San Francisco tour with Carol and Ralph

Wed Feb 25

Today we joined up with Carol and Ralph and set out for a tour of some areas of San Francisco that they had not seen before.
First we drove from Fremont over the long San Mateo bridge (about 7 miles long) to Half Moon Bay which is on the ocean about directly west of Fremont but across the bridge and over the mountains.
We watched the waves and some surfers working them along the beach. The waves were very strong this am and the tide was apparently at high tide based on the water level. We nearly got splashed a couple times by a monster wave that came in and whacked against the rocks on the shore. If you stand around with the waves hitting like that you soon have a coating of salt residue on your glasses and the car windshield.
Then we drove north up the coast to Pacifica. There we went to a large pier that we have been at before and walked out on this pier. There are always people on the pier fishing for Dungenous Crab. We even saw one person catch one. Unfortunately for the fisherman, the crab's shell measured 5.75 inches and needed to measure 6 inches to keep him so back in the water he went.
The following picture was taken out at the end of the pier looking back at land. This guy stood still long enough for me to get his picture. Notice how green the hills in the background are. They have had a lot of rain in the area over the past few days and the grass is really growing green now. The area is about as green as we have ever seen it now. We have seen it in its brown state more often than green. Now and for about a month will probably be its greenest times.

Our next stop was at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge where we had a little trouble with the parking meter, but after having it eat a few quarters, we finally got enough to register so we took off to walk out on the Golden Gate Bridge. I waned to have at least 1.5 hours to walk out and back and the meter was only registering about 3/4 of the quarters we fed it.

We walked out to the first main support where we took the next picture.



















This is proof that Carol and Ralph did make it out the the first main support of the bridge. We took a few other pictures as well but I like this spot best.



After the bridge hike, we headed to Fisherman's Warf where we had the traditional Sour Bread Bowl of Clam Chowder.



We drove back home to Fremont via the Bay Bridge which some of you may recall had a big problem in previous earth quake. It is a 2 layer bridge. The traffic going towards the city is on the top layer and the traffic going east is the bottom layer. We were in the lower level. No earth quakes today.