A bridge over the sea and the inhabitants beneath

8/22:

I woke up this morning to the braying of a donkey as a car alarm went off. And of course once the donkeys were braying, the goats had to bleat and the horses had to neigh and children had to scream. I quickly decided that the campground was just a little too rowdy for me and packed up my stuff to book it down to San Francisco. But first I had to find a campground for the next two nights, because somehow I forgot to book any. Oops. Found one for tonight – Saddle Mountain – but had no luck finding one for the next night. Guess I'll figure that one out when I get to it!

Anyways, I hopped on the freeway and headed south to the Golden Gate. I had expected some kind of visitor center or welcome or pulloff or something on the northern side, but apparently there isn't one (or I missed it if there was) because I very suddenly found myself crossing the USA's most famous bridge! It was fairly uneventful and kind of unexciting, to be honest. A bridge is a bridge, I guess.

Cloudy as usual

Nice reflection though on my nice clean car!

On the other side I parked in the touristy madness and walked around for a bit. I wanted to find my souvenirs for the bridge – because I had indeed crossed it, whether or not it was exciting – but unfortunately had no luck at all. Really disappointed about that as our family has a tradition of getting a Christmas ornament at every destination we travel to, and I have been keeping up with that and getting an ornament at every major place that I stop. San Francisco is the first place for which I've failed to acquire an ornament (so if anyone has a spare laying around and wants to send it to me, I will gladly pay for it!). There were a couple of souvenir shops downtown on the east side, but I avoided that entire area of madness entirely and no amount of ornaments could have made me go down there. It was an absolute zoo! I cruised around the western side of the city though, stopping at their version of NYC's City Park. Eventually I got really tired of the traffic (mostly the people causing it, and their assumption of your car's braking ability, and their apparent need to be somewhere 3 seconds faster if at all possible) and booked it out of the city. I was definitely very glad to have my cargo net there though as there were a lot of times when I had to brake hard and all of my stuff was held down pretty well instead of flying about the interior destructively.

Very nice view

Alcatraz off in the distance.

Inconvenienced a bunch of tourists to get this pretty terrible picture! Ha

Jane ate a dragonfly for lunch.

From San Francisco I took Hwy 280 down to Monterey to see the aquarium. That was much more my speed – Monterey is a beautiful town and there's a lot of cool stuff to see and do there. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of time to explore as I wanted to spend most of my time at their famous aquarium, which I last visited a little more than a decade ago as a child. It was just as awesome as I remembered it being, though the entrance price was quite a bit higher than I recalled (ha). I took a zillion pictures of the coolest things I saw – especially the jellyfish and cuttlefish – which of course I will share with you all. I apologize for the overwhelming amount of pictures but marine life is really my thing! So here they are:

Very cool entrance to the Open Sea exhibit.

A buncha seals looking fat out in the bay

Upside-down jellyfish! Saw these when snorkeling in Belize once.

They had all different kinds of colors of jellyfish, very cool

Reef squid chilling out

Nautili!! Never seen these in person before and they are so interesting! I wanted to see one really swim but no luck unfortunately.

Cuttlefish - one of my favorite animals!

Defensive pose

Giant kelp forest exhibit

This shrimp was cleaning the eel

What sand dollars actually look like when they're alive!

This fish was living in a shoe hahaha

Otter naptime

Awesome sunfish!

After I had wandered around the whole aquarium a few times, I left to go to Carmel Valley, where my campsite was for the night. A VMFer friend Jeff had recommended this place Baja Cantina to me for dinner, so I did that instead of resupplying my cooler. It was a super cool Mexican-American restaurant just chock full of vintage auto memorabilia – signs, posters, ads, business cards, plates, you name it it was in there! Lots of brands I had never even heard of, which I of course looked up on my phone while I ate. Great food and I'd highly recommend it to any vintage car enthusiast in Carmel Valley looking for a place to eat.

Tomorrow will be an extra special day, as Jeff has arranged a Mustang cruise for Jane and I to join! Super excited to meet some more VMFers in person and get to hang out with car people for the day. I cleaned Jane up a bit more to make sure we wouldn't be embarrassed in the presence of cars that would undoubtedly be clean and show-ready. But she's going to be a little dirty because hey, we're on a trip across America and I spend a lot of time on dirt roads. Oh well! Can't wait anyways. Kelly signing out.