day 20 - san francisco, ca to los angeles, ca

Our first stop for the day was Monterey Bay, home of lovely sandy beaches:


The main attraction in this city was the Monterey Bay Aquarium, considered one of the best in the world.

The aquarium itself is located on a street called Cannery Row, which was historically full of canneries (factories specializing in canned fish). In fact, the aquarium used to be a sardine cannery itself.



The following are just pictures of the various fish that we saw. They seem to specialize in keeping particularly exotic and beautiful species of fish. They had a kelp forest exhibit, as well as a special exhibit on seahorses.










Out in the back, there were some wild seals sun bathing on rocks in the bay:


Monterey Bay Aquarium is one of the very few in the world that has the knowledge and capacity to keep an ocean sunfish. Unfortunately their sunfish had been released (it grew too big) but here's a picture of an ocean sunfish for reference. THEY LOOK LIKE GIANT FISH HEADS. And they get to be as big as 14 feet, making them the biggest fish in the world except for sharks. (They are harmless, though, and such slow swimmers that all they can catch to eat is jellyfish.)


We didn't get to see a sunfish, but we bought a sunfish stuffed animal anyway.

The rest of our day was spent cruising down the scenic highway 1, which had many lovely beach vistas.



Finally, at the end of the day, we reached Los Angeles!!!

We stayed in a local Comfort Inn for the night, and moved in the next day (Thursday the 2nd). After over 6300 miles of driving, we're happy to be home!

day 19 - fresno, ca to san francisco, ca

For most of our day in San Francisco, we were lost or stuck in traffic. It kind of took the shine off of what was otherwise a great city. To be frank however, the streets of downtown San Francisco are probably the most un-car-friendly streets I've ever been in - worse than New York. They are first of all, ridiculously hilly. Secondly, there are these trolleys taking up all this space on the street and going incredibly slowly. Finally, there's something about the lights...they only seemed to stay green for about 10 seconds at a time.



But anyway, San Francisco is a fun city with a very New York kind of feel in the downtown area. We first stopped in Chinatown, of course, because we were (again) craving Asian food.



Then we tried to look for the Golden Gate bridge. After numerous failed turns and a lot of confusion, we ended up going through Golden Gate Park, which ends in a cute beach.


We drove for another 20 minutes before finally finding it:


Here's a segment of bridge and some facts:

By then, unbelievably, it was already 5pm. (To be fair, we did take a nap earlier in the day too.) So we headed to Pier 39, a nice, Santa Monica-esque market area on the wharf.




From the end, you can see Alcatraz, the famous prison, as well as lots of sea lions (but we didn't see them that day).

Then we had an amazing seafood meal at Pier Market.

Steamed clams

Grilled scallop and shrimp skewer

Grilled teriyaki salmon

We will undoubtedly be back to San Francisco - just not with a car next time.

day 18 - mariposa, ca to fresno, ca

We spent the day exploring Yosemite!


The drive up was quite lovely. Mariposa is about 40 miles from the park, and it was nice and woody. We hit Sierra National Forest, which is right outside the park entrance, and followed a road that had a rushing river running alongside it.

Partway there, we saw the remains of a rock slide. Apparently they're pretty common in this park.

On the valley of the park, we got a nice view of more of the river, many of the park's large waterfalls, and several giant rock faces.





We took a small trail to the bottom of one of these waterfalls. Along the way we saw this fearless squirrel and a mule deer.


Here's the bottom of the waterfall:

We dropped by a visitor's area to get lunch, then decided to escape the valley floor because it was ridiculously crowded. 95% of the visitors who go to Yosemite never leave the valley floor, as it has a ton of amenities and a shuttle bus that takes you to a bunch of scenic sites. We decided to take a road that led above into the alpine zones to see the views.

The silvery stripe down the center of this next photo is the river we were following:


As we continued up in elevation, the land became increasingly rocky, and trees grew sparse:

Here's a view from a point about 8,000 ft high:

We also came across a lovely alpine lake here, where we took a break:

And this is Tuolomne Meadow, the largest alpine meadow in the park.


After driving the distance back towards the valley, we wanted to go see the stand of giant sequoia trees, but it was at the very south entrance of the park, so we sped down there. On the way we got this lovely, postcard-worthy vista, complete with a rainbow:

At one of the other scenic points, we saw this bear! It was pretty exciting. He didn't attack or anything.

More nice views:



Here's a striking bird, called the Stellar's Jay:

Finally, just after sunset, we got to the sequoia stand. It's hard to get a sense of how large they are from these pictures, but they are wide enough for eight people to stand around them holding hands.


We decided to stay the night in Fresno, and got some rest before heading up to San Francisco in the morning.