Hello From George in SF

Sunset at SF RV Resort

After a long day of driving and exploring Fisherman's Wharf yesterday, everyone is sleeping-in this morning.  I am sipping a cup of coffee and enjoying the view from the RV which is parked in a camp that overlooks the Pacific Ocean.  The view is spectacular, but the park is a little crowded and it gets quite chilly in the evening due to the wind from the ocean.  Today we will venture back into the city and tomorrow cross over the Golden Gate and head north up the coast. 

I forgot to mention an incident on my previous post that occurred as we were approaching Yosemite a couple of days ago.  My GPS told me to take a slight detour from the main road into the park.  When we pulled onto this road, a man driving a pickup truck shook his head at us.  "I think that guy is telling us not to go this way," Natalie warned me.  "And I thought I saw a sign back there that said 'no vehihicles more than 7,500lbs' allowed".  But I could clearly see a bus and a heavy truck lumbering up the switchbacks on the mountain side.  "If they can get up there, we can, too," I replied, shifting the big RV down into 2nd gear.  Natalie and the kids, looking at the sharper and sharper turns and steepening climb, were not convinced.  "Maybe you should turn around, dad," Andi warned.  But the RV barely fit on the winding road.  Turning around was not an option.  Eventually, I had to manually shift down into 1st gear, and the straining RV barely managed 10 or 15 MPH up the steep, winding road.  When we finally got to the top, I reassured everyone that I was (of course) right, and they should not have given me such a hard time.  But when we left the park a couple of days later, and the GPS again directed me to the "shortcut" to go back down the hill, I saw the sign myself:  "STEEP WINDING ROAD!  ABSOLUTELY NO TRUCKS OR MOTOR HOMES ALLOWED!  VEHICLE GROSS WEIGHT LIMITED TO 7,500 LBS!"  Turns out that the trucks I had seen from the bottom were actually driving on the main road.  The switchback was a shortcut for smaller vehicles (like sports cars and experienced locals in pickup trucks).  Fortunately, everything turned out okay (thanks to my skillfull RV handling, of course :))