San Francisco

San Francisco is just an excellent excellent city. As soon as I stepped off the bus, I could just tell that there was something nice about the place that I was going to like. To be honest, I think the sunny weather had a lot to do with it!

On arriving in the USA Hostel on Post St. I immediately crashed out for a hell of a sleep after not getting enough rest on the train - I was absolutely knackered. On waking up, I made a most horrendous discovery - that I'd left my beloved black and grey stripey hoodie on the train. Thankfully, on a quick nip down the road to H&M, I managed to find the exact same hoodie on the out-of-season sale rail, the last one of its type left - a great relief. Also managed to find what may have been my closest contender yet in my quest for the perfect wooly hat.

I took this first morning as an opportunity to go up and look at Lombard Street, but I was kinda disappointed when I actually got there. I guess I should've known - it's just a wiggly road down a hill at the end of the day. Next came a bit of lens shopping, taking advantage of the weak dollar to buy me a nice Nikkor 85mm f/1.8. It got its first use in anger after meeting up with Kelley and Francis again, the couple I'd met on my first visit to Portland.

In the afternoon, Francis and I went on a little expedition to a dump. Thankfully however, the reason was that there was an art show on at the dump with a bunch of works made from found objects. It wasn't great in terms of the artwork, but it was quite an interesting setting and did a good job of saving me from getting trapped in tourist hell! That evening, I was invited up to a pleasant wee dinner party at their flat, where I mostly admired Francis' extensive collection of horror movie memorabilia.

The next day, I had decided to just go for the tourist thing and make a trip out to the golden gate bridge. The bridge itself was pretty impressive, but I found the area around the bridge to be a lot more interesting. There was a pretty cool old historic fort at one end of the bridge, and a pretty cool pier where a whole bunch of old guys were out fishing. I even managed to catch sight of a Sea Lion out for a wee swim, which was pretty cool.

That evening, I met up again with Roxanne from the train journey, and she showed me around some of the cooler sights in the city by night. The next day, Roxanne, her friend Meredith and I would go on a nice wee adventure to what I'd definitely call the highlight of my trip so far - the Pet Cemetery in the Presidio. It was a totally surreal experience, with the majority of the ex-pets belonging to servicemen and women who had been stationed there when the Presidio was still a big military base. Although the cemetery had officially closed in the 70s or something, there were still a lot of "new" burial sites, implying that the cemetery lived on!

After the bizarre joys of the cemetery, we carried on down to a lovely wee beach on the Pacific coast and sat for a few nice hours in the sun.

I have to stop writing just now, but I'll carry this on in another post soon!

Portland (Slight Return)

After the many joys of Seaside, I was glad to make my way back to Portland for one more night before hitting the train to San Francisco. The plan was to arrive back mid-morning, spend the day just hanging out in the city, spend one night there, and have a nice lie in, catching the train early the next afternoon.

Unfortunately however, I was without the experience of one of the most vital lessons I've learned on the journey so far. The simple lesson being do not rely on people you've only ever met in the pub when very drunk for a place to stay the night!

You may recall from my previous blog posting from Portland an episode involving drunkenly dancing in my kilt. Well that night I'd met some people in the pub who'd offered me a place to crash on my return to Portland, knowing I'd be going down to Seaside for a few days. Arrangements were made the day before I was due back up, and all seemed rosy until I ended up in Portland, when all of a sudden phones were ringing out and text messages were going unanswered.

With no place to stay, I got in touch with the HI Hostel where I'd been staying previously, and thankfully managed to get me a bed there instead. While I was there, I met some excellent people - Roxanne, Ramon, Douglas, Jessica and Jennifer. We all went out for a stroll around the streets near the hostel, and ended up at the Blue Moon for a few beers and found out that all of us but Jessica would be travelling down to California on the same train the next day.

The train journey was a bit of a beast, 21 hours in total, but thankfully the good company made it a whole lot more tolerable. The train had plenty of legroom and comfy seats, so it was a nice relaxing journey, even with the woman sitting behind us whom we were sure was trying to communicate with ghosts. Jen left us at Sacramento, Roxanne at Martinez, leaving myself and Douglas to carry on to Emeryville, then making the short bus transfer across the bay to San Francisco.

Seaside

After spending lots of time in the cities, I decided it was time for another slightly more remote spot to visit. On the recommendation of a traveller in Seattle, I made my way from Portland to the Oregon coast, ending up in the aptly-named town of Seaside. Definitely a perfect case of "does exactly what it says on the tin".

I arrived in the dark, unpacked my bags in the HI Hostel there, and spent what little was left of my evening sitting around a pleasant campfire with some cyclists from Chicago who were making their way down the coast. It was a pretty good start to my stay, so I went to bed hoping for more of the same over the next couple of days.

