Life in a cloud

Our month in San Francisco is spent soaking up city life at its best: brunches at trendy Fillmore cafes; sushi, Mexican and Thai dinners; functional public transportation ... and high-speed Internet.

We sublet a studio apartment in Lower Pacific Heights. The centrally located studio affords us room to sleep, but little else. It's quite a change from spacious suburban living in Las Vegas, and it takes us awhile to get used to sleeping through traffic noises and the constant sound of foghorns from the bay.


It's also cold, surprisingly so. Despite Summer's arrival elsewhere in the U.S., San Francisco is engulfed in a cloud within which temperatures hover in the low twenties (degrees Celsius, of course). After three weeks of shivering nighttime walks, I finally give in and retrieve my coat from a bag of clothes I'd packed away for next Winter.

Our San Francisco experiences are many and varied, so I'd best present them as a list of favourites:

Yelp - The remarkable Web site to which we owe the discovery of most good things in San Francisco. It lists restaurants and activities alongside user reviews, and is so well used by locals that stores physically advertise their Yelp ratings in attempts to attract walk-in customers.

The Grove, Fillmore - A funky cafe that served up good ice-blended coffee, a hearty chicken pot pie, and the BEST apple pie I've ever tasted!


Sundance Kabuki Cinemas - With rocking armchairs, fresh buttered popcorn, a restaurant and an over-21 balcony theatre (complete with cocktail bar), the Sundance Kabuki takes movie-watching to new heights. We visit weekly ... at least.

Napa Valley Wine Train - Navigating several vineyards to sample random wines isn't really our thing. So we have dinner on the Wine Train instead, have a bottle of Napa Valley Pinot Noir with our four-course meal, and see the sights from the comfort of an old-style train cabin.

Free outdoor San Francisco Symphony concert - Much like Sydney's Symphony in the Domain, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra attracts a vibrant crowd to its free concert on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The concert takes place in the rather male-dominated Dolores Park, and features music by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Brahms.


Fourth of July at the Presidio - We falsely assume that the Golden Gate bridge is San Francisco's Sydney Harbour Bridge equivalent, and make our way to the Presidio for dinner and what we assume to be the best view of the fireworks. As it turns out, the pyrotechnics take place in North Beach. We catch a distant view with our dessert.

Brunch at Wing Lee - Super cheap and extremely tasty, Wing Lee in the Richmond is Yum Cha at its best. We order 4 pork buns, 3 shrimp dumplings, 2 huge spring rolls, 2 pork turnovers and 2 cans of diet coke for just over $10. Mmm!

Psychedelic volcanic ash

Under the summer sun, our northward drive from Bakersfield to the Lassen Volcanic National Park is almost unbearably warm. However, when we arrive at the park, which is located near on the Californian side of the California-Oregon border, we see snow.


It's just after 6pm when we enter the park, so the grocery store and ranger stations have already closed for the day. Compared to the Grand Canyon National Park, Lassen is eerily desolate.

It's also cold -- frighteningly so. I hurriedly pull a jacket over my singlet top, as we leave the car to investigate the Manzanita Lake campgrounds.

The few occupied campsites are already gushing smoke, and we soon realise that without an open grocery store from which to buy firewood, camping may not be the best idea.

So we rent a $60, bare-bones cabin in the nearby town of Shingletown for the night. The cabin lacks bedside tables, lamps, curtains, clean bedding, and its own bathroom, but we bring in our own quilt from the car and sleep the sleep of the dead.

In the light of day, Lassen is far less formidable. We encounter a deer on its afternoon stroll as we make our way to the campgrounds, as well as a very brave, inquisitive squirrel under whose watchful eye Jim chats to the elderly campgrounds host about hiking, National Park attractions, Australia, the downfalls of the military...


At the host's recommendation, we hike up the nearby Cinder Cone volcano the next day. The cone rises some 230 metres above the surrounding area, which is covered in a mixture of grey ash and colourful sediments from a 1650s eruption.

We also visit Bathtub Lake but find it far less appealing than its name suggests, due to the cold and an infestation of mosquitos. Dinner is cheese and salami sandwiches and toasted marshmallows, as it was the night before.

On June 17th, we reluctantly leave the (relative) wilderness for the city of San Francisco. And a fitting greeting we receive, with heavy traffic all along our last 25 kilometre stretch from Richmond to San Francisco, and absolutely no street parking within four blocks of our new home!