Sausalito, open your golden gate!
San Francisco! One of those places, like Paris or Texas, where I've always got a happy grin cemented onto my face. It might be just airport code SFO, but I'm still bouncing along pushing a luggage trolley, leading a party of five off to the hire care precinct, smiling at random travellers and humming songs about golden gates, cable cars and sunny California.
We took the lift up a level and boarded one of those automated trains a couple of stops to the rental depot. "You can drive," I told my son as we sprawled our baggage over the front of the carriage.
The van was booked through Netflights, home of amazing car rental deals in English pounds. Dollar Rentals had the best rate and here we were lining up to collect the keys. We pretended it was just Twinkles and I doing the driving, avoiding the $25 daily fee for younger drivers DD and DS. The Aussie dollar had hit parity with the greenback, but five weeks of twenty five bucks wasn't to be contemplated.
I passed, with heavy sighs, a long line of Mustangs on the way to our silver Chrysler Town and Country. One day, I'll drive Route 66 in a convertible, but that day wasn't this one. We had five people and a stack of luggage and I was aiming for comfort over speed and style this time around.
We filled her up, I sat in the commander's chair, contemplated the array of buttons and dials ahead of me, punched a few for luck, fired the ignition and rolled grandly down the ramp into America.
Not my first time at the helm of a Yank cruiser, so I had a certain amount of confidence. And a certain amount of worry that I'd forget and go the wrong way at an intersection. I didn't, but I kept drifting right within my lane, a common failing amongst we Aussies, as we automatically found our comfort zone on the right side of the left lane. Sort of having a dollar each way.
The job of the co-driver in the front passenger seat was to nudge the driver back into position, screaming now and then if a streetlamp or bridge railing came too close.
The plan was to fill in the time before we could check in at our Fort Mason youth hostel with a drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito for lunch, a drive around the Marin headlands to catch some of those postcard views of the bridge, bay and city, and then see how we felt. Maybe jetlag would see us hitting our bunkbeds early, maybe we'd be out of phase and partying until three AM.
I hadn't felt like hiring a GPS for five weeks, so had bought a Tom Tom at home that came with a free international map download. I'd picked the North American map, and despite a little hassle with websites and software installs, had gotten it loaded up. They could make these things simpler.
It worked once it got a good look at the sky, and I set Sausalito as the destination and off we went. I'd expected to be directed straight up through downtown and over the bridge, but it sent us further west and we dived under Golden Gate Park and through chunks of suburbia. I think I might have made a wrong turn somewhere while it was searching searching searching for satellites.
Not to worry. We were just hanging out of the windows, having a ball, pointing out road signs and black and whites* and all the things you see in the movies. "Oooh!" Futurecat squeaked in delight, "California poppies!"
Soon enough, the towers of the bridge were rising up. I pulled off into the visitors centre, where I knew there was a parking area, a shop, and some fantastic views. Been this way before, you see.
Darling Daughter has somehow inherited the whimsy gene. The mention of flowers reminded her that here we were in San Francisco, and like the song I'd been singing to myself, we'd better get some flowers in our hair. And photographs taken. Here are Twinkles and DD, appropriately beflowered. There were also some shots taken of your humble narrator, but as this is my blog and my story, they will not be seen here.
We will, however, feast our eyes on FutureCat, a Newzealander who received her screen name from Americans puzzled as to how it was always a day ahead where she was and could she send them the lotto numbers, please?
We were all smiling. It was just fantastic to be there after all the planning and dreaming and have the day go so swimmingly.
I ducked into the visitors centre for some change to feed the meter during the picture frenzy. I had some US notes, but nothing in the way of shrapnel. I spotted an area with National Parks Service stamps and passports for sale and I was mildly interested, but I didn't buy one. I've been kicking myself ever since - I missed out on dozens of stamps until I finally bought a book in Maryland. Have to go back to collect the whole set, I guess!
Finally we piled back into the van and I found my way out of the carpark onto the bridge. I probably went a few turns too far, and at one point we had gone under the approach ramp and were heading off to Seal Rocks. But I was dead scared of making some fatal error. You know those "Wrong Way" signs they put up? Well, they put them up for people like me.
Here we are on the Bridge. The image is tilted because everyone apart from me was hanging out of the right side of the van to take in the view. That little yellow thingamajig is a Ballycumber, the emblem of the BookCrossing.com community to which Futurecat and I belong. I'll explain later, but it's a lot of fun.
