Tag Archives: San Francisco

The Lost Day

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26.08.2017
Atis Edvards un Niks Jānis writing:

We are safely boarded an airplane and now we are flying from San Francisco to Istanbul. This could be considered as a lost day since we started the flight yesterday, August 25th. I slept the largest part of the flight, I was up only during one movie and when the flight crew kindly issued a tasty dish. When I woke up my brother was touching his monitor, only 15 minutes were left to fly.

When we arrived, we went through the airport controls and headed for the hotel reservation desk. We waited a little and soon we were heading for an airport shuttle bus. I felt pretty relaxed while driving and when I was looking through a bus window to Istanbul. We went to a somewhat quieter place reaching a beautiful hotel. We checked in and came to our room to get beds ready. We realized that we did not have blanket, so we called reception and asked to bring a blanket to us. At first, it did not come and did not come. After we called again, they brought us the sheets. Then we called reception for the third time and finally they brought a blanket. We were all set up.

We ate our wonderful delicious pizza that we took with us straight from San Francisco Italian Restaurant. We know that at least part of our group went out to see the city. We also wanted to go and look at Istanbul. The view from the hotel balcony was nice. But we realized that we were very tired and went to bed. This was one of the shortest days.

Leaving America

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25.08.2017
Kristīne writing:

After night spent in Europe Hotel & Hostel modest apartments in San Francisco main drivers are to wake up pretty early to return the rental cars. Also we want to return to Walmart some stuff we bought during our trip. So Agnese, Imants, Salvis, Kristaps, Juris, Ilgonis and Daumants are on their way to Oakland while others may sleep longer this morning.

I use this possibility and wake up indecently late, after 9 a.m. Then packing of bags trying to push in more than there is free space. Luckily Juris has one bag he doesn’t need anymore. So I am finally done with packing all my belongings and souvenirs and snacks that I am going to take to Latvia. Check out is at 11 a.m., but we can leave our bags in one room the hotel provided us for longer. After that we have some free hours till leaving for airport. Me, Niks and Dace decide to go to Chinatown just to walk around and may be buy some (more) souvenirs.

At 2:30 p.m. we all gather to leave for airport. We go to Bart (train) because it’s quite comfortable and pretty cheap way to get straight to the airport. At the Bart station we say goodbye to Agnese. She is staying one more night in San Francisco and going to Riga through Los Angeles and Moscow. Seems to be longer way, but no – Agnese arrives in Riga only two hours later than we do.

In airport there is the usual crowd, luggage checking, passport control and safety control. I occur to be unlucky enough to make safety control officer suspicious that I am trying to bring a knife on board. Finally it turns out that the suspicious item is my flash memory drive. Safety officer kindly offers to pack my bag again, I kindly say no, pack it by myself and it’s done, I’m in.

After some waiting boarding to Istanbul is opened. We fly again with Turkish Airlines. It takes little more than twelve hours from San Francisco to Istanbul. Must admit during this flight I feel much better than in all my previous long flights. I even manage to sleep time to time. There are two meals during flight and free drinks. So everyone tries to spend his time as much comfortable as it possible by eating, drinking, watching films, playing games and of course sleeping. As we fly towards east we will arrive in Istanbul in August 26, little after 5.p.m. And it’s already another day and another story.

As for me August 25 is the day I really feel like my trip has come to its end. I feel little sadness, because no matter how long was the trip, it’s always not enough. But I really enjoyed it. And there will be other trips and new adventures as always.

The Day of Big Trees

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24.08.2017
Ausma writing:

1st and 2nd team wake up in Motel 6 in Medford, Team 3 in motel in Weed. We take a quick sandwich and go to the Rogue Valley Inn motel to have some breakfast. This motel moved us yesterday, because there is a reconstruction and there were no places for us. Some of us have coffee and juice, others cornflakes, and then we go on a long journey to San Francisco.
The first team will try to drive to Walmart supermarket to give back the stoves and pans.

We drive along the road 190 towards the ocean coast. On the way, we are accompanied by fog and smoke coming from a burning forest near coastline. Ocean was gray, with large waves, foggy. As usual, we collect some small rocks from the ocean coast.

