Novato – San Francisco: Crossing the Golden Gate 22nd - 25th October

It was very difficult to leave the comfort of Petita’s house, but of course we had to and immediately immersed ourselves into the sprawl of San Francisco’s suburbs. Cycle friendly as the area is meant to be, getting into this city was not nearly as simple as getting into Seattle on its much missed leafy luxurious trails.

The bicycle path appeared, disappeared and reappeared, and took many different forms; from dirt paths to paved ones blocked by big slabs of concrete, to hilly steep roads with no shoulder and horrendous quantities of traffic, it took us over and across roads and motorways several times, sometimes totally unnecessarily. We are convinced that the people who are responsible for designing these paths are not cyclists themselves!

After at least three to four hours of stopping, looking around, inspecting maps and our cycling guide book, asking directions from bike shops and nice people, and tolerating comments from rude people, we finally found the very decent cycle path from Marin City, which travelled, flat as a pancake, over marshland to Sausalito. After 6 hours without proper nourishment, moods were sour with low blood sugar and sapped energy level. Therefore, the lunch we ate, with the view of San Francisco across the bay, was possibly one of the best we’d had, and we became human again. It was also a great pleasure to see the highest concentration of bikes in one place that we had during our whole journey, so for once we did not feel like out of place freaks on overloaded bikes, and we struck up friendly conversations with fellow diners and cyclists.

A couple of steep hills took us up to the much anticipated Golden Gate Bridge, a very important milestone in terms of the larger aspects of the trip – at this point we’d cycled from Alaska to San Francisco (well, mostly!). Being such an exciting moment, and much to the annoyance of the many other (and very professional-looking) cyclists whizzing over it, we stopped to take a stupid amount of photos (luckily we have only published a select few of these). So excited were we, in fact, that in a moment of distraction could not find the camera and thought we’d dropped it off the side of the bridge. As usual, Paul found it in some obscure pocket of his pannier.

As we meandered through The Presidio and Crissy Fields, we basked in the late afternoon sunshine, and wisely found a motel that was up one of San Francisco’s more reasonable and gentle hills (and of course very near the bottom).

We found ourselves in a very nice neighbourhood, Russian Hill, which contained such a plethora of excellent eateries, drinkeries, health food shops, cycling shops and salons that could have kept us busy for days, but we did manage to tear ourselves away to see other parts of the city. San Francisco was made most enjoyable by a fantastic tour with Sally and Bob and their dog Annie, our family friends from way back in the 40s. This included visits to Alamo Square for excellent views of the city, the Golden Gate Park where we enjoyed an excellent lunch with Bloody Marys and samples of beer, and most importantly Berkeley to check out the street where Naomi’s gran lived sixty years ago. A very merry night out in the Mission with Mark, a family friend from a long time ago (this time the 70s) and Eric, our on-off cycling companion, meant we spent Paul’s birthday feeling somewhat worse for wear, but this did not stop us from going out to see yet more of the city. The food and the view from the San Francisco Institute of Art is highly recommended, (the toilets aren’t), the cinema was massive (Into the Wild is also recommended and brought back our memories of Alaska), and finally we enjoyed a rather posher than usual birthday evening meal back in our own cosy neighbourhood.

NB We apologise for the delay in publishing the blog – no excuses as usual, except that we have had several big hills to cycle up and social engagements to be filled. We are now doing our utmost to bring it back on track with the photos.

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