Day 30, Friday, July 15

I unloaded a bunch of stuff from the trailer (everything except a few days clothes and camping gear) to make room for Jeanette’s gear and headed out to meet her at the San Francisco airport. Jeanette’s plane arrived at 9:30am and I arrived at the airport at almost exactly 9:30. Great luck and perfect timing! Little did I know that this was to be theme for our entire weekend! From the airport we headed through San Francisco. The combination of me, Jeanette, the trailer, and our gear was definitely more than the motorcycle’s drive train was happy with. Having just replaced the clutch, I was fearful of having to replace it again in short order. Unfortunately, we chose the wrong route for getting to the Golden Gate Bridge from the airport. We went through the town rather than going around it at water level. Apparently going through San Francisco, the transportation engineers have determined that the best way to manage traffic it to make sure that you catch EVERY DAMNED STOP LIGHT on red. And San Fran being where it is, each red light is at the top of a hill. NO fun for me or for the motorcycle. I’d intended to stop at the Golden Gate Bridge to take some pictures but the ocean fog was incredibly thick and only about the bottom 20 feet of the pilings of the bridge were visible. Even when on the bridge, you couldn’t see the suspension cables if they were more than about 30 feet away. For someone not used to the fog (both Jeanette and me) the fog was really cool and kind of eerie. From there we hopped on Highway 1 and headed up the coast. At the airport, Jeanette and I had looked at the road map and reached the conclusion that there were enough campsites along the coast that we’d just wing it on deciding where to stop for the night. Several times, when there was a break in the fog we pulled over to look down at the ocean and every time we chanced to pull over at a place that had a path down the beach and also every time we were the only people on the entire beach! It was great! When we got tired of driving for the day we started looking for campsites. We passed quite a few that were completely booked up and a few that would have made great comedy subjects for Jeff Foxworthy (beat up camper trailers parked wall to wall, each resplendent with layers of plastic nick knacks in all visible windows, astro turf sitting areas, beat up aluminum folding chairs, empty beer cans, and the mandatory annoying yappy lap dog). Fine camping fare if that’s what you’re into, but neither Jeanette nor I felt like donning old stained white tank top undershirts shirts, 1970’s era shorts, and bedroom slippers. So we kept on… At Manchester Beach State Park, we pulled off highway 1 to go down and play in the water, and accidentally stumbled onto the Manchester Beach KOA. What luck. The place is absolutely beautiful. In fact I’ve never stayed in a campground anywhere which was even remotely as clean as this KOA. The grounds were completely manicured, the bathrooms were so clean that you could practically have eaten off the floors, the staff was super friendly, all the trees and shrubs were perfectly pruned, the tent sites were level and shaded, and they even scrubbed down the barbeque grills and cleaned out the ashes from all of the fire pits every morning. It was great!