Our trip started off driving from State College, PA to Dumfries, VA to stay at Erin's for a night. We left a little after 3 pm and arrived down in the V A around 7 or so. We met Erin's family and her brother's collection of snakes, geckos, and piranhas.
Time to get this trip really started. Erin's dad drops us off at Baltimore - Washington International Airport (BWI) for our flight leaving at 4:10 pm. Nothing too unusual so far, we get our tickets, drop off our checked bags, go through security and finally make it to our gate and wait for our plane to board. Finally we start to board for our flight and we make it onto the plane around 4 pm. As we sit there waiting to push back from the gate, the clock keeps moving, soon it's 4:30, then 4:45 pm and we learn that apparently some sea gulls had hit the plane on its way into Baltimore, so they had to inspect the plane for damage before they would even start loading the luggage on board. Eventually we get off of the ground around 5 pm. This is going to cause problems since we only have a 50 minute layover in Atlanta before we catch our flight from Atlanta to Oakland, CA. We finally get off of the plane at 6:55 pm and have to run the entire length of the terminal bags in hand, hurdling chairs, and dodging the elderly to catch our 7 pm flight. As I made it to the gate we were supposed to be catching our flight at, there was no Delta agent to be found. A rude DHL package agent pointed us to a Delta manager in a suit, who upon seeing us arrive at the gate where he was supposed to be helping, turned and ignored us. We finally found a Delta agent that would help us a gate down. Unfortunately, this was the last flight of the night to Oakland, so he scheduled us for the first flight out in the morning at 6:35 to Dallas-Fort Worth to Oakland. He hooked us up with a hotel room at the Hilton, and some certificates for dinner. The hotel was nice, but the restaurant service was horrible. Maybe I'm not used to the slow pace of the south, but it shouldn't take 20 minutes for a waiter to bring you a menu. After a long, hectic day, we hit the sack around midnight, only to wake up in 4 hours.
Waking up at 4 am is horrible, especially when no one is in a good mood from the day before. We all shower and put on our travel clothes from the day before because all of our clothes are in our checked bags somewhere in Atlanta. We take the shuttle back to the airport and board our flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. The plane is practically empty, so we can all sprawl out on our own row and I can have a nice window seat. It is a quick flight, so we're soon in the state of Texas. We have a two hour layover until our flight to Oakland, so we kill some time playing cards in the terminal. Finally we board our flight to California and get out of Texas. There isn't much between Texas and California except strange geometric shaped fields and the Rocky Mountains. We touch down in Oakland at noon, and head to baggage claim hoping our bags made it through all the connections. After all of our troubles so far, we aren't too optimistic, but eventually they fall onto the spindles and into our hands. (More on this at the end.) Then we make it outside into the 70 degree sun of California! Katie's mom drives us back to their house in Navato, just north of San Francisco. After dropping our stuff off and picking up her brother, we head down to Baja Fresh, we get a taste of real Mexican food. This is just the beginning of the Mexican food onslaught for the trip. Later that night, we drive our to Sacramento pick up Katie's other brother's truck for her mom for the week. This is also my introduction to the California gas prices. We find gas in Sacramento for $1.99 a gallon (the cheapest we'll see all trip), so we fill up and head back to Navato to sleep. (When I opened my luggage that I had checked, I found out that half of my clothes were missing. A few shirts, shorts, socks, and underwear, bathing suit were all gone. None of it was too important, but it is really frustrating what our rights have taken a hit since the increase in security. I still have a claim pending with Delta about this situation.)
We drove down to the University of California at Santa Cruz to visit Katie's best friend Jenny. We toured the campus which is very spread out and all the buildings are hidden in the trees which is pretty cool. It is much different than all the other U.C. schools that I have seen. I didn't take too many photos because we were busy running around the town of Santa Cruz and all the little book stores and surf shops. We didn't make it into the pacific, but I had gone in there the last time I was in California and it was freezing, even in August. We left early in the evening for the 2 hour trip back up north to go home to watch some movies.
