San Francisco 60 and Seattle 🤠

So we departed the great redwood forest of California and headed into San Francisco for a nice long visit and the opportunity for me to celebrate my 60th birthday. As I said before, the drive-in was totally amazing and contrary to normal belief we had great weather on our visit to San Francisco. 😀

We settled into the RIU in downtown San Francisco near fisherman‘s wharf, which is a nice place to walk around a nice place to see things with lots of nice restaurants and places to have cocktails.

There’s a lot of really cool things down there besides the wharf and the pier that we discovered. We also saw these robot driving cars in San Francisco similar to the ones that we saw in Arizona. It is the wildest thing to see a car driving around with nobody in the driver seat. It’s called Waymo. Look it up. It’s the wildest thing. There’s a WW2 submarine the USS Pampanito which sunk 6 Japanese ships in World War II. There is a building with retro video games a photo booth . Lots of fun. Our photos turned out shit as we all cut off and everything, but it was a lot of fun anyway. Why not blow five bucks on something like that. 😀

Living by the water and seeing all the ships is really cool thing that we’ve experienced a lot lately. We tried to get some tickets to go to Alcatraz, but unfortunately that wasn’t going to happen. We took a cruise around the harbor. It’s called the bridge bridge cruise it’s between the San Francisco, Golden Gate Bridge, and The Oakland Bay Bridge. You go directly past. Alcatraz and you see the whole harbour. On the other side of the harbour you see SAN Quentin Prison and it’s very cool. Unfortunately we were on the boat during happy hour 😂

San Francisco is a really cool city as far as I’m concerned and one of the things they have beside the cable cars as they have a fleet of old street cars. A lot of them came from Toronto. They are all repainted to represent street cars in cities that had that particular type of streetcar and streetcar system, I didn’t see it but I did hear that there is one that is painted in TTC colours 🤓

The ride in the cable cars is an unbelievable experience. It’s extremely inefficient. It’s extremely old being hundred-year-old plus technology but it works like you would not believe as you go up and down the hills you see what they built. It was one of the coolest experience that I’ve had on a transit vehicle. After ride on we went down to The Franciscan Crab Restaurant for some appetizers and a drink. This place is full of photos of stars going from Lucille Ball to Tom Cruise were all in this place. It was built in the late 50s and has that 1950s charmed to it Are we getting tourist in or what 😂

We spent our fun all night hanging out at fisherman’s wharf with a visit to the Christmas store of all places, and I had a coffee made by a robot, which was pretty bizarre. During the earthquake in the late 80s, the marina kind of broke apart and a whole bunch of sea lions moved in and they are still there. People watch them and we did. They’re pretty cool. They make a snorting noise and throw each other off into the water The next morning we got up and headed back over the bridge through a massive traffic jam of course on a Sunday morning with the destination of Woodland Washington. It was in Woodland that we have intended to visit an RV furniture store for some springtime shopping. 😎

After a nice night and a pricey shopping spree, we headed into Seattle. Naturally, like it seems the rest of the world here it was raining that being said it didn’t damp our spirits as we checked into the Embassy Suites in downtown Seattle. Embassy Suites if you’re not familiar also has every evening of managers cocktail party in which you get a couple of free drinks you hang around with your fellow hotel inmates have some munchies and basically meet some very cool people. 😊

The next morning we got going and headed out on a tourist visit around Seattle, which is a beautiful little city and one of these days I’ll visit again when it’s not raining. We went to the Pike market. We saw the original Starbucks we saw a video game parlour with all kinds of, original video games, including the last video game that Dominic played a Beatles pinball machine when he was in Seattle several years ago. The seafood is amazing and if you check out one of the pictures, the size of the lobsters was unbelievable. We also had a beer and ate fish as one would and generally checked it out and it’s a very cool place.

We walked around. I enjoyed a original Seattle hotdog, which was awesome, but probably bad for me, but it was still awesome. We had some seafood. We had a couple of beers which were just fine. The fish you could buy there was amazing, but I have no way to cook it

We bid farewell to Seattle and headed to the Canadian border and had a very uneventful crossing. The drive from Seattle is very nice very scenic. After crossing the border we went to White Rock and had some lunch overlooking the water to toast our recent journey 😀

We plan to end our time in British Columbia with a visit to Chilliwack to see some old friends, one of which goes back over 30 years to the Germany days. A great return visit with uncle Bob and lovely Lisa and a beautiful visit with Iona , Andre and Brianna. Our friendship with Iona goes back to the days of Ettenheim in Germany and our first apartment. Iona and her buddy Guy were the only other English-speaking people in the building and surely we became friends and we’re still friends. We did all kinds of crazy shit together like go to Paris. Iona took us on a tour tour around Chilliwack to some of her favourite places and we also went out for a beautiful Greek dinner. Lots of fun visiting folks you’ve known for that long. 😎

We packed up in a rain storm and headed off for the ferry to Vancouver Island. We checked into a lovely hotel right across the street from the Black Ball Ferry Terminal that took us to Washington State to start this journey a couple of weeks ago. How ironic. 🤓

We enjoyed ourselves and spend the day going to The Butchart Gardens and checking out a portion of Victoria that we had not seen called Fisherman’s Wharf. We are hunkering down packing the last of our stuff storing our car preparing to fly to Toronto and awaiting the Bomb Cyclone weather phenomenon here in British Columbia. This particular weather brings naturally rain winds up to 90 km an hour. 😁

While we’re not in the RV anymore as it’s going to remain on Vancouver Island for the winter. Our little baby Mini car will also remain here on Vancouver Island. Our plan is to come back in the spring when all the snow is gone and resume the great RV adventure. We still enjoying travelling and will continue after Christmas without the RV with visits to Portugal Spain and Germany. We will be heading back to Toronto for December and the Christmas holidays. The fact that you folks follow along on this blog is very special to us and we really appreciate each and everyone of you and hope you find it interesting the things that I’m writing and that we are presenting. It’s also great memory tool for us to see what the hell we did. Have a lovely December Merry Christmas Happy New Year and we will be resuming the blog in January. We will still put a few things up on Facebook and Instagram.

Cheers

Monika and Terry