San Francisco - Our nerves are shot - June 4, 2009

After spending a wonderfully quiet and peaceful night at the Uvas Pine RV Park south of San Jose we hit the road, the 101 to be specific, and continued heading north. Our goal today was to see the Golden Gate Bridge and get past San Francisco. Around 1:30 the traffic started getting really heavy and we had our first dose of gridlock. All traffic had come to a complete stop...somebody had dropped a case of styrofoam cups on the highway. Apparently a 3,000 pound vehicle is no match for a styrofoam cup as it brought all 4 lanes of traffic to a complete halt.

We approached the Golden Gate Bridge (GGB) from the north as we had gotten on the 880, 580 and so on and worked our way around the east and north sides of the bay. As we approached the GGB we could not figure out how to get to the GGB park without crossing the bridge and turning around. We're finding the signage in California to be less than helpful for out of towners.

Using Streets and Trips software we managed to work our way to Fort Baker which is at the bottom of the GGB. It turns out the fort had been a cannon emplacement during WWII. It's called Battery Yates at Fort Baker.

After we left there we went through Sausalito to look at the house boats. There are literally hundreds of them. They range from million dollar homes to derilicts and is quite a community.

Then it was back out onto 101 to continue north. Traffic was bumper to bumper with instant slowdowns for no apparent reason. This continued on until 4:45 when we were far enough north of Santa Rosa to leave it all behind us. Some observations...more people were getting on 101 than getting off and when the traffic subsided it was instantaneous. We never did figure out where all those cars went.
The rest of the drive to Leggett was great. Driving through the forests, the hills and best of all, hardly any traffic. We arrived at our destination about 7:15 at the Redwood River Resort. Cool and damp, but really beautiful.