We drive through the Redwood National Park – on the edge of the road there are huge sequoias – very large and tall trees – biggest trees in the world. We are stopping everywhere in the road pockets, taking pictures, and flying like children through the sequoias forest. Daumants is very glad that we are in the big sequoias forest, not just seeing some trees as at the start of the trip. Impressively – the forest is in the mist, only at + 15*C outside. We are joking, that acclimatization for Latvia begins after the heat in America.
We drive along the historic 101 road, which is often referred to as the Redwood Road. We go to the Thomas Kuchel Visitor Center, named after a US Senator from California State (1953-1969). There we learn about the Sequoia trees and Redwoods. It is interesting to compare sequoias and redwoods: they are plants of one family. The Gigant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) are more than 3200 years old, 300 ft or 91.4 m high, a mass about 3500 tons, a diameter at the base – 40 feet or 12.2 meters, the seed is like oat flake, but the cone is like chicken egg – they are the thickest trees on world. In turn, Coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are the longest trees on world: more than 2000 years old, up to 370 feet or 112.8 meters; mass about 1200 tons, diameter at foot 22 ft or 6.7 meters, seed like tomatoe seed, but cone like olive.
Soon we arrive at the Redwood Giant’s Avenue, which looks like a snake above and below the 101st road. Again we are in the Redwood Forest. Again stopping, taking pictures and trying to find the thickest and then the tallest trees, apart from the sequoias of redwood. In the roadmap it is written that somewhere there grow the oldest and largest trees in the World. I am not sure if we found it, but the remains we saw were both thick and long.

We visit private museum of Minerals. Ilgonis and Maris as experts buy some items (minerals, rocks, fossils and meteorites), for their home museum, others just visit the exposition.

We ride cars through the old sequoia tree, which does not show any signs of life. Glad to pay $ 8, to capture the moment, how our cars go through this tree. It turns out there is also an alive tree that you can go through for $ 5, but it stays for the next time. Team 1 traveled through that tree – Chandelier tree (height 315 ft, diameter – 21 ft, age 2400 ys) in Leggett.
Time is running on and we drive to San Francisco, still on our way to Walmart supermarket, because we need to buy some food for breakfast.

750 km traveled during all day and we are at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The sun has just set, but it’s a little light to finally see the bridge without a fog. We take some pictures; the wind is so strong that blows us off the feet, it’s cold.

We go to the bustling stream of San Francisco streets and it was hard to see the sign of Europe’s hotel & hostel on Brodway street, because other advertisements and signage were so bright. Maris has the sharpest sight and sees the letters above the very narrow door. We quickly load and shovel all the belongings from the car, because tomorrow we will transfer the cars back to the car rent. 5352 miles or 8563 km on the roads of USA are done. We drag the bags to the room on the third floor by very steep stairs. The room is full of stuff. The drivers go to look for car parking; the rest are struggling with suitcases. Need to pack for the journey back home.

Good night. This will be our last night in America.

The 2nd Day in San Francisco

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02.08.2017
Vita writing:

We woke up at 6:30am. For breakfast we had an infinitely sweet muffins that we had obtained in warehouse store the previous day (is everything really so sweet in America or is it just us… brrrrr), we had a cup of fresh yesterday’s coffee, we collected all our countless stuff left them under the supervision of Gleb. We took a subway ride to the Civic center, then took the bus Number 30 North. It turned out that you need to register the Clipper cards twice – on entry and on exit for this ride. I probably did not do it right and some additional money was pulled away. It’s good that kids were clever, they made it all right for their Clipper cards.

We went to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was foggy, thick fog all around the bridge. We were trying to see it and take pictures of the foggy bridge. We took a trail uphill. The fog did not vanish, but we were happy about the view. For a short moment even the bridge’s contours could be seen following by cheerios sounds. We went down the hill and over the mighty bridge. Wind blew in the ears and it was strong. Overall views all around were fabulous.

We started to go back to the center of San Francisco by foot. We were tired and happy. We stopped by the Dome — the beautiful art temple, built in the 20th century. We sat drained into deep philosophical reflections of life. Philosophically clever turtles swam in the pond.

Let’s go to the Super Duper burgers. And we did have real burgers. I usually do not eat such things in Latvia. Then Daumants introduced everyone with his drink of Root Beer. That got all four of our family.

Drivers went to get the cars, but we’re still wandering along ways of San Francisco. We took the trolleybus number 22 to get closer to the subway. In our way we enjoyed beautiful neighbourhoods with beautiful private houses. Wonderful flowers, roses at home gardens etc. Architecture, unusual facades and beautiful windows. Fabulous … Huge lavender shrubs that when touched by hand were smearing some sort of fabulous oil. For some time after that I still smelled my hand to enjoy the nice scent. We went to the City Hall, Opera and many other interesting places.

When we arrived at the motel, we were waiting for drivers for quite a long time. We sat on the cold floor to chill out somehow and we continued to wait for our drivers. Finally, the cars were there and we started to fill them up and we are on our way.
At first we can not find were the shopping center is located, it was dark already. After a huge shopping at the Walmart, people finally start using our walkie talkies. Now it is so much easier. Karlis ahead of the team 3 is well oriented and we are happy to get to the motel. But oh, there are cockroaches in a room. Good night. The feet are heated, the nose is burning from sun and the tiredness is huge.

