Leaving Eugene we headed straight back to the coast to continue our trip South via highway 1. As Bree mentioned in her last post recapping our our time in Oregon, we’d started at the tip top of the Olympic Peninsula and the plan was to take the coast highway all the way back to SoCal.

Having spent most of my life on the coast in Southern California, the rugged Oregon coastline was a massive contrast. So different. Cold, misty, logs on the beach, rock outcroppings in the water everywhere, did I say cold? Yeah, cold. But super super beautiful. We really loved the drive. And on the clear days the sunsets were truly amazing.

As some of you may know I have a propensity to the play the pokers on occassion (see massive understatement) so we’ve found that finding casinos for 1 stop overnights are ideal. So I’d like to officially thank all of the podunk casinos along the Oregon and NorCal coast for accommodating us along our journey.

Our next “stop” was the Redwoods of Northern California. These trees are really something to behold. We tried beholding one of them here actually. Truly amazing.

We curled along the winding dipping coast highway through protruding fog fingers and misty rains as we approached San Francisco from the North. After swirling down from the hills and wet into Marin the Golden Gate, shrouded in fog, welcomed us to our new home for the next few weeks.

Now most of you don’t know this, but I’m a studied linguistics scholar and turns out the literal translation of San Francisco means No Fricking Parking Spaces Like Anywhere.

Ok, so it wasn’t THAT bad as we did obviously find parking but it’s like a sport. You have to train and compete and it’s quite clearly a survival of the fittest pursuit. It’s comical at best and maddening at worst but after a few days finding our city legs we ended up schooling the locals and scoring premo parking for our entire stay in front of our friends Michael and Tina’s place in the Haight.

San Fransico was awesome. We planned our arrival and entire stay in the city PERRRfectly with their 2 week window of amazing weather that they get each year. I can’t tell you how many times our friends living there said, “no you guys don’t understand, the weather is NEVER this good, you are so lucky”.

We got to see a whole bunch of friends and had a great time with them all. Shout outs, props, boo-yas, and virtual hugs to Michael, Tina, Andrew, Greg (Nate and Taylor), Vlad, Rachel, Jodi, Ben and Tamara.

We spent a LOT of our days wandering around Golden Gate park with the dogs, checking out local eateries (The Pork Store on Haight got our most visits on the trip), catching up with friends, and seeing the touristy sights of the city. We even headed over the Bay Bridge to venture into Berkley one day as well as the place of my birth (Fairfield) to tour/visit the Jelly Belly factory on Halloween. The highlight of that day for Bree for sure was the Jelly Belly’s (big surprise) but we also went to a pizza place that I’d gone to as a child. Same location, same owners, same GREAT pizza. I told them that I hadn’t been there for 34 years and had made a pilgrimage back. Our server seemed to think that was pretty cool as did I.

All in all it was a great time and we really liked San Fran (after getting over the complete shock of having SO MANY people around us, everywhere, at all hours of the day and night – except 4am). We headed out of the city to the South Bay to hang with our friends Vlad and Rachel for a bit in Burlingame before setting sail back down the coast a few days ago. Stay tuned for our LA update coming soon.

Tally ho…

SoCal bound,
Matt