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DAY 16 – Monday, March 29
START: Orangevale, CA
END: Montara, CA
MILEAGE: 133 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: San Francisco, Lombard Street, Fisherman’s Wharf, Cable Cars, Point Montara Lighthouse Hostel

The mood was very somber all morning as Lauren and I once again packed our bags and loaded everything into the car.  The four of us sat around the table until past eleven o’clock, eating breakfast and talking about insignificant things.  Nobody wanted to say the thing we knew had to be said.  Finally, with the pit of my stomach dropping out completely, I said, “Okay...”  I didn’t even need to finish the sentence.  We all knew.  Slowly, we stood up and headed for the door.  Lauren and I did a cursory last check to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything – as well as to prolong the inevitable departure.

We all hugged.  Several times.  Individual hugs.  Group hugs.  Sandwich hugs with Laila in the middle.  We stood around talking about more insignificant babble.  Then we hugged again.  And then again.  Once more I was the one who had to say, “I love you,” and then get inside the car.  Even still we talked for a few more minutes through the open windows.  I started the ignition and we talked for a few more.  Finally, we said, “I love you,” one more time and I dropped the car into reverse.  Laura stood with Laila on her hip, both of them waving.  I turned the wheel and pulled out into the street and still Laura stood waving.  She waved until we reached the intersection near her house.  She waved while we sat at the red light.  She continued to wave until we had made the turn and drove out of sight. 

Thirty seconds later, my phone beeped with a simple text message:

:-(

My insides felt empty and the lump in my throat continued to grow.  I hadn’t seen Laura in person for almost four years, and three days together had simply not been enough.  Especially when I knew it was likely to be just as long or longer before we saw each other again.  We had survived on email and telephone for the last few years, but now I knew those means were no longer going to cut it for either of us. 

Lauren and I headed southwest on Interstate 80, passing through Sacramento one last time, and driving past the innumerable California towns that seem to merge endlessly into one another in one long stretch of urban sprawl, on our way to San Francisco.  We stopped for lunch at In-n-Out Burger, my one and only “must-eat-at-several-times” place whenever I come to California, with burgers so delicious that I was still able to scarf down my Animal Style Double Double despite my lack of appetite. 

Lauren understood my solemn mood, but also understood that we had two more weeks of driving ahead of us, so she made me this compromise: “I know you need to be sad right now, so be sad today, as long as you can get over it by tomorrow.”  I told her I would try.

I always describe San Francisco the same way to those who have never been there:

“You know in Winnie the Pooh, how there’s always a cloud over Eyeore that only rains on him?  Well picture yourself driving down the California freeway.  It’s bright and sunny everywhere you look.  But off in the distance you see this one giant cloud hanging over one section of the earth.  Every time you drive this way, that cloud has not moved.  It just continues to hang there in that same spot.  That spot is San Francisco.”

People who come to San Francisco expecting the warm and sunny California weather they’ve been hearing so much about will be sorely disappointed.  Surrounded by water on three sides, San Fran takes in plenty of the Pacific’s cool ocean currents.  That cold water mixing with the hot air of the California mainland is what gives the city its signature foggy weather and perpetual hanging cloud.  I can still remember spending one particular Fourth of July in San Francisco wearing long pants and a sweatshirt and still feeling as though I needed an extra layer.  Ironically it was this drab and dreary weather that made San Francisco such an ideal settlement since the winter and summer temperatures only differ by twenty or so degrees, sustaining a mild average temp of around fifty.

We drove into San Francisco, and under the cloud at around 1:30.  I remembered from my previous trips into the city that there was relatively cheap parking in Chinatown so we found a garage there.  We knew by the time we got here that we wouldn’t have a lot of time to really take in much of the city, so our plan was to hit the few choice (i.e. touristy) places I remembered and call it a day.  I threw some snacks, water bottles and our sweatshirts into the backpack, slung the camera over my shoulder and we were off.

…or more appropriately, UP. 

