw a Bobcat walk right in front of the rock wall.  I got so excited.  I just wanted to grab my camera and take photos of the bobcat.  It was so close, if I wanted to, I could have just reached down and touched it.  Of course, it was gone in a blink of an eye.  I was lucky to see it.  After taking just two other photos, in the same place, a racoon walked on by.  It was an awesome and unexpected to see some wildlife that night.  After that, I put away the camera equipment.  As I was doing so, I noticed the racoon again, at the nearest trash can by a wood fence.  I took some snapshots.  Nothing more.  Then I noticed more racoons.  Baby racoons!  It was a family of two adult racoons and three baby racoons.  I stayed to wait for a great photo opp, but sadly they were too scared to stick around when people got close.  I decided it was time to head back to the hotel and call it a night.

July 22: Redwoods, Sausalito, and Hendrik Point

     

     Finally, after two years, Emily and I are having more epic adventures!  Emily was staying in downtown San Francisco, and since I had a car we decided to explore area's outside of the city.  Emily wanted to travel out to see a California Redwood Forest.  With that, Muir Woods National Monument was perfect since it is located just a few miles past the Golden Gate.  It was even more perfect, because it is one place I have yet to visit in the bay area.  I drove in, picked Emily up, and we headed north to Muir Woods.  I have heard that this place can get extremely packed in the summer, but since it was a Monday, we crossed our fingers that it would not be swarmed with people.  We got to the parking lots.  Filled.  We drove down seeing nothing but cars and cars on the sides of the road.  Finally, I saw one last spot on the left side of the road.  I flipped a bitch, and grabbed it.  We walked on up to the entrance, paid the fee, then headed on in.

     

     At first, it seemed to be very touristy.  Many people, all crowded on a boardwalk.  I was expecting more of a hike on a few trails.  Some of the main groves of Redwoods was in a small area with the boardwalk.  Once we kept going, past all the people, we found the real trails.  The first trail we came to sounded amazing, because you could see the ocean from the trail.  Sadly, that portion of the trail was closed, so decided to just keep going forward.  Soon, Emily and I was on a dirt trail, alone, hiking through the Redwood forest with a small steady stream to the left.  It was beautiful.  Of course, no hike of ours goes without goofing off and taking photos.  It was quite, it was peaceful, it was beautiful, the air was fresh, the fog was clearing.  It was a perfect hike.  After about a mile or so, we decided to turn around and head back to the main tourist area.  It made me think about how many people come to Muir Woods, and never get too deep into this beautiful area.  Most of them stay on the boardwalk, look at the main Redwoods, and head right back into the city.  In a way, it is a shame that they get to miss out, but in a way it was great they did not go so far, so we can just enjoy the forest alone and not with annoying people.  We headed to the main gift shop, grabbed some amazing sandwiches  ate them outside (which we just wanted to sit there forever!), be gift shop whores and buy a few things, then left to our next stop. 

     

     Since we had time, we drove on over down to the waterfront shop area of Sausalito.  We looked through the cool shops, bought some salt water taffy, fought the urge to have ice cream, and just enjoyed the view of downtown San Francisco and the bay bridge across the way.  So many people had ice cream as we were walking down the streets.  We badly wanted ice cream, but we kept trying to ignore the fact ice cream exist.  The fog was clearing.  I figured this would be a perfect time to see the Golden Gate.  After exploring Sausalito, we got in the car, and drove out to Hendrik Point.  We got there, and no parking.  No suprise.  I kept going to the next parking turn out.  Nope.  Kept going to another view point farther away.  Nope.  Finally, at the fourth view point, there was a parking spot.  We got out, took some photos, then got back into the car to see if we can't get closer.  At the next view point, we got there as a car was pulling out.  It looked like a car was waiting for the spot, but they did not move, so I went in front of them to grab the spot.  While we were looking, a group of people (or just a large family that owned a big white van) packed up with h  opes to find a parking spot at Hendrik Point.  Right away, Emily and I bolted to the car, got in, and speed off to beat them to Hendrik Point.  The farther out parking lot, there was a guy backing out, and as he left, I grabbed the spot while other cars were waiting for that spot.  I felt like a rebel, and we won.  From there, there was a pathway over to the Spencer Military Battery and Hendrik Point.  All the rooms were open, so we explored the Military Battery first, then went to the main view point.  It was awesome!  One of my most favorite views ever.  After spending about an hour between all the view points, it was time to get Emily back to her hotel.  I went back to my hotel, went to pick up a pizza from a well recommended local place, and did some work preparing for State Leadership Conference (that's another blog post)

