We woke up in Fremont instead of San Francisco on this leg of the West Coast Tour. We were booked to tour the University of San Francisco – where the Jesuits have been ‘Separating Evil from Genius’ for over a hundred years. Our reviewers, who were becoming somewhat jaded in their college tours, said that they didn’t think they wanted to attend an urban campus.
So what do you do when you are in San Francisco for a very brief visit and you’ve toured the University of San Francisco and you want to make your visit even more memorable? We went to see the Golden Gate Bridge and North Beach. We left Fisherman’s Wharf for the girls to keep on their ‘To Do List’ . We ate a late lunch in North Beach at the Pier 23 Cafe and wished we’d left enough time to tour the Exploratorium.
We knew we had a long way to go before we slept and we’d stayed longer than we should have for easy driving. If only we’d known then what we know now, we might well have spent a second night in San Francisco and left fresh in the morning. We knew where our reservation was, so off we went to Mammoth Lakes. Somewhere around Pinecrest or Strawberry, not quite to Bumblebee, but well past Cold Springs, ( you’re with me, right?) we saw the last of the daylight. I knew I was going to miss it so I took a picture. Yeah, that snapshot isn’t all that special, but it’s what we had to remember the light as we pressed on over State Route 108. It wasn’t really terrible; it was dark and curvy and steep and we had to go slow and we lived. One last little complaint, where was the moon? You can see that the skies were quite clear in our’ Last Shot of Daylight’, there should have been moonlight. Sonora Pass is probably a visual banquet during the day. No one praised my driving or route selection at the end of the leg for the second day in a row.