Jānis, Laura, Agnese comment:
The little adventure named car rental was as exciting as tiring and long. Everything started with a long ride (but in comparison – not so long) by metro (BART) during which we had several discussions about some american choices of accessories – that is Laura does not like rings that some choose to put in their noses. After the metro trip a short distance from from the station an employee from the car rental company Enterprise picked us up and drove us to the car rental. During this trip we received a free story about the Babel tower.

The choice in the car rental was very vast and impressive. For example, there was a car available with completely used tyres, with which even the smallest rain would create a feeling of being in an aquapark. One of the cars available could not be locked, which, of course, dismisses all worries about the things inside. However, at the end, we received cars without features mentioned above and a couple of the cars where even better than what we paid for, although I must admit that the reason for it could be that the car rental company ran out of cars. Daumants received an grey Hyundai Sonata, Imants received an white Jeep, Juris got a black Nissan Altima, Kristaps a red Hyundai Elantra, Ilgonis received a dark gray Chrysler and Salvis received a beautiful, dark Dodge Charger. After all six teams received their cars we where ready to go.

It turned out that each car could only have two drivers, which displeased us, because two drivers where going to join us in Los Angeles. After we explained to the employee of the car rental company that this was a pretty big problem, we where allowed to choose three drivers for a couple of cars. At this point we heavily felt the absence of Austra and Loreta, because several teams had to be reorganized.

I Love SF

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01.08.2017
Ilgonis writing:

“I love SF”, this slogan was stamped on our hands while we waited to climb a Coit tower where we enjoyed a panoramic view of the San Francisco. I think I can agree with these words because during the day we experienced many wonderful things. We visited Chinatown with it’s busy street’s, rushing people and vegetable markets. We admired steep hills of the city that previously I had seen only on Hollywood movies. We wondered how people can park cars here and they do not roll downhill?

Then we went by a ferry to the famous island of Alcatraz. Do you remember a scene from the movie “The Rock” where Sean Connery sings a song about Sanfrancisko while taking a shower? Apart from the fact that this song was buzzing in my head for a whole day, this movie was all that I knew about Alcatraz prison. Reality was quite a different but not less impressive mostly thanking the good audioguide that revealed history of the prison and its inhabitants. After returning to mainland we listened to the furious cries of sea lions on a Pier 39. Did you know that wet sea lions are black but dry specimens lazy lying on the platform become moss green?

We were already tired and it was not easy to climb five blocks to the Lombard street but it was worth of it because we could watch cars slowly going down the narrow serpentine among flowers that are on the both sides of the road. A final crescendo (literally) was a ride on the famous San Francisco cable car that took us from the Fisherman’s Wharf to the train station. We went up and down banging and clinging while the most brave persons of our group were hanging on both sides of the cable car. The only disappointment was the Golden Gate Bridge that was hiding in the fog for a whole day. Let’s hope tomorrow we will be more lucky.

The Long Day

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31.07.2017
Imants writing:

Second morning of our journey begins with decent breakfast offered by the Mercure hotel we stay in. Part of the Eclipse Tour team who took a rest last evening before going back to the airport take opportunity to explore hotel neighbourhood. Our shuttle bus arrives with 20 minutes delay but this is not an issue because we have plenty of time before upcoming flight.

After mandatory security checks and passport control procedure we are ready to fly to our point of destination. It is about 45 minutes left till boarding and some of it goes to do routine airport window-shopping. Most of the team lead to a remote gate where additional security checks are expected for people travelling to United States. And there is unpleasant surprise for us – security officer after checking Loreta’s documents announce that previously acquired ESTA is not valid because of passport number mismatch in both documents and she is not allowed to board. An hour remained until the end of the boarding is dedicated to resolve this issue. Unfortunately due to technical reasons Loreta is unable to acquire new ESTA and therefore she and Austris are forced to stay in Istanbul. It is severe loss for our team.

As we are heading to West the Sun is shining in the sky during all the twelve hours long flight. One can say that we have returned to past or had a special long last day of July as when we landed in San Francisco there is still 31 July. After the Customs and border control we meet Agnese who arrived just two hours later from L.A. Afterwards we take a public transport and go by groups to our accommodation sites. Could be that everyone is tired after such a long flight and needs to gain energy for next day when we are going to explore the city of San Francisco.

Agnese comments:
Later it was found out from the US embassy that Turkish Airlines had no right to deny the boarding because of missing ESTA. There always is a chance to acquire ESTA after landing in the US as it’s a very quick process (of course ESTA can be denied and then it’s not a quick process at all)