San Francisco is built on a series of forty-three hills, many of which boast a grade close to or greater than twenty percent.  That’s saying something when you consider that all but the most treacherous mountain roads have a maximum grade of fifteen.  But Lauren, now with thirty extra pounds of belly, was a trooper.  She grunted and breathed through each uphill step, forcing me to stop often, but never giving up – even after an extremely rude Chinese lady refused to let her use the bathroom in her restaurant.  

We walked up Columbus Avenue through the neighborhood of North Beach, famous for (amongst other things) having the world’s first officially recognized strip club as well as playing host, back in the day, to many well-known artists and Beat Generation writers including Jack Kerouac – who even has an alley named after him.  The neighborhood is now home to dozens of hip coffee houses, culturally cool bookstores, and deliciously enticing Italian restaurants – as well as the city’s notorious red light district.  Lauren tried her luck in one of the Italian restaurants, and the very charming (and very effeminate) host graciously allowed her to use the bathroom.  We both agreed at that moment that Italians are much nicer than Chinese people.

Ever upward, we tried to take Lauren’s mind off the growing pain in her legs by playing an admittedly juvenile game: Friends or Lovers.  It’s no secret that San Francisco boasts a higher-than-average gay population, with some polls putting the census at over twenty percent – not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Every time two men or two women went by us, we took guesses as to whether they were a couple, or merely hetero jogging buddies out for a run.  The game carried us all the way to Lombard Street and to the base of Russian Hill, at which point the relatively gradual grade we’d been on shot to ridiculous proportions and Lauren needed to save every ounce of breath she had for her ascent.

With a maximum grade of twenty-seven percent, Lombard Street is still only the third steepest street in the city, though by far the most famous.  In 1923, as a way to alleviate the dangers associated with such a steep incline, the city planners installed eight “switchbacks” into the street’s steepest block between Leavenworth and Hyde Streets.  Paved with bricks, adorned with bright red hydrangeas, and passing along several beautifully old Victorian houses, Lombard Street inadvertently became one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city – and the inspiration for a particularly funny Bill Cosby routine.  All much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of local homeowners who are constantly forced to deal with the extra traffic when thousands of out-of-towners line up for the opportunity to a get picture of themselves driving (slowly) down the “crookedest street in the world.” (Vermont Street near San Francisco General Hospital is technically crookeder than Lombard if you look at it mathematically, but let’s not nitpick).

Unfortunately for Lauren, the sidewalks along Lombard had no switchbacks so she continued to hoof it straight up the hill, asking me why we couldn’t have just driven down the street instead.  To which I replied, “because I don’t feel like sitting in traffic for three hours.”

Turns out I needn’t have worried.  Mondays in March apparently aren’t prime tourist days in San Francisco, and traffic was moving along at a swift five miles per hour down the crooked street.  After taking our obligatory pictures and marveling back at the insanely steep hill my nearly-eight-months-pregnant wife had just climbed, we started down the other side along equally-steep Hyde Street, in the direction of San Francisco Bay and the daunting island of Alcatraz – on our way to Fisherman's Wharf.  

Most locals say, and discerning travelers agree, that there is virtually nothing authentic about Fisherman’s Wharf.  Modern shopping malls, tacky gift shops, overpriced seafood restaurants and kitschy museums mostly overshadow the aura of generation upon generation of blue-collar fishermen who helped turn San Francisco into such a thriving port town back in the day.  Nevertheless, like Times Square in New York, Fisherman’s Wharf is an indelible icon of the City by the Bay, second only to the Golden Gate Bridge itself, and a visitor simply cannot come here (much less from three-thousand miles away) and not at least take a stroll along its docks. 

For me personally, I had only one purpose in visiting the touristy wharf: to get myself a bowl of the best damn clam chowder in the speaking world.  Mind you, I lived in Boston for four years, a place that prides itself on its chowdah and I still stand by the statement that the best clam chowder you will ever find in your entire life will come from Fisherman’s Wharf – specifically from Fishermen’s Grotto No. 9. 

