After a much needed break from the road at Laura's, we were off again. This time, to San Francisco. Yes, the hills are as bad as you've heard. Lauren was a trooper though. She made it up and down and up and down until we got to Fisherman's Wharf where you can get the best clam chowder IN THE WORLD.

(And remember, I used to live in Boston)

She didn't have the strength to do any more hills at the end of the day, so we took San Fran's most famous mode of transportation, the cable car, back to our garage.

We spent the night south of the city in a hostel that, among other things, boasted its own lighthouse! Lauren is a big lighthouse nut, so of course we had to stay there. The hostel was a suggestion from the book, HOSTELS USA by Paul Karr and Martha Coombs.

This was the first in a long string of lighthouses over the next several days. We drove north, up the Pacific Coast via the winding but scenic California Route 1. It was slow going (rarely was it safe to go any faster than 45m.p.h.) but the views of the ocean crashing onto the jagged rocks below made it worth it.

The road brought us in-land and through the redwood forests for a bit. At one point we saw a sign for a "Drive Through Tree." We were falling behind schedule and desperately trying to make up time, but we both agreed that on a road trip like this we couldn't just drive past something like a tree that you can drive through.

In this extreme northern end of California, you'd never know that you were in the same state as Los Angeles. I finally understood the people who say Northern California is a completely different state of mind from Southern California. Not counting Marin County with its aging hippies and Buddhist communes, this part of California had a true small-town feel. The people were friendly, down to earth and real. No plastic surgery that I could detect.

Back along the coast for the next two days we set our mind to "light bagging." All told we visited over a dozen lighthouses by the time we were in Washington State. We saw nine in Oregon alone!

We got into this area at just the right time as most of the lighthouses were just finally opening their doors to visitors for the season. We talked to the hosts at several of the lights and learned all about local lighthouse history, the life of mariners and even how jetties work.

We even got to climb to the top of a few of the lights...

...no mean feat for a woman who was now going on 35 weeks pregnant.

Oh, if you could have seen the looks people gave us as we started up those steps. I think they really expected Lauren to go into labor right in the light's head.

We'd had plans to spend time in Portland and Seattle, but we realized that we only had a week left before we had to be back, and we still had to get all the way across the country. It had taken us almost two weeks to come all the way west and the trip up the Pacific Coast had taken longer than we'd anticipated. Unfortunately, we had to forgo Portland and Seattle and start pressing East.

ONTO WEEK FOUR
(The Home Stretch)