Departing Saturday morning at 7am, I drove on almost-empty streets toward the Golden Gate Bridge. It was so eerie to see nary a car when normally I would encounter a continuously onslaught of vehicles, tour buses and trucks. San Francisco is normally a nightmare of double-parking and a obstacle-course of parking and driving hazards ~ I was already enjoying getting out of the City even for this short two-day escape.
From the bridge the sunrise over the East Bay was gorgeous and I wanted to stop, but experience from previous road trips warned me and I decided not to stop at the northern lookout point. I drove through the Rainbow tunnel and continued toward Mill Valley to get to Stinson Beach and the Coast Highway. After three decades, I would be finally going from Stinson Beach to Pt Reyes – or at least in that direction – and seeing the great scenery enroute! Up the curvy narrow road to Mt Tamalpais I stopped for a second – a long second – when I saw the fog over the bay and gentle slopes below, and snapped a pix, the first of many….
To make a {very} loooong story shorter, descriptive of winding curvy tight narrow road driving, gorgeous rocks sitting in the surf off brown and sheer cliffs, let me just say that I have been known to stop and take pictures just a few times along a drive. This trip was planned with that in mind and I did stop a couple of times. The last time this happened I was exploring Oregon in early 2006 with a friend who drove me to Newport from Eugene. This is normally a two-hour drive, perhaps 30 minutes more should the traffic be bad…. That trip took five hours. So, you may be asking, did fototaker break this record? Hahahahaaaa not by a long toss, but let me say that from San Francisco to Fort Bragg let’s say it’s about a leisurely three-hour drive and in this case, it took me eight hours to finally arrive at my destination!
Within a month I’ll be back in Rota again ~ but it’s only a month…. sigh.....The motel room was very clean and nice, though located at the very far end of the town, and it would be a looong walk in the chilling air. So I drove to the main part of downtown after the sad sunset and looked for a place to eat. Most of the prices were quite expensive – SF style – but I expected that as it's a coastal resort area. There was a small Italian-style place on a side street which I finally determined would be a good safe place to eat, and had a good big plate of pasta with warmed bread and olive oil.
A local holiday parade started after 7pm with the town residents slowing filling up the streets of the main thorough-way. Back in the old days – I was told – the parade consisted of the lumber trucks which hauled their long wood loads to and from the town. With that industry gone, the parade continued but now trucks and vans participate, each with their array of festive holiday lights as decoration. We even saw a AMTRAC which torn up the street, and the ATVs and even the bicycles were participating dressed in bright Christmas lights! I’ve never before seen a bicycle with lights such as these! Pictures of this parade are posted in my foto site.
The next morning I departed late as I was listening to the commentary of my favorite Spanish soccer team on my laptop ~ they lost 3-4 ~ then departed and headed for the long drive back. I didn’t plan to stop at all so hopefully would arrive in three hours or just a bit more. The connecting road from HWY 1 with 101 was snaky and narrow in some spots too, but the traffic was practically nil, so it was an enjoyable drive… did I say I love driving on narrow curvy roads? They remind me of the roads in the Cadiz province in southern Spain…. And amazingly the scenery was just as similar!!
Eventually I reached Marin County and from there it was just riding the traffic tide across the bridge to the City, where I went to Chinatown first to eat something quick and cheap, before I returned “home”. It was without fanfare or celebration, and just more pixs to add to my fast-growing virtual list of millions of image files to record onto plastic DVDs.
I ate during the trip, which is a surprise and I finally experienced a very lovely and easy drive to northern California and Mendocino County. Mendocino in itself is very tiny as I discovered, though very picturesque.
The below picture is of an unusual sight in downtown Mendocino: Father Time and the Maiden... which sits upon a pedestal on top of a white building in the downtown area, now a bank though it used to be the Masonic Lodge in much earlier years. Carved by mason Erick J. Albertson who worked for a local lumber m
ill, it was in his free time within a small shack where he made this interesting depiction of Father Time and the Maiden out of redwood. It also shows the Hourglass of Transience, the weeping Maiden with the Anointment of Her Hair, the Acacia Branch and the Sacred Urn, the Sundered Column, and the Book of Light - all of which are items symbolic of the Masonic Order. Thanks to the Mendocino Visitor Center whose kind wise volunteer provided me with this information and much more.
