Northern California

We left San Mateo and headed north on the 101. We got to experience San Francisco one more time before we left it for good. We both agree that the area is beautiful and the weather is perfect, but we refuse to live anywhere near downtown. Everything about San Francisco's downtown area is just twisted and wrong, not to mention expensive. I think Jeremy and Eva are doing the right thing by living just outside of San Francisco.

This is an example of why driving in downtown is so bad in San Francisco. This photo is of a busy intersection in downtown. See the small dot of red in the tree... that's the red light for this intersection. It's pretty tough to see when you're doing 40, trying not to go the wrong way down one way streets, and looking for your turnoff. Usually when Liz and I worked together, we could find the red lights in time for me to stop. There was one, though, that I completely ran (no yellow whatsoever). Luckily there was no one coming the other way.

Our first day in San Francisco we saw very little fog, which allowed us to do a lot of sightseeing. Our last day, though, was a little more indicative of typical bay conditions. In this photo we are crossing the Golden Gate Bridge at around noon, and the fog is so thick that you can't see the tops of the towers.

During our drive up the coastline the fog continually rolled in. It did not begin to clear until late afternoon. This is not the typical that we've seen elsewhere. This fog moves at 15-20 mph. It's really cool to watch, but I imagine it gets old quick when you have to drive through it everyday.

As we continued up the coast, we found an overlook point where you could see the ocean and a small town below. This scene looks more like pictures I've seen of Ireland than the California coastline.

Point Reyes Station

Liz and I asking Eva about some interesting things that could be seen in the San Francisco area. One of the ideas she gave us (and one that I wouldn't have found myself) was Point Reyes Station. This national preserve area has many things to do, but Liz and I came specifically to see the San Andres Fault.

This is the visitor center for the park. There were actually no fees for entering the park. Hallelujah! We finally found a free-bee!

The trail to get from the visitor's center to the location of the fault is about a mile (round trip). We were walking the trail and chatting when several deer sprung from the trees just a few feet in front of us. We paused to take a picture of them when Bambi ran out of the trees to try and catch up with the adults. He got all the way on to the sidewalk before he saw us. In this picture he's running back into the trees that he came from.

We could see the other two deer glaring at us from behind the cover of the trees. We decided to back off in hopes that the baby would run across to catch up with its mother. The baby never came out, but eventually the females cautiously came back across to rejoin the baby. I don't think mom trusts us very much.

Finally we got to where we were heading. This fence predates the great Californian earthquake of the early 1900s. Before the earthquake the segment of fence in the foreground and the segment under the tree in the background were all one piece. The earthquake allowed the plates on either side of the fault to slide some 10-15 past each other, splitting the fence in two.

Redwood Forest and Drive-Thru Tree

Several hours north of Point Reyes Station we began to enter redwood country. At the time, neither Liz nor I had ever seen a redwood tree so we weren't sure what we were looking for. We were inspecting all the trees as we drove and trying to guess which ones were redwoods. All the trees were extremely tall, but none seemed to be as massive as I had imagined. I was beginning to get a little disappointed when we saw an exit for a drive-thru redwood tree.

Once we got into the park some of the large redwoods began to emerge. This particular tree seems to have lost part of its trunk sometime throughout its history. Now a new (but separate) trunk is growing out of the same base section resulting in this strangly shaped tree.

This is the highlight of the park, Chandalier Tree. A sign near the tree sites the tree's age around 2400 years old.

We had to wait for all the other people taking pictures, but finally we got our turn to drive throught the tree. We were partially under the tree when we noticed that Liz's mirrors weren't going to make it. We stopped just in time to avoid shearing off the mirrors. Luckily the mirror fold in or else we couldn't have made it through. Even with the mirrors in it was a really tight fit.

Not far from the drive-thru tree there was an enourmous redwood log bordering the parking lot. We couldn't resist leaving our mark amongst the other names of the great on the giant log.

After our quick stop at the drive-thru, we continued north toward Fern Canyon, our next stop. A few miles up the road we saw this place and had to get a picture. We didn't go inside because it was getting late, but apparently this is house built into the base of a living redwood tree. I don't know how so much of the trunk can be removed without causing the tree to collapse.

Even though we had now seen some massive redwood trees, we had still not really hit redwood country. As dusk approached, we began to hit significant patches of enourmous redwood trees. The canopy of the trees is so tall and full that there's practically no direct sunlight near the ground.

This shot, with the road sign in it, gives a little better scale of how tall these trees are.