San Francisco, Yosemite National Park and Eugene

This is in English now because I want all my friends to be able to read this. The first part I wrote in San Francisco on Saturday. Just didn't have time to post it.

Saturday, Mar 31

I'm sitting at a Starbucks, close to Fisherman's wharf. I'm soaking wet. Rain is fun. Except if you are trying to find a coffee shop with a wifi. That's open. And serves decent coffee. Found one so now I can blog. Haha! Sorry mum and sis for not posting often enough. Where should I begin. We had planned to go to Alcatraz yesterday, but the tickets were sold out. Girls booked a tour for today but I decided not to go. Only available tour was a boat trip to Angel Island+Alcatraz for $58.

So instead of going to Alcatraz yesterday we went to Yosemite National park. Awesome! This is what I love the most about road trips and traveling with my friends. We are all spontaneous and don't care about schedules. I mean, we did have one, but nothing worked out the way we planned. In a good way though. Also we've booked motels the night before. This has worked perfectly for us. What else about traveling. It's pretty self evident that traveling in the US requires a car. Gas is cheap, renting a car is cheap BUT insurance is expensive. Also dropping the car off at a different location, which in this case is a different state, costs extra. Katja wanted to drive too (which I was really happy about) so we payed extra for that too. Total rent for one week including taxes, insurance ect is $1099. Total for gas is about $250.

Driving is easy and I'm totally used to the way people drive here. There are only two things to remember. First, do not use any signals when changing lanes or turning. That will just confuse everyone else. Second, do not trust the neverlost navigator. We named it the "alwayslost"-navigator (also "Iwillnevergetyouthere-navigator") because it never gets you where you want to go. The irritating woman voice tells you to turn right, while the screen is pointing to turn left. Whaaaaat? It can not be just our navigation skills. We had a lot of fun trying to find our way around in Las Vegas. In Los Angeles and San Francisco we had no problem at all. This is weird since LV is basically one street in the middle of the desert. Also, the navigator couldn't take us to the Golden Gate bridge. I've been there before so I knew where I was going but seriously... we were on the street that takes us directly to the bridge and still the navigator was totally lost.

Tuesday, April 3

Drive back was long. We left around 6.30 and came home around 4.30. Had two snow storms in Southern Oregon which slowed us down. I drove 20mph and couldn't see anything. All the trucks had pulled over and some cars too. We have a lot of snow in Finland, but we also have winter tires. It was fun to follow the outside temperature drop slowly from 40 to 32 (which is 0 C). The road temperature is always a few degrees warmer than the air, but still I was glad it didn't drop below freezing so we could keep on going pretty safely.

K and S left 7.30 this morning and I went to my 10K class 7.40. It was sad to say good bye and I miss them already. Running 15K (in the rain) was a great distraction from that. This term will probably be the most fun one so I'm exited. I'll tell more about that later. Now some pics. I deleted most of them already because I didn't have enough memory so go to FB to see more. Take care guys! Hugs to mum and sis. Have fun painting. :)

I took the girls to rec. They passed the belay test and could climb with me and Matze.

I do it like this. (supposed to be a figure eight, you can blame the teacher)

Katja doing her first route. Next to her is the crack, in which I always mess up my hand.

Not in the right order, I know. This is from San Francisco.

In San Francisco, heading to Union square.