Fernanda & Karl - Road Trip, Day 24 -- Website by Now Interactive Solutions

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San Francisco
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Iceland Five-O
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Twin Cities
10/12/18

Oktoberfest 2018
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Monday, September 10, 2007

Road Trip, Day 24

The Pacific Ocean
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California, Nevada

We left San Francisco today. We're on the road again. Though it took us a while to build up the momentum to escape SF's attraction. By 2 o'clock we had only made it about 20 miles outside SF up route 1 to Stinson Beach. We were enchanted. Probably helped that it was a beautiful sunny day. We had lunch, walked along the beach, and were really kind of reluctant to go.

I was feeling kind of car sick from the twisty turns of route 1 while looking at a map. It felt like we had driven miles and miles on route 1, but when I looked it was only a really short distance. We headed off towards wine country.

We stopped at a relatively small vineyard in the Sonoma valley, did a tasting, but neither of us are really wine snobs, or that into it. We drove on into the Napa valley, and I must say it has completely jumped the shark. It was nothing like my memories of it from back in the early 80s. Possibly the fact that everything seems drier right now might have something to do with it, but the big pretentious "wineries" with their menu of "tastings" and the price list are just too much. I remember small to midsized vineyards where you go to try what they make and how this year's vintage turned out, so you can discover what you like and learn what are the good labels. None of this pretentious "epicurean experience" in huge pretentious grounds, with pretentious bourgeois tourists spending money to try and compensate for lack of taste. Blah.

We broke 5000 miles driving through wine country, our last bit of sight-seeing before turning back for the return trip. [Actually we broke 6000 miles I now have discovered -- I lost 1000 miles somewhere in Utah... So this is actually a significant milestone, or rather kilometerstone: we surpassed km 10000 this day, which is a quarter of the circumference of the Earth -- it's as if we had driven from the North Pole to the Equator!]

So we headed east on Interstate 80, the road that will take us home. We blew through Sacramento, and headed to Lake Tahoe, where we hoped to spend the night so we could see the area in the morning. But it was either full up or way too expensive. We drove through and tried every motel, but it was no use.

Lake Tahoe is expensive even to just drive through, as I got a ticket just after getting back on I-80 after having given up on Tahoe and decided to push on through to Reno, Nevada. So hooray, I have a speeding ticket from California...

We drove through to Reno, and after driving through the garishly lit downtown with its casinos, we settled into yet another Motel 6 (with no wifi).

So, the push for home has begun. Turns out I-80 will be the best interstate to take, which means we will be passing through the salt flats and Salt Lake City again. If only I'd known... My ideal route would have us leaving from Seattle and driving through North Dakota, but alas, alas, there is no time to get that far up north. So many things to see and do, so little time.

Tomorrow we plow further eastward as much as we can.

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Previous Entries

:-(
06/19/21

Açores
08/29/18

Our New Bathroom Saga
11/17/16

Europe 2015
03/16/15

The Berkshires
10/18/14

Road Trip South
03/23/13

Greece!
07/26/12

Our Trip to Ireland
08/09/09

Google Map of our Trip
09/17/07