We left our campground around 11 to get to San Francisco. With traffic, we got there about 1. The weather is still superb. It got up to about 70 today-no humidity, bright sunshine. However, it was disappointing as we crossed The Golden Gate Bridge, there was as thick layer of fog on the upper half of the bridge both times. The fog is strange here, it moves in like a blanket, covering the entire town and burns off mid to late morning and moves in again at night. We met Matt at 1 and he gave us a tour of the Google campus. Chris and I were amazed. Matt works for the abuse department of Google +. There is a slide that takes you from the second floor in his office to the first. They have over 25 FREE places to eat and all kinds of micro-cafes(MK) with coffee/espresso machines and many local products. There is free ice cream and drinks all over the place. There are nap pods that you can reserve for naps in between work. They have organized intramural teams, a bowling alley, multiple gyms, etc. Matt was even able to organized a mixing class a couple times every quarter. He is allowed to purchase drinks for the "class" through work. They have a 3-D Google maps area and an animation studio thing that we tried out. There were all kinds of relaxation areas and they had pools, gardens child care and you can even bring your dog to work! This place was awesome. They also had laundry and dry cleaning services, massages, oil changing on campus along with many other awesome things! Basically, anything you think would be "cool" in your office, Google has installed. There were some places we were not allowed to go, but Matt gave us an awesome tour. We had lunch with him on the campus; it felt a lot like a college campus. Again, the weather was perfect.
We really wanted to see Alcatraz but didn't plan very far in advance so we didn't get to see it. We drove into San Francisco and decided to check out Chinatown. Since we teach about Chinatown and Laurence Yep each year, I've wanted to see Chinatown. San Fran. has the biggest Chinatown in the US. Grant Avenue seemed to be the main street. There were Chinese lanterns up and down the street and all kinds of music playing and little novelty shops. I bought a couple post cards and a good luck charm to hang in my classroom. There were several Chinese restaurants on every street. We decided to try a restaurant that was on the sixth floor of a building. We weren't too sure about it. We took a rickety elevator up six floors and the décor hadn't been changed in maybe 30 years. The food was expensive for what we consider reasonable, but the view was impeccable as well as the food being good. Chris had Szechuan chicken and I had cashew chicken. We split fried rice. Everything was really nice. The view was over the city, facing Nob Hill(which we also read about in Laurence Yep's story). You could see the laundry hanging from rooftops and rooftop gardens. The view was worth the extra we spent.
After dinner, we browsed a couple novelty shops and listened to the live music playing in the street. We headed back to the parking garage and left San Francisco. We drove back to Petaluma, across the Golden Gate Bridge again. The bridge was covered with fog-disappointing, but cool to drive over it. Chris and I got frozen yogurt in downtown Petaluma-this is an awesome town. We could spend a half a day in this town, too. It was smaller than Healdsburg, but more our pace/style. It had more of an agriculture, old building feel to it.
The nights are very chilly. We really should have brought jackets. Matt told us, people in San Francisco usually wear jeans, a shirt and bring a jacket. The days are warm for a few hours and then it gets very chilly and windy. We watched Zero Dark Thirty and went to sleep! We're heading to Yosemite tomorrow after a stop at Hook and Ladder Winery.
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