We whipped past the freewheeling cyclists on the way down to Sausalito, parked the van and went exploring. Palmtrees, sunshine, smiling faces, restaurants, souvenir shops and always the Bay in the background. The kids ducked into a toy shop and didn't come out again until they had played with everything. I contemplated buying a bumper sticker.
A firetruck drove past, the back crowded with tourists and a couple of cheerful guides pointing things out. Just one of those quirky San Francisco sights. Apparently the guides sing and dance and just have a wonderful time showing the place off. I love this town!
A little further along the way was the fish and chip shop I'd found in 2010. This time I plumped for a table inside and we ordered up various meals - the first decent tucker we'd had in all of a 48 hour Friday, I guess. In what became a father-son bonding ritual, I asked for a couple of local beers, which of course were Anchor Steam. We clinked our glasses and posed for the camera. Fish and chips, a beer and the Golden Gate. Here is paradise!
I saved the bottle and soaked the label off later, to stick in my travel journal. Perhaps I'm a little nutty, but I have fat journals for most of my trips, full of tickets and maps and receipts and beer bottle lables and bumper stickers. One day, when I've spent a fortune on a lifetime of memories and have developed Alzheimer's, I'll be able to go back and do it all again.
In another of my nutty rituals, I pulled into a Starbucks, where I bought a super-ginormous coffee mug, the souvenir San Francisco edition. Towards the end of the trip, the van was fairly rattling and clinking along on groaning springs, and I had to subsidise the US Post Office to a breathtaking degree.
There were galleries and boutiques, restaurants and real estate agents. I could think of worse places to live. This guy was singing on the dock of the bay, just piling up the tips, selling homespun CDs and putting a bit of cool into the sunny day. We lingered, listening.
And then we bade farewell to fair Sausalito, heading off for the Pacific coast and the Marin headlands.
The Tom-Tom wasn't much use here. It didn't show hills, and what looked like a good direct route would often turn into something you'd be worried about hiking along, but we had a grand time amongst the green hills, old military installations, dusty lookouts and groves of trees. It was all ridiculously scenic.
We all know about Amelie
and the kidnapped travelling garden gnome who gets photographed in various exotic locations? Well, meet Wolverine. DD's boss has this plastic Wolverine figurine she keeps in her office, supervising affairs from a bookshelf. Wolverine got kidnapped, and we were forever finding new places to pose Wolverine and his razor claw hands along the way.
That was fine, and DD's boss was doubtless charmed to receive emailed photographs of her plastic friend teetering on safety railings above iconic landmarks for the next few weeks, but what added a whole jar of spice to the adventure was the fact that the original internal rubber linkages allowing Wolverine to move his limbs or bend and turn his head had long since perished, and every now and then an arm or head or torso would fall off as he was being positioned for the photo.
We tried to keep him together with Blu-Tac, but that wasn't as secure as it might have been, and a fair proportion of the trip was spent retrieving bits of Wolverine from the landscape.
Like this one. Just over the safety rail is a drop that plummets down to rocks on the shoreline via gullies and near vertical slopes. Wolverine's arm plopped off onto the wrong side of the barrier and teetered, like a movie car, on the edge of the drop. DD scrambled over the fence to get the body bit back, Twinkles hanging onto her rainbow belt in case she slipped. I didn't really need this level of excitement, but we got the limb back. And DD.
But, OMG, the view! This was like living in a postcard. Simply stunning. I'll come back one day with a bigger camera.
Before we left Marin, I took a picture of the New Zealand flag I'd hoisted onto the van's aerial and secured with a ball of chewing gum. I wanted to make FutureCat comfortable about being a lone New Zealander in a van full of Aussies. Besides, I figured people would think it was the Australian flag anyway. See how there's a little nick in one corner? Over the next three weeks the threads gradually unravelled and by the time we got to Washington DC, we were British. Barely.
And then we entered Fisherman's Wharf into the GPS and followed the voice back over the bridge. I've lost count of the times I've stayed at the Fort Mason youth hostel, but it was a welcome sight on the grounds of the old military base as we parked the van, pulled out our bags and checked in. There was a young lady on the desk and she handed us forms to fill in as she gently extracted money off my credit card.
"You know," I said, "It's really comforting to us Aussies that youse have got all these gum trees here."
"Double You Tea Eff?"
"You know! Gum trees!" I pointed out the window at a nearby grove.
"Oh, those are Eu-cal-ypt-us trees!"
I rolled my eyes. "Geez, how pretentious can you get!"
"Pretentious? Moi?"
--Skyring
* Black and whites = cop cars. Just like in The Blues Brothers
and Dukes of Hazzard
except they weren't leaping about so much.