When I woke up the next morning, I realised I'd definitely got the wrong impression. Everything seemed to turn to that soul-sucking grey colour that I thought I'd left behind when I left Glasgow, and the rain meant that my North Face waterproof jacket had to be brought out in anger for the very first time. After taking a brief wander around the town, I decided that Breakfast/Lunch was in order and I dived into a nice wee cafe, for shelter as much as anything else. It was if some guy upstairs was trying to say that life becomes instantly better after a good meal, because after yet another helping involving melted cheese, I emerged from the cafe into glorious sunshine.

Despite the fact that glorious sunshine makes everything just look a lot more appealing, the one thought that kept running through my head was how much Seaside was basically an American version of Largs. Tacky tourist shops and hamburger joints were in plentiful abundance as I walked down the main drag, but nothing could've possibly prepared me for what I saw as I reached the beach.

A Dog Long Jump competition. Yes - you did read that correctly. Much like that spotted in the olympic games, only with dogs instead of humans and a big swimming pool instead of a sand pit. The owners would throw a toy, the dogs would run along the runway, leap, and splash into the water, aiming to cover as long a distance as possible. I'm not entirely sure if the dogs were aware of this objective, but they certainly enjoyed chasing the toys and splashing around.

Unfortunately however, my experiences in Seaside seemed like a giant anti-climax after this event. My days were mostly spent sitting around on the beach getting pretty bored, and my evenings were spent either hanging out in the uber-white-trash bars in the town or trying my best to avoid some of the old weirdoes in the hostel.

The hostel was pretty rubbish. The rooms were tiny for the number of people they tried to cram in, the staff were either annoyingly pushy or just plain village-idiot-stupid. I got especially tired of the one staff member whose sole experience of Scottish culture was the fact that Braveheart was his favourite movie of all time, and he proceeded to ask me all kinds of questions about whether we still have clans and live in little shanty villages and like killing English people. I mean, come on, Braveheart!?!

So aye, to sum up, don't bother with Seaside. Just go to Largs instead - the ice cream's better and most people realise how stupid Mel Gibson's accent really was.

Portland

When I first started saying to people all the places I would be visiting on my trip down the west coast, Portland was mostly met with reactions along the lines of "oh" or "where's that?". After visiting, people asked me what kinda fun stuff I did in Portland and what I went to see, all I could answer was that I just sorta hung out in the town centre, and visited a pretty cool book shop.

You'll probably also be thinking that this is gonna turn into one of those blogs where I go on about how disappointing some place is, but in fact, it's gonna be quite the opposite... I loved Portland.

There's just something about the city that I seemed to really latch on to, and I certainly wasn't the only one. The HI Northwest Portland was populated by a lot of people moving from cities across the US trying to find places to live and work in Portland. I must also comment that the HI in Portland definitely wins my award for best hostel so far, it'll take a lot of beating!

Powell's book shop was just something else. It occupied an entire city block, was three floors high, and had books on just about every topic imaginable. Me - I was just happy to spend hours and hours browsing their many photography books. To put it into perspective - they had a section just of Ansel Adams books that was bigger than the entire photography section in Borders in Glasgow. Despite my wanting to limit my carrying weight to as great an extent as possible, I couldn't resist the allure of the shop and ended up buying four books - one exploring creative approaches to photography, a little book of photographs by Lewis Baltz, a collection of Ray Bradbury short stories, and The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

The people in Portland were the one thing that made it my favourite city, and that attitude also seemed to rub off on everyone at the hostel. On my first night proper I met a cool texan guy called James, and Kelley and Francis, a couple whom I would later catch up with in San Francisco. After they left, things got kinda quiet around the hostel, and the inevitable "table for one" meal at a local bar had to be done. Anyways, in the rather excellent 21st avenue Bar & Grill, the waitress Evie must've felt sorry for me and started chatting to me, and before I knew it, I'd been invited along for a few beers with her and her friends Amanda and Joe. Of course, one beer led to a few more, and before I knew it, I was dressed in my kilt dancing like an idiot in a tiny little funk/soul place. I also managed to score a free pedicab ride which was interesting, especially as kilts aren't particularly renowned for their aerodynamics!

If there's one thing I loved most about Portland though, it was the bike culture. It was certainly a very cycle-friendly city, and I enjoyed having a nice perv at all the lovely old steel-framed Bianchis chained to the city's lamp posts. I loved them so much, I've put together an entire dedicated set of photos, which I'll hopefully get round to sticking on my flickr page pretty soon.

So I had lots of fun in Portland, and my next destination would be a small town on the Oregon coast called Seaside.