Our 3 year anniversary is coming up so Jonah took a couple days off work so we could go on a trip to celebrate. However, we could never decide what we wanted to so of course it ended up being last minute plans. We left on Saturday after sleeping in and packing and headed north toward San Francisco. The plan was to camp outside of the city and go for day visits and hangout at the campground. I got us directions for a few campgrounds so we'd have a few options if some were full. Well, I didn't check the directions that I printed directly off of the campground website and so instead of a campground we ended up at a street and then had no idea how to get to the campground. We called Isaac and he got us some directions but the site was full so then after searching for more campgrounds nearby he ended up booking us a room at the Days Inn in Redwood City. We had to back track a bit but we were just happy to have somewhere to stay! After checking into our room we drove down the main street and found some dinner at a local restaraunt that claimed they had everything you could want to eat. We were a little dissapointed with the food but had fun trying a new place anyway. The next morning we checked out at 10:30 and headed toward San Fran. Jonah wanted to stop and take pictures at the Maserati and Ferrari dealership that we had seen on our way to dinner.
We made it to the City and found an $8 all day parking garage without too much trouble! We left the car (with a little bit of apprehension about ever finding it again!) and started walking to find some food. Before food however, I needed to go to the bathroom but of course we couldn't find one! Finally we went into Starbucks and waited in line with other people who had as much trouble as we did finding a bathroom.
Once that was taken care of we focused on our quest for food. We found plenty of places to eat but unfortunately they were all closed which we found very odd. We ended up walking quite a ways and made it to Pier 39 where once again we had to search for a bathroom! After finally discovering one that actually had doors on the stalls we were once again able to look for food. By this time it was already after 2:00pm and we wanted something fast! We saw a crepe stand and it looked SO good!! So we got hot dogs which were yummy and then split a banana, Nutella crepe with whip cream. It was DELICIOUS!!!! We felt much better after getting food in our tummies and resting for a while.
We started walking back toward Mission St. but took a different route than when we walked over. This route was a little less direct and had a lot more hills. I started getting pretty tired (we had walked pretty much all afternoon) but we didn't know where to go. We decided we should try to find the car and to check and see what time the garage closed for the day.
Once we got to the car we decided to just leave San Fran and find somewhere to stay for the night. We settled on Pinnacles National Monument and headed that way. Of course things wouldn't be that easy. After driving the couple of hours it took to get there we discovered that the side of the park we were entering (west) was a day use only and the gate closes at 8:00pm (it was past) and there is no through road to get to the other side. Once again we had no place to sleep and were tired and frustrated. We back tracked (again) and found a motel in Salinas. The next morning we checked out and went to Denny's for breakfast. We got on the road and decided to just head home. The trip wasn't turning out like we had wanted and I've forgot to mention until just now that the whole time it had been either raining or a chance of rain. So we were headed south on the 101 when we decided that we were so close to the beach that we might as well go and if it rained on us then who cares?! We stopped in Cambria and walked around the town and then went on a walk through a beautiful field where we found lots and lots of birds flying in the air. We were dissapointed that we hadn't been able to camp on our trip so we made the decicion to go to Montana de Oro and spend the night there. We stopped at a store to get some soup, bread bowls, and wine for dinner and then went to the campground. We were pleased to find it nearly empty and picked out a nice spot and got set up.
We made and ate dinner and were ready to start our fire when it started raining. We headed to the tent hoping it wouldn't last too long so we could have our campfire. We busted out the DVD player and watched the Office....... until the battery ran out. The rain was still falling and spending the entire evening in the tent wasn't what we wanted so we threw everything in the car and went home!