This was our big trip to downtown San Francisco. We woke up early (10 am) and took the ferry from Marin to downtown San Fran. The ferry went by San Quentin Prison, while the inmates were outside, so we all said hi to Charles Manson. I took a few pics of the Golden Gate Bridge from afar through the fog. I also took one of Alcatraz from the boat. Finally we reached the Port of San Francisco and started walking around the city. We walked through a little farmers market and saw a lady with a Jamba Juice. If you've never heard of it, it is a really good fruit smoothie. After 3 people joined the conversation, we found out where the closest Jamba Juice store was and headed down Market street through the financial district. The architecture there is really impressive and made for one of my favorite photos. We walked up to the TransAmerica building and then cut across to head back toward the piers. We walked down to Pier 39. Of course there are the token pictures of sea lions. Then it was time for a little lunch so we had to hit the fresh seafood at the Fisherman's Wharf. We split a crab sandwich and clam chowder. I've had better crab sandwiches, but the clam chowder was amazing. After all this walking around the city, we headed back to the ferry to beat rush hour traffic and headed home for another relaxing night watching movies.
Today we were going to head to the beach, but not really for a swim. First we had to get some gas when we found a cheap gas station. We headed to Stinson Beach driving up the famous highway 1 that runs along the coast all the way up to Washington state. The scenery along here is beautiful and you can just smell the ocean and trees all along the road. Too bad it was very foggy, the views were amazing. We finally after traveling through the offskirts of Muir woods and many eucalyptus trees (no koala bears though). We were greeted with signs warning that there have been shark attacks here in the past few years. Fortunately the water was much too cold to anything more than wade in up to our ankles. If I ever lived out there, my first investment would be a wetsuit for the frigid Pacific Ocean. Next we back towards San Francisco and visited the Marin Headlands. Because of the fog we couldn't get too many shots of the Golden Gate Bridge which can normally be seen from this viewpoint. We crossed the bridge into San Francisco and cut down to the Palace of Fine Arts to explore around. There was a small little lake with swans and ducks swimming around there. The architecture and detail was very intricate. Then we traveled around driving through the Pacific Heights, Haight-Ashbury, and Union Square where we almost collided head on with a trolley. After that, we decided to call it a day while we were still alive and head home to the green hills of Navato.
As you can see, gas prices had sky rocketed in California, but we decided to drive out to visit another of Katie's friend who goes to the University of California at Berkeley (a.k.a Cal, or Berkeley). We stopped at Kim's sorority house to pick her up for our visit and took a tour of their huge house (Sororities at Penn State don't have their own houses, they live in the dorms). The view from their roof is insane. Wouldn't that be something nice to wake up to, a view of San Francisco and Oakland across the bay. Their campus reminded me a little of being back at Penn State, but with a little crazy hippy street stuck through the middle. We walked along Telegraph Avenue and checked out Amoeba Music and Rasputin Music where I finally found a cd i had been searching for. Nothing really too exciting there to see except students going to class who weren't on spring break! We went back home as it started to rain and the storms came.
Ah, Friday, our last full day in California. We decided just to sit back and enjoy our last day of relaxation before returning to PA. Jenny and her friend Cynthia drove up from Santa Cruz to visit and so we had a little party at Katie's house after her mom made us double decker tacos. (I think we had real Mexican food everyday at least once. Mmmm.) We sat around, played some cards, watched movies and went to bed early to wake up for our flight back home the next day.
After our flights on the way out, I knew there was no way getting back home was going to go smoothly. Surprisingly, our first flight from Oakland to Atlanta was on time and we arrived in Atlanta about an hour before our connection flight. Unfortunately, it was raining and foggy there, so the gates were backed up and they switched our arrival gate. We lucked out and were moved closer to our departing gate and we made our connection flight back to Baltimore. Something was going too well, I tried to remain optimistic, but the girls had to bring me down. In the short time we were in Atlanta, Delta wasn't able to move our baggage from one plane to the next, so our baggage hadn't flown back with us to Baltimore. We were told that they would drive it out to Erin's house in the early morning. On the drive back to her house, we hit up Walmart for some 50 cent toothbrushes and headed home. Luckily, our bags arrived at her house around 6 am and we finally had our clothes back.
Time to drive back home to Penn State. When we returned, it felt like we were back at the beach with 70 degree weather and people everywhere already starting to celebrate St. Patty's Day. I had a great time in California, but it is always nice to be back at PSU.
Just a note, all of these pictures have been scaled down so they don't take up too much space. If you want any of the original high quality pics, just email me or im me and I'll send you them.