California Dreamin': Day 2 -- Are you going to San Francisco?

Where: San Francisco, CA.
Staying until: June 2.
Total distance traveled: 310km.
Money spent on bridge tolls in San Francisco: $5.
New people met: 2.
Utterly random thoughts: Drunk hobo fights are kind of awesome.

I departed yesterday morning from Williams, CA en route to the Golden Gate city early in the morning... By early I mean around 10-ish. The original plan of me spending the night in the car completely vanished the minute I saw a Motel 6 go by the window. By the time I got to bed I completely crashed and stayed down for 10 hours.

This extra energy though, meant that I could use a lot more of it driving down the back roads in Northern California.

The drive through Napa -- over 50km stretch of sheer fun.

Instead of heading down the I-5, I took the long way (a.k.a. fun) around and found this back road called Knoxville Road in Napa, CA. About 30+ kilometres of the road are one-laned roads with swooping corners and bends. With a bit of terrain too. And no traffic. I went nuts driving on that road. Never in my life had I have so much fun in my car. (This road is also been said to be the greatest road in California -- we will see about that when I tackle route 66 and Yosemite, but for now I absolutely agree).

Who cares if this detour took me an extra two and a half hours to make it to San Francisco? It was all worth it.

Driving in San Francisco though is a whole other animal. San Francisco is a beautiful city -- albeit a tad unfriendly for driving travelers. If you think driving around Downtown Vancouver would ruin your day, wait til you drive around San Francisco -- where you'll be swung with traffic, cable cars, street cars, buses, bicycles, no left-turns, one way streets and so on. To make matters worse, the sheer amount of skyscrapers in the Financial District meant that the GPS was rendered effectively useless.

Still though, look at San Francisco. So pretty. I spent much of the day just driving around it and marvel at, well, everything. 

That and the fact that I pretty much had to stay in the car, because San Francisco is just so damn cold. The weather was 8 degrees yesterday with winds that felt like Oklahoma tornadoes.

At the hostel I shared a dorm with two traveling Aussies -- Brittany and Bradley. Thought I'd give them a shout out because they are utterly awesome as well. We went out for cheap pasta (less than 9 bucks!!!!11!1!) and received free late night entertainment from two drunk hobos who decided to brawl each other right outside the pizza joint. I don't even know what that was about, but at one point one of them grabbed a chair from the restaurant and swung it at the other bloke. Pretty random.