California (again) day 12

August 24

We left our motel room refreshed and found a place to have breakfast. We saw a bank across the street and decided to go in and replenish our cash supply. Using an ATM would get us the usual wad of twenty-dollar bills. We arrived in the States with hundred-dollar bills, but only 1 fifty-dollar bill has been given us in change so far. So we went into the bank rather than use an ATM, just to get a supply of fifties. Then we decided to get only a few fifties after all, in case there was a reason we weren't aware of that we had not seen more of them in circulation. The bank clerk was cordial about our request. He pronounced the name of this city Mer-céd. I picked up on that; I had been mispronouncing it until then, by accenting the wrong syllable.

We got onto highway 99 and joined a lot of traffic. This highway looked like a freeway that must have been built in the early days of limited-access highways. It was no picnic driving the van so quickly on such a road, designed before traffic engineering improvements made such speeds safer. The lanes seemed to be somewhat narrower and ramps shorter – enough of an inconvenience to make the van's loose steering an issue again. The interior valley of California this road traversed was hot and again the inadequacy of the van's air-conditioning became an issue, too.

We approached Livermore, CA, to find banks of "pinwheels" – wind turbines festooned the hillsides here, harvesting energy from the hot winds that blew over these hills and into our van's by-now-open windows.

We steered into Hayward CA and parked in the lot of the motel we'd contacted while driving: another motel in the chain of America's Best Value Inns. I got upset at the clerk when the check-in process involved photocopying everything I handed her. I allowed her to photocopy my passport, but I strenuously drew the line at her attempt to photocopy my credit card. She said I was the first person who ever objected to that, but she respected my objection and refrained from doing so. What's wrong with people here? This is where identity theft begins. Why was I the first to object?

It was early enough in the afternoon to make something of this day, so after transferring most of our baggage from our van to our room – and relaxing there a bit – we drove to the BART station in Hayward to catch a train to San Francisco. Parking in this station's lot was free. What a pleasant surprise! I asked the woman in the glass information booth how we should buy tickets to get to Fisherman's Wharf. She explained the ticket vending machine to us. It took most denominations of paper money, but not fifties (perhaps this explains why fifties are not popular?). A pan-handler sat beside the vending machine to also offer his unsolicited assistance. He needed the coins we received in change, but so did we so I didn't give them away. On the platform for the train were more "characters;" one in particular was in the throes of an audible argument between two of his split personalities. I was not so sure how this trip into San Francisco was going to "pan out." Dread was welling up in me that I had to consciously suppress. We boarded our train and passed under San Francisco Bay in a tunnel and our ears popped from the depth the train dove. Razelle was nervous. What if an earthquake should choose that precise moment to occur? Her dreads were accompanying us into San Francisco just as mine were. We also feared missing our station. No sign appeared in the train, nor were any announcements made as we entered the various stations enroute. Only the names on the platforms themselves, outside the train windows, served to inform us where we were (when pillars didn't block our view of them). We appreciated Singapore's transportation system so much more now than we already had, then.

Disembarking at the Embarcadero Station, we rode the escalator to the street. San Francisco immediately struck us as a different realm than any we'd experienced before we surfaced in her midst – and mists. Our dreads (mine of being shaken down, Razelle's of being shaken up) continued to followed us. Many more hard-luck characters loitered here among the high-rising edifices of commerce towering above us in downtown San Francisco. Razelle needed a bathroom, but with all the vagrants in this district, no such facility was available without a purchase being made first. Razelle found a vegetarian restaurant to patronize, ordered a sandwich and thus gained the access code to the ladies' room.

We then waited in the penetrating chill of these environs at a streetcar station, bundled in hooded jackets against the cold mist that enveloped this district. A streetcar pulled up and its affably cheerful conductor announced that the ticket machine was broken so the ride was free. We rode this car to Fisherman's Wharf and alighted there. Signs flashed brightly and lots of tourists milled among shops selling everything tourists might covet. I found an outlet for a chocolate factory (a competitor of Ghirardelli's, apparently) and bought a small bag of chocolate-covered roasted coffee beans. Razelle was put off by the commercialism of this place and the crowds this attracted. The gauntlet she would have to walk to get to the distant end of the pier was overly daunting. I steered her to a side passage that had no shops – just moored fishing boats and some docks with closely packed lolling sea lions on them.

This was what Razelle had come to see. This made her day and her mood picked up. We were here when the sun set, but in the fog we saw no setting sun nor the colors of that time of day. It just got darker and colder. Ah, San Francisco; such a unique place. You either find it intriguing or you tire of it quickly. We didn't stay as long as we originally had planned. We returned to our street car station and had to pay to ride it this time. We took our BART train back to Hayward, but had to transfer along the way. We found our van where we'd parked it. No one had molested it in our absence. We drove it back to our motel, entered our room and shut the door. Our first impressions of San Francisco were what they were. We slept on these and considered their meaning.