Washington to Florida - 2016: San Francisco

You can't traverse the state of California from north to south without seeing San Francisco, right? It's a beautiful city.

Coming down I-5 from the north isn’t a particularly great drive.  California is pretty and all, but the inland scenery isn’t what you’d call spectacular.  You do pass close by Mt. Shasta and Redding where my friend, pilot and musician, Hal Johnson lives.  And of course there is the town of Weed, which always makes me laugh when I see the sign for the exit even though I know that the town got its name from Abner Weed, a lumberman, not the hippies growing and smoking marijuana up in the hills.  At least, that's the story...

We stopped short of San Francisco in the town of Vacaville.  Next morning we got off the Interstate at Vallejo where we cut across to Highway 101 which would take us down into San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge.

Californians are a little strange.  They don't say, "Take 101 south."  Instead, they'll  say something like, "Take the 101 to the 5 and then take that to the 10 east to Florida."  Don't ask me why.  Here in the south, it's different.  We'd never think of saying, "Well, just take the 10 to the 29 and then take that to Montgomery where you catch the 85 to Atlanta."  They'd look at you funny down here.  But all Californians seem to refer to roads as "the"- something.

Anyway...I jumped off the 101 at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. There's a park with a nice overlook of the bridge and the harbor. However, the sun was just at the wrong angle - I should've gone across to the south side for better lighting. Nevertheless, the views were breathtaking even if the pictures didn't come out so great.

The obligatory shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and (of course!) a selfie of me and Jacob

From there we hopped across into San Francisco proper and headed for the town of Pacifica where we were to pick up the Pacific Coast Highway southbound.