July 23: Aircraft Carrier, Art Decorated Stairs, and Embarcadero
     

     For the second and last day of this small epic adventure, Emily and I headed out of the city again, to see the USS Hornet.  The USS Hornet is an Essex class United States Navy Aircraft Carrier that fought in the Pacific during World War II and is famous for picking up Apollo 11 after they returned to Earth from their trip to the moon.  We drove on out to Alameda on the other side of the Bay Bridge to get to the Hornet.  Took us just a little bit to find it due to confusing roads, but we made it.  The ship was amazing.  It was designed where you are welcome to explore the flight deck, the flight hanger deck, and the second deck below the deck by yourself.  Anywhere else, you had to go with a tour group.  We went with the tour group right away.  The tour was great.  I think Emily and I were the youngest in the tour group, but it was still good.  We got to see many things.  We got to go up in the "island" were the bridge is.  Got to see the command center, a few of the ships big guns, and so many other places.  Our tour guide seemed to talk forever at each location.  There was a person in the back of the group who was in training.  She said they were aiming for the tour to be around 45 minutes.  The tour lasted about 2 hours.  Correction, we stayed on the tour for 2 hours.  By the time we got to see a majority of the ship, our energy was gone.  We were tired of standing, we were extremely hungry, and our blood sugar levels crashed to a major low.  The tour stopped for about 15 minutes for the tour guide to have a lunch break before the tour would continue down to the engine room.  We decided not to continue.  Before we left, Emily asked another tour person to take us down to the print show (she loves that stuff since she got a degree in design).  It was cool they took just us two down their.  Since we were there, we also got to see the brig.  After that, we were gone.  It was amazing, but we did not want to spend our entire life on the ship.  We stopped at a Jack In A Box to have lunch and to recharge our extremely low on energy tanks.  We felt 1000 times better after that, and we headed back into the city.

     Emily is amazing at finding random cool things to see when traveling.  She had learned, from the internet, of a series of 163 mosaic artistic steps located at 16th street and Moraga Street in San Francisco, near Grand View Park.  We drove on up to the Grand View Park, and thought the Moraga Steps would be on the west side of the park.  Walking around the small park trails, there were no mosaic steps to be seen.  Before finding the stairs, we stopped to enjoy the amazing view of downtown, Mt Sutro, Golden Gate Park, and the Pacific Ocean from the park.  We stopped a person walking by on 15th avenue on the west side of the park, and said it was just down the road.  We had found them.  We were about sick and tired of stairs, and we ended up at the top of those stairs.  We walked down to the bottom, and then slowly made out way back up the stairs.  We took photos all the way up.  It was beautiful.  The bottom of the stairs started off with water, and worked your way up to dirt and trees, all the way up to the moon and sun.  It is an amazing site.  I highly recommend anyone to go see it.  After the stairs, it was about the time when Emily and I needed to part our different ways.  We drove down to the Nob Hill area of downtown.  I parked in a parking structure, and we said our goodbye at some running store place.  It was amazing hanging out with Emily, and we so can't wait for our next epic adventure.  It was now time for me to walk over to Union Square, to spend the rest of the evening with another amazing person...Jess.

     

     I met up with Jess at Union Square.  It has been at least 3-4 years since we last chilled when she came to Santa Monica.  Of course, when hanging with Jess, we always find at least one geocache.  Before we went out on our geocaching adventure, we set out for dinner.  Jess took me to this amazing place called Super Duper Burger on Market Street just west of 3rd.  It was an amazing place.  Everything there is 100% natural and organic.  No preservatives, no chemicals, nothing processed.  It was quite an amazing place.  I had a grilled chicken sandwich with chipotle ailoi and a side of garlic french fries.  The food was orgasmic good.  Definitely a place I will have to return to in the future.  Having dinner and catching up, we set out to find a geocache.  The geocache we were looking for was located at the Embarcadero between pier 3 and 7.  It was a cool place to look for a cache, since I never really have explored the Embarcadero before.  

