Day 34: San Francisco to Monterey

The Pacific Coast is absolutely gorgeous ... when you can see it, that is. It was bright and sunny when I woke up in San Francisco. I packed up my things and went to Menlo Park to have lunch with the Crippens. We lived in the same apartment complex for the first two years of my life and I've been getting birthday cards and presents from them ever since. They don't have any children of their own, so they kind of adopted me as their grandchild. Here's a photo of me, my mom, and the Crippens on Christmas morning in 1980. It's a photo of a photo, so the quality isn't very good, but you get the idea.

And here's a photo of my dad, my brother, and me when we visited the Crippens in 1987.

Here's a photo of the Crippens now:

And here's a photo of me and Eleanor:

It was great to see them.

After lunch I went to Palo Alto. I drove by the hospital where I was born. Then I went to Stanford Shopping Center - the prettiest mall in America. It's outdoors. They used to have special, unique stores, but now they have the same stores as every other mall in America (well, every other very high-end mall) so I didn't go in to any of the shops. Check out the interior of the mall:

After that, I walked around downtown Stanford. I found a tart yogurt shop. It's a self-service yogurt bar, so you get a cup, fill it up with the yogurt of your choice, and add the toppings you want, and then you pay by the ounce. The cups are huge, so I was careful not to get too much yogurt, but then it was all over once I got to the toppings. I put on too many strawberries and then had to put on an equal amount of mangoes and then I asked about banana slices and it turned out they did have them, in the back, so they brought them out and added them to my yogurt. I ended up with a $7.00 yogurt. Ridiculous. The yogurt wasn't even good. Fortunately the people watching was awesome.

Then I headed south on Route 1. It was really foggy for almost the entire trip, so I didn't get to enjoy the views. Here's a photo I took at 5:00 PM:

I decided to stay the night in Monterey. Today the weather is supposed to be beautiful. First I'm going to go on a bike ride and then I'm going to go to the beach. I might stay here again tonight. We'll see.

Gotta go!