San Francisco Bay Area

We've been in the San Francisco Bay area, movin, shakin, bobbin, weavin, and visitin, now it's time to chill out and at least catch you up on what we did on the way here. BTW, while at Kingsburg we never did check out Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks. We just weren't motivated to drive up into the cold, snowy elevations, so we skipped that trip.

When we left Kingsburg and Viking RV Park we traveled 250 miles NW, as planned, to just beyond San Francisco, stopping at Wine Country RV Park in Rohnert Park, CA.

The first 150 miles were over a rather rough, bumpy, noisy Hwy 99N. It was a flat, difficult drive as the highway was crowded, and the number of lanes varied constantly between 2, 3, and 4 lanes. That's because we passed thru so many sprawled out farming towns and cities, each with their own fast food joints, hotels, fuel stops, and car dealerships. The largest of these places were named Fresno, Chowchilla, and Modesto.

Finally we got off of Hwy 99, switching to Hwy 580W. This took us thru an industrialized area before entering the hill country east of Oakland. That's where we found ourselves in the middle of a huge wind farm, fascinating but ugly, certainly the largest wind farm we’ve seen all along the way thus far, and there have been several.

Hwy 580 moved into some beautiful, hilly territory outside of Oakland. Once in the ‘bay‘ area the sky turned gray and we had to use the windshield wipers for the first time in recent memory. The jet stream has been blowing directly into this area and north for the past month or more and I‘ve been watching and hoping the pattern would change before we got here. We are heading into the Pacific Northwest though, so what’s to be expected, showers and gray skies, and we'll make the most of it.

Once in Oakland we had to decide how to get across San Francisco Bay. It would be either the Bay Bridge/Golden Gate combination or the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Since we could see that SF was completely fogged in and wet we avoided going there today. We could see the skyscrapers in the distance, but not the GG bridge. We took the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge which runs right past Tiburon, and we saw San Quentin. Anyway, at San Rafael the Hwy 580 changes to Hwy 101, and we stayed on that another half hour to our destination, Wine Country RV Park at Rhonert Park, CA.

I guess it was a ‘stroke of luck’ that we opted not to use the Golden Gate Bridge today. There were probably delays there (as you may have heard in the news) as a teen-ager caused a disturbance this afternoon when he jumped off, surviving a 220 foot dive with minor injuries.