Friday night we met up with Adrian & Petrea Kells (from NZ) who have been living in San Francisco for about 18 months or so. They took us to their favourite little pizza restaurant for dinner. We had about an hour wait just to get in, but it was well worth it, they were sensational pizzas. And the garlic bread... I am drooling just thinking about it... You get a little loaf of freshly cooked bread, a dish of butter, and a whole wood-fired garlic that you scoop out onto your bread...
After dinner they gave us the grand tour around San Francisco. The city has very distinct areas with very different people in each area – there is a big Chinatown, the rainbow district (gay district), the hippie area, homeless central, little Mexico and a few others. Lots of interesting people watching in most of them! We also went up Twin Peaks which looks out over the city.
Saturday we visited the Golden Gate bridge, which we couldn’t go through San Francisco without seeing! Ironically we had quite nice weather in San Francisco, which we hear is pretty unusual – normally it can be warm and sunny only a few km away but in San Francisco it will be windy, foggy and cold! Not really the impression that I had of San Francisco, but there you go! The day we had was still windy and not exactly warm, but a nice blue sky.
After the Golden Gate bridge Adrian & Petrea dropped us off to visit the Fisherman’s Wharf and Farmer’s Markets. Lots of cool buskers and neat little stalls. We walked about 7km round town, and then headed out to Modesto on our way to Yosemite National Park.
My initial memories of Modesto are not very pleasant at all! By the time we arrived in the area, got some groceries and got ourselves sorted for the next few days it was getting pretty late in the evening and we didn’t know where we were going to stay for the night. It kept getting later and later and I was getting grumpier and grumpier, so we eventually got Pizza Hut for tea at about 10:30pm (your pizza options are plain cheese pizza, pepperoni & cheese pizza, or pay $18.99 for some additional toppings!) and drove about 30km out of town to a campground that we had read about. The book said it was 13 miles out of town, so we nearly turned around several times but luckily stuck it out just long enough to find it and have a bed for the night!
We had a really nice meeting there the next morning though with Ed & Lisa Denio, and we also stayed with them for a night after we visited Yosemite, so my impressions of the place have improved a lot since the first evening!
One thing we have been enjoying in California is all the fresh fruit. All around the Modesto area is a strawberry and cherry growing region, with dozens of roadside stalls selling cheap and incredibly yummy fruit. The strawberries are enormous and soooo, sooo good!
More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/canadianmport/NorthernCalifornia?authkey=Gv1sRgCO-A99eHsrKmVg# (this is the same link as the last post and includes other Northern Californian pics)
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