Tuesday 23rd – From San Francisco to Eureka

I was frustrated with San Fran (especially since all the hills meant Bertha was of little use, on top of the impossible traffic) so I decided to get out of town.  I had planned to do some shopping first, but gave it up when multiple road closures made the traffic even worse than usual.  But it did give me a slow-mo tour of Chinatown when a very frazzled traffic cop was attempting to merge 6 lanes of traffic down into one.

After I survived that I headed over the Golden Gate and stopped at the viewpoint just over the far side of the bridge – together with every other tourist.  I like San Fran a lot better from a distance!

I then went for a drive around Marin headland where I took this:

 And then through Sausalito – a very pretty, very expensive little town.  From there it was full steam ahead to Eureka (no, not that one unfortunately) – here’s my route

I think of San Fran as being pretty small – but it’s amazing how long it took to get totally out of town/suburbia.  Basically all the way to Santa Rosa it’s suburbs, and even after that it’s a lot of little towns.  After that it gets pretty – wineries, then LOTS of trees, it really starts to feel like the northwest with endless pine trees.  I really enjoyed this part of the drive.

Very curvy roads in parts, and not easy driving for the last bit.  I was tired by the time I got to Eureka.  I’m staying in the Eureka Inn –

A lovely historic hotel, with a great big room – they upgraded me so I wouldn’t have to climb the stairs – the lift was broken.  But it was still a long walk from the car to my room.  And I’m feeling a bit silly but I’m using not only my own pillow, but also towel and doona – no tiny scratchy towels, and no sweating under polyester doonas!

I’ve decided to camp out here an extra day to rest up and do some laundry.  They’ve got OK wifi so the plan was to catch up on blog posts – you can see how well that’s working, I’m still a week behind!