“Headin’ up to San Francisco, for the Labor Day weekend show…”  Jimmy Buffet

Full disclosure: I LOVE this city, loved it from the first minute I saw it as a child from under the huge glass fastback of our family’s ’64 ½ Barracuda.  It was one of those big trips that everyone can recall from their childhood where the whole family loads up in a station wagon and heads for distant places like Las Vegas, Yellowstone, The Smoky Mountains, or, yes, San Fran.

But I didn’t see much of the city today.  We spent a whole lot of time driving through some of California’s arid north central region, past lots of huge olive and fruit groves, and also into Eureka, where I secured my charger ($80), and a car power adapter ($50), and now I can sit in the car and type away to my heart’s content without needing to worry about my battery power.  Life is good…

When you enter Kalifornia,(the Orwellian State) you start to notice a lot of state- sponsored signs.  One of them, placed on a 4X4 foot billboard about one cop car length inside the state line, had about five sentences of block print on it, which, curiously, I couldn’t make out at 80 MPH, and I doubt anyone else could either, but I’m pretty sure it said we were all doing something wrong just by breathing and taking up space here, except for the illegal aliens, who are of course always welcomed with open arms, which is why that particular sign didn’t need to be in Spanish.  I also noticed a sign that said the forest was run by some kind of tree tenders union, and that the gas is about $4.19 a gallon.  In fact, just about everything cost more, and is that a surprise to anyone?  Is there any mystery as to why white people and businesses are leaving the state like caddies are dropping Tiger Woods?

But it IS beautiful…except for Oakland, of course, which is where we enter San Francisco from, and I briefly wonder if they ever fixed that little problem with the pancaking double decked bridges if there is another earthquake, because I am on top of one now and it’s be just my luck…but we make it to the city safely and head for our hotel on famous Lombard Street.  The Cow Hollow Inn (there must be a story behind that name) is a nice $100 hotel that costs $150.  But, it is where it is, the rooms are clean, the A/C works, and the location is good, though if you have a hard time with noise at night, it might be a problem, since the cute vaguely Victorian-looking bay window surveys what tour books say is the World’s Most Crooked street, but instead looks more like the World’s Biggest Traffic Jam.  Oh, and the Internet speed is so slow that I decide to use the free service from Mel’s Diner across the street.

Since we’re in this city paying a premium price, of course the first thing we do is try to watch a college football season opener in our room at the hotel, but, out of the 197 channels we can get, the only one with bad reception is the LSU-Oregon game, so we head to a crappy restaurant whose name I don’t want to mention because I don’t even want to give them bad publicity, and because I’ve forgotten it.  So we watch LSU win, and we both cheer, because we like the SEC, and because we have no life, or any apparent interest in San Francisco right now, but this is Jonathan’s passion, and he promises we’ll go on a tour tomorrow, and in fact he even books us one.

So tomorrow I’ll tell you about San Fran, but for tonight I’m whupped.  Good night!