     

     In route to finding the geocache, Jess had mentioned that she had heard about the amazing hotel lobby at the Hyatt Regency.  We decided to take a look.  It was one amazing hotel.  You have a curtain of lights hanging down from the extremely tall ceiling  a large wood sculpture in the middle of the lobby standing on top of a gentle water fountain pond.  It would be a dream to stay at a hotel like this, but I could not begin to imagine how expensive it would be to stay there.  At this point, I was kicking myself because I left my DSLR in the car many blocks away, and my point and shoot camera battery was dead.  All I had was a semi good iphone 4 camera.  That explains how terrible the photos are at this point of the blog.  I was watching the elevators rise up to the top of the hotel, and it looked like it went up to this pent house where you can see an amazing view of the city.  Jess and I wanted to go up to the top, so we got into the elevator and headed on up.  It seems only hotel guests were allowed on any floor above the lobby, and you needed a room key to access those floors.  We grabbed a elevator with guests already using it.  To our luck, the 17th floor (the highest the elevator will go) was selected.  We got up to the 17th floor.  It was not the place I thought the elevators went.  We were below the pent house.  We still walked around, and we found a few windows with amazing views of the city.  I felt like a rebel sneaking up to the top floor.  Especially when those are probably the most expensive rooms in the entire building.  While looking at a view of the east waterfront, I noticed this amazing water fountain outside of the hotel.  I just had to go see it.  

     

     The Vaillancourt Fountain was amazing!  It was a series of cement tunnels with water pouring out of them.  What made this fountain even more amazing was that you could climb up a few stairs, onto a medal elevated walkway, in the middle of the fountain.  I love water fountains, and this is on the top!  After the fountain, we headed towards the cache location.  It took us a while to find the cache, and mainly because of stupidity.  There was a circular bench around a light pool.  Right away, I knew the cache would be magnetic and under the bench.  Moved the hand around, and found nothing.  After awhile, we started looking all around the place for the cache.  Jess checked underneath the bench again, and she had found it right near where I placed my hand.  I got down on my stomach, took a look, and what do you know.  The cache!  I felt so stupid.  After the cache, we spent the rest of our time walking the Embarcadero. 

     

     The views from the Embarcadero were amazing.  Right away, we walked out onto Pier 3 because of a few old ships that caught the eye.  There was an old car ferry that was turned into a dinner cruise ship, and next to it was a beautiful old steam engine ship, the kind with the big round and red paddle on the back and the steam stacks.  The type of ship you would expect to see on the Mississippi and not in San Francisco.  I would love to go out on that thing.  The ships name is the San Francisco Belle.  From the pier, we had an amazing view of the Bay Bridge.  We would continue to walk all the way to Pier 22 1/2, which is almost right under the Bay Bridge.  It was dark, and the bridge was lite up.  Jess was telling me that they are celebrating the 75 anniversary of the bridge by having these special twinkling lights on each of the steal cables that hold the main support cable of the bridge.  The lights are not a permanent thing.   The lights made the bridge just super beautiful.  I was extremely glad that Jess and I walked closer and closer to get a better look, and that I was able to see this rare lighting of the bridge.  As we got closer to the bridge, we saw the full moon rise, and it was a deep red color.  It made the view just 1000 times more rare and awesome.  Again, I was kicking myself for only having a crappy camera phone.  Afterwards, I walked with Jess down Harrison Street to 4th street were we parted ways.  She offered to take me to her apartment building and to go up to the top to see the view of the bay bridge from there, but it would take me a good 30 minutes to walk about to the car, and I needed to get back to the hotel because I would have to wake up early and drive out to UC Davis.  

     I had an amazing time in San Francisco.  I love San Francisco.  The city is so amazing.  This is the type of place where you can be proud to be who you are, and to be proud to be a Californian.  I feel welcomed to this amazing city, and it never gets old.  This trip was greatly needed.  I loved being able to experience it with two amazing people (Emily and Jess). I didn't get to do everything I wanted because of the lack of time, but it just gives me an excuse to come back!