Arrival SFO

The flight was uneventful, the movies boring, so I got a reasonable amount of sleep. Luci also slept, thanks to a sleeping pill. We arrived around 9am, but got out of the airport in the rental car around 1, I don'tknow where the time went! The rental carcmpany managed to upsell us in car size, she also lied about the price of petrol (telling us paying 3.08/gallon in advance was better than the street price, but the street price was 2.69) and she lied that it was cheaper to use their phone/internet at $109 when we actually bought a SIM with unlimited US and Mexico coverage for $60. So our first stop was a shopping centre where we looked around and got the SIM.

Then we drove south to San Andreas Lake, went for a walk around the next lake which was pleasant, a bit like Hobart's Waterworks except you couldn't leave the path due to fences. We drove over the hills to the Pacific coast, and north to San Francisco. Crossing the city and approaching the Bay Bridge there was so much traffic! We took an exit and advanced faster through the city streets. On the ramp back to the highway we saw a number of tents of homeless people.

We drove and drove, and realised that the Bay area is much larger than we thought. Eventually we got to Castro Valley where we tried to find somewhere to eat. The reviews on Trip Advisor and Yelp took us to places that were really pretty ordinary (eg, an Afghan restaurant that turned out to be an ordinary takeaway cafe). We ate at a so-so Chinese restaurant. Then we went to the AirBNB home.Read more