In business since 1935, the No. 9 (named for the original stall number it occupied on the Wharf, not the order in which the franchise was opened – this Fishermen’s Grotto is the original) was actually the Wharf’s first sit-down restaurant.  Lauren and I didn’t bother with the sit-down part though, opting instead to pay cash to an employee at one of several outside counters serving piping hot chowder from constantly replenished kettles.  As I always do whenever I’m here, I got my chowder in a signature sourdough bread bowl and ate it, not with a spoon, but by dipping the bread into the thick cream until it’s good and soggy and then popping the whole thing into my mouth.  I made sure to grab several handfuls of napkins as my hands and face are usually quite messy by the time I get to the bottom of my chowderlogged bread bowl… which I then proceed to eat as well.

Lauren tasted the chowder I had been raving about for months, but apparently wasn’t as blown away as I had been, because she headed off toward several gift shops where she bought souvenirs, Christmas ornaments and t-shirts for everyone back home.  I found a shotglass with a simple drawing of a cable car and suspension bridge on it.  Afterward Lauren picked up some lobster bisque from a competing establishment and attempted to eat it as the wind and seagulls competed for the chance to knock the bread bowl out of her hands.  The wind eventually got the better of us, making us wish we had brought more than just a sweatshirt, so we tore up the bread bowl and threw the pieces to the birds and began our trek back to the car. 

It was really quite by accident that we ended up taking a cable car ride out of Fisherman’s Wharf that day.  We hadn’t begun the day intending to be so touristy, but after a few hours of walking we realized there was no way Lauren was going to make it back over the hill(s) to Chinatown.  So we bought a couple of tickets to ride the Powell-Mason cable line – the longest continuously running transit line in the world.  The six-dollar fee included a couple of collectible postcards and a really long ass line. 

While romantically steeped in nostalgia, the cable car isn’t exactly the most efficient means of travel about the city.  A new trolley came along once every twenty minutes or so, about the same frequency as a city bus, but the capacity on each car was only fifty or sixty people, half the amount of their diesel-powered counterparts.  Lauren was content to sit and wait through four full carloads as long as it meant she was off her feet.  When our turn came, we raced around to the front of the car where Lauren could sit on the outside of the bench and where I could stand on the rail, hanging off the side of the trolley like so many people in vintage sepia-toned photographs – or like so many tourists in badly framed digital photos.

The ride lasted about fifteen minutes, taking us back over Russian Hill and across the crest of Lombard Street, where the driver thoughtfully paused to allow everyone to take pictures, then back into Chinatown where we hopped off about six blocks from our parking garage.  It was unfortunately the longest six blocks of Lauren’s life.  On a trip where she had rarely waited more than thirty minutes between pee breaks, Lauren was now going on over an hour and a half and was in desperate need of a bathroom.

She went into the first Chinese restaurant we came to and begged the hostess to use the bathroom.  Either the woman didn’t notice Lauren’s bulging belly or didn’t care.  In any event, she held up her hand, snapped a very curt, “NO!” and turned Lauren away.  The scene was repeated in the next two restaurants in line and Lauren came out, eyes brimming with tears and bladder bursting with… well, yeah.  To this day I have held the Chinese people personally (and corporately) responsible for my wife’s suffering that day.  As such, I did what I considered to be my husbandly duty.  For the remainder of the walk, whenever a Chinese woman came up to hand me a menu or some other useless piece of paper, I held up my hand and all but shouted, “NO!” as I pushed brusquely past her.

In retrospect, I’ve thought of an even better deliverance of justice, which you can feel free to use for yourself.  If I had it to do over again, I would have gone in with Lauren to one of the restaurants that so rudely dismissed her and asked for a table.  I would have let the waitress pour us water and tea tell us the specials.  I would have spent several minutes examining the menu while Lauren used the bathroom several times.  If I was really feeling the spiteful twinge, I might have even ordered something… something expensive.  Then after Lauren had peed until she felt satisfied, we would have said, “Thank you, but we’re just not hungry,” and left.  Some other time perhaps.

