4036.2

I am glad I didn't bother to add up the total mileage for the trip before we left. I might have been scared off of it. We're already over four-thousand miles. I swear. Seems impossible, but there it is. No wonder the gas is killing my (wildly estimated) (pseudo) budget for this trip. At least the car, despite being over 113,000 miles (and rapidly counting) still gets like 27 miles on the highway.



Though we've left that portion of the trip behind for a bit, the whole part thru Oregon had lots of encounters with Lewis & Clark, and the Oregon Trail, and all that. Every place we encountered them treated it as a relatively unique experience, worth paying attention to, but I was so used to the same stuff in the KC area, I blew it off for a while. Finally I realized its much like the river following I had previously been ranting about. Its an interesting connection, that people set forth from very near my house, and ended up where we did in the north-west. And we thought it was a long trip by car, on interstate highways.



Anyway, back to the story. We've been in Pacifica for three days, and have done several spates of touristing and shopping in the city as well.




We've done some walking and driving around, but the water is cold so not really any ocean work since the surfing (and I am still sore from that). The hotel pool is closed, and their alternative turned out to be in Half Moon Bay, like half an hour away over what ends up being a dangerously twisty road. Cool and scenic, though, so we stop various places, and come back the next day to hike up the state park we saw the entrance to.



McNee Ranch goes back a few miles, but we stuck to the coast. Good views, as its basically above CA-1 where its dangerous there. The rest of the park is some sort of amazingly unique and unspoiled wilderness, such that efforts to avoid the twisty road have been thwarted since the 60s, and just now they are solving it by tunneling under the park.


That evening we went to the Cliff House for dinner. Good food, but we were suprised to find its an NPS concession, and indeed there's a series of good looking parks on this side of the headlands. So, Monday we took the same route up the coast, bopped around the edge of Lincoln Park, then drove over random city streets (stopping along the way for some Turkish) to Fisherman's Wharf. Not too impressed with most of the touristy stuff, but the NPS had a nice little museum (sadly, still under construction) and a lot of old, restored boats. Mostly big ships, but I liked the junk, the working schooner and the other small boats.



They even had a functioning boat building shop. Apparently, aside from their work on restoration, they offer classes.

After this, more wandering thru the city, with stops at EQ3 and Room & Board for shopping. Also some wandering along the waterfront areas near the stadium and the Academy of Art. We ran across a nice little gallery that had half its first floor dedicated to an artsy, but still production-level, letterpress shop. They do wine labels and other such high-end, low-volume stuff. Talked to them a bit (due to my print history and mostly-latent sadness at not pursuing it anymore) and it was cool to see.