San Francisco looks like a great city! Wow. AND it has perfect weather – 55 at night and 65 during the day. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Mer and I went west, young man, to come to a friend’s wedding, which is today (Saturday). We decided to make a mini-vacation of it, so we are here for five days, in the greater SF area.

Yesterday was travel day – we got up at 5:00, so we could leave at 6:30, for a 9:00 (non-stop!) flight from Cleveland to SF. This is a big country! It amazes me that I can start out in Cleveland (not the east coast), and still get on a plane and spend almost five hours on it and still be in the U.S. Amazing.

The flight was without incident (one of the two movies was Fool’s Gold, which was the in-flight movie when we went to the DR on another airline – that was funny to me), and we got to SF around 11:30. We got our rental car (a 2008 Ford Focus that I am very fond of) and were on the road by 1:00 or so. We wanted to check out a park north of SF, so we had to go through the city and across the Golden Gate bridge. While not super-efficient, it was very cool to see the city this way. We only have the car through today, so it was neat to see the city by car – after the wedding we’ll explore it on foot.

Our destination was Muir Woods, which is a redwood forest preserve. While not so big or well-known as the Redwood National Forest, it is only about 15 miles from SF. What a drive! It was all winding roads with ocean views from time to time. What fun!

The park was really nice. Redwoods are huge. We grabbed a quick bite in the park center, and then hit the paved trail. Until I saw the unpaved trail. That went up. And up. And up. Guess which trail we took?

It was a nice trail – strenuous enough to keep most tourists away but not so strenuous that we were panting (except for one small section). Meredith did great – I was more winded than she was. I am proud of her – she is in very good shape now compared to how she was with some trails we did in France last year.

The trail wound around all kinds of redwoods (did I mention they are huge?), and wound back and forth while going up the hill. It was called “Ocean View Trail,” so we kept being excited to see the ocean. After about an hour of climbing, we finally made it to the top of the hill, and a road. From the road, we were pretty sure we could see haze that was over the ocean. That’s our story, and we are sticking with it! Later, when we got back to the bottom of the trail and looked at the trail map again, the small print we did not read indicated that you could not actually see the ocean on Ocean View Trail until the very top. Ah, well.

On the wildlife front, we got treated to seeing a huge bird flying below us (when we were on top of the hill) – that is always weird to me to see a bird below me. We also saw two deer grazing on a slope that must have been 45 degrees – they were not concerned about us in the least. I figure they knew nothing could chase them up that slope.
 
It was also heartening to know that foreigners are still coming to the U.S. as tourists. On the trail and in the visitor center, we heard seven or eight different languages, including Chinese, Italian, French, Norwegian, German, Russian, Polish, and maybe more. We also heard U.S. accents from all over. Neat.

We left the park about 5:00, and one of the staff recommended taking Route 1 north. She said it was “fairly” pretty, and would take longer but avoid rush hour out of SF. We took her up on it. “Fairly” pretty turned out to be breathtaking! I have never seen coastline like that, and I have never been on a road like that either. Shannon’s friend Greg needs to get his car to this road! It has more switchbacks and hairpin turns than any road I have ever seen. You can never get faster than 35 mph, and 25 is more normal. It is worth it though. It did turn the two-hour drive into more like four hours, but I don’t regret it. Wonderful.

We got to the hotel about 8:00 and then went out to (walk) to get something to eat. I like the hotel – it is brand new, has internet in the room, and has an iPod-compatible radio alarm, so I can listen to my Shuffle as I write this. Very nice touch!

So, that is SF, Day 1. I’m looking forward to Jeff and Julie’s wedding today – I’m thrilled for Julie, plus I love weddings. More later if I have internet access in my SF hotel room.