San Francisco

Liz and I packed our bags up and headed toward San Francisco. We had another photo finish check out in our hotel room. The longer we are on this trip, the less we seem to be able to get up a 7 am every morning. While in S.F. we were staying with friends of mine from Gainesville, Jeremy and Eva. They have a new baby, Alex, that is only 6 mo. old. I have never stayed the night at a house with a young baby, so I have to admit that I was a little nervous. I figured everyone would be up all night and the whole place would smell like soiled baby (hey, I have limited experience with kids). I'm glad to say that was not the case. Alex is one of the cutest and happiest babies that I've ever seen (and I'm not just saying that because Jeremy and Eva will be reading this). He rarely fussed and was captivated by my goatee. Hey, what more can you ask for? I wish more people were like that, hehehe.

The southern side of San Francisco is marked by rock writing on the side of the hill. Also, the infamous bay fog can be seen rolling in.

There is so much packed in a small space in this city that they have to stack interstates.

Finally, downtown San Fran can be seen. It looks beautiful from a distance, but it sucks to drive in.

San Francisco's downtown is littered with one-way streets, impossible to see red lights, lanes that appear and disappear. On one of the few moments of peace in downtown, we got to look at the beautiful architecture.

Fisherman's Wharf

The first destination we hit in San Fran was the Fisherman's Wharf area. This is where all the docks are and where you can get the freshest fish in the bay.

Each of these buildings are docks and accompanying warehouses. There are 30 or 40 of these along the bay.

This is the most secure ex-prision in the US, Alcatraz. We tried to take a tour, but it was sold out for almost a week.

Near the same area, there was a submarine that you could take a tour of, but we've already done the sub tours before. It's really small, you're glad you're not on stuck on one, etc., etc.

This is a clock tower in the docking area. You can also see the cables for the trolleys here. Strangely enough the downtown busses are electric too and use the same cable system. This just adds more confusion to the already nightmareish downtown driving situation.

This is one of the downtown trolleys. You have to buy a tour ticket to ride them, but then you can use them to travel around the downtown area. The tickets are a little expenisve, but it beats fighting downtown traffic.

This is the lesser known Bay Bridge. Having never seen this bridge before, I almost mistook it for the Golden Gate Bridge at first. This bridge actually has a top and a bottom level. The top level goes east into Oakland and the bottom comes west back in to San Francisco. I wanted to drive across this bridge, but we couldn't think of anything we wanted to do in Oakland so we skipped it.

It took us a while of searching, but we finally found the Golden Gate Bridge. It is truely an impressive sight. The towers that hold the suspension cables are absolutely massive.

Even though the bridge has six driving lanes, congestion seems to still be a problem. To account for this, they actually change the direction of the lanes during different times of the day. In this picture there are 4 lanes leaving S.F. and 2 lanes coming back in. Its the opposite in the morning.

We originally stopped at the touristy overlook for the Golden Gate Bridge. This little park is right off of the road after the bridge. There were a lot of people there from all over the world (I didn't hear much English being spoken). The view of the bridge from here was very poor, but Liz noticed a small marina off in the distance. We managed to find our way there and took this picture of the bridge from a secluded pier with a much better view.

North of the Golden Gate Bridge there's a tunnel through the mountain side. On the way back into San Francisco, Liz caught this great picture of the Golden Gate Bridge from inside the tunnel.

Stanford

After our downtown/Fisherman's Wharf experience, we were done for the day. We went back to San Mateo and spent the evening with Jeremy and Eva. The next morning, Liz decided she wanted to see Stanford, so we headed south to Palo Alto.

We knew that Stanford was in Palo Alto, but other than that we did not have much to go on. Even with the GPS we had a bit of a hard time finding the university. Finally, after taking the grand tour of western Palo Alto, we found the entrance road to Stanford.

This is truely a magnificant university. There is no shortage of funding here.

Here we are in front of the David Packard (as in Packard-Bell) Electrical Engineering building. Like I said, there is no shortage of funding here.

And what do we have here? Why, it's the William Gates (better known as Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft and multi-billionaire) computer science building. At this point, I was thinking of walking around with a bucket over my head to catch any money that just fell from the sky. It seems to happen a lot around here.

This tower is clearly visible from the main loop at the entrance of the university. I'm not sure what it is used for... maybe some of you Stanford graduates can fill me in on that.

All throughout the campus, there are beautiful vine covered archways and towering palm trees. At the University of Florida, we don't need such lavish lanscaping, the weeds and rust are our decorum.

This courtyard is beautiful, with the brick walkways and the well maintained planters. It was also nice because there were very few students on campus at the time so we had the whole place to ourselves.

The other side of this courtyard overlooks a bed of flowers. When I was getting ready to take this picture, a guy walked right into my shot. He proceeded to unpack all of his camera equipment and set up shop right in front of me. So we waited until he was finished setting up and then we stepped right in front of him and took some pictures ourselves. We get so spiteful sometimes.

More walkways lined with palm trees.

Back at the House

After Stanford, we headed back to the house for our final night in San Mateo. Unfortunately, Liz and I arrived in the middle of the week so we weren't able to spend more time with Jeremy and Eva. Jeremy had to work in the days and Eva is constantly busy with Alex, but we were able to have dinner with them both nights and even kick back a few beers.

This is where Jeremy and Eva live. The owner of this house built two apartments and a garage behind the house. Jeremy and Eva are in the left apartment and Jeremy's friend Joe from high school lives in the right apartment.

I got Jeremy, Eva, and Alex to pose for a group photo for me.