We somehow made it all the way to the Holiday Inn adjacent to our parking garage and Lauren finally peed.  Then she peed again.  Then as we made ready to go, she went back to pee one more time.  Sufficiently emptied (for the moment anyway) she lugged her tired and hill-beaten body to the car and we headed out of the city through rush hour traffic. 

We had starred the Point Montara Hostel as soon as we read about it in HOSTELS USA.  The book gave the hostel top honors for setting, saying, “A state park, the hostel comes complete with its own lighthouse, secluded pocket beach, hot tub, views of the Pacific, and glimpses of harbor seals, great blue herons, and migrating gray whales.”  Not that Lauren read that entire paragraph.  They had her at “lighthouse.”  Lauren is a lighthouse nut and for the next several days we would be traveling up the Pacific Coast stopping at as many of them as we could.  The Point Montara Hostel and Lighthouse would be the perfect starting point for the next leg of our journey. 

We drove south along curving California Route 1, which runs right alongside the Pacific Ocean.  Of course by seven o’clock it was too dark to actually see the view, or really the road itself, as there weren’t any streetlights.  We missed our turn the first time, but eventually found the little unmarked road that led down to the hostel.  Lauren became giddy and started hopping up and down in her seat the instant she saw the lighthouse’s beacon slowly turning in the night.  

I started feeling that same irrational nervousness I’d experienced checking into the Pitkin Hostel.  I was worried that all the young but seasoned hostellers would see our loaded down car and pregnant belly and spot us for the phonies we were.  But the conversation with the hostel manager at the check-in desk eased all my anxieties.  He was our age, maybe even a couple years older.  He asked us where we were from, where we were headed and when we were due.  We talked about our trip, what we had seen, and what we had planned for the next few days.  He gave us some tips on places to see up in Oregon and even told us about another hostel at the top of California that was worth visiting if we had the chance. 

We paid fifty-seven dollars for our private room – more expensive than pretty much every motel we’d stayed in thus far, but far cheaper than any we’d find in the San Francisco area no doubt.  After settling in and dropping off whatever items we felt comfortable leaving in a room with no lock, we headed to the kitchen to make dinner.  The fare was much simpler than our Pitkin pasta feast; just turkey sandwiches and tomato soup, but it was filling and delicious.

As we ate, a woman in her fifties named Judy joined us.  Our conversation began with her asking Lauren how far along she was then blossomed into a whole discussion about midwifery and natural childbirth before splintering into other topics from there.  Before the trip, I had been worried that Lauren’s pregnancy was going to prevent us from doing certain things like going out to bars, and meeting people in their smoky local haunts.  But for as many things that we were prevented from doing, that big old belly ignited dozens of conversations all throughout the trip that we might not have had otherwise.  Looking back in retrospect, I wouldn’t have done it any other way. 

Judy, we learned, was a retired high school guidance counselor who was up at the hostel for a few days of R&R.  We were later joined by Mac, another fifty-something who was at the start of a five-day bicycle trip down the California coast.  The hostel manager came and joined us as well and the five of us sat around talking like the easy-going strangers we were, recounting past adventures, talking about the places we came from, and somehow always bringing the conversation back to Lauren’s belly which would inevitably give way to more discussions about homebirth, the medical community and other maternity issues.  Lauren and I later joked that this trip was really all about spreading midwife propaganda everywhere we went.

This was exactly what we had anticipated and hoped for in a hostelling experience; sitting around the table and shooting the breeze with people from all walks of life over a simple hot meal, learning their stories, telling them ours, and coming together under no other common thread than the fact that we were all travelers in this journey of life.  

After our mini-crowd had dispersed, Lauren and I spent the remaining hours until lights out doing laundry and checking email for the first time in two weeks.  Back in our little room we filled out post cards and caught up on our journal, which had fallen behind while at Laura’s.  Around eleven, we turned off the light and fell asleep to the sound of the ocean crashing on the darkened shoreline just outside our window.  Once or twice I awoke in the middle of the night and was lulled back to dreamland by that steady rhythmic sound. 

ONTO DAY 17