To: frog report
From:Zelda Queen of the Night<zelda@valley.net>
Subject: San Francisco!!
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Saturday June 27,1998
Hooeee!!
We are here!
Getting to San Francisco was quite an adventure in itself since
Utah.
We took another one of Mother's ill-advised scenic short cuts
yesterday. It looked so simple on the map. It had little dots
which meant it was scenic. It was direct. What we took was Route
180 over the Sonora Pass. The road was a narrow two lane affair,
in places only one lane and it went directly OVER the Sierra Nevada.
Right over the tops of the bloody things! The top speed was about
30 if you were feeling daring, most of the time I went 10 to 20
miles per hour. Grades of 26% and more. Dropoffs of hundreds of
feet to the side. No guardrails naturally.There was snow everywhere,
we were up about 11,000 feet . This was one really white knuckle
ride folks, this was scary.It was exacerbated by the fact that
in Bridgeport, CA on the eastern side of the pass they were having
the Bridgeport Jamboree, a HUGE gathering of motorcyclists. A
lot of these motorcyclists had decided to take the Sonora Pass
west to Bridgeport and would come around these curves on my side
of the yellow line (looking for the absolute apex of the curve
no doubt). I didn't swerve, believe you me, it was their lookout
I figured.
Six new frogs joined the army in Bridgeport when we
stopped for groceries, one is purple with red eyes and looked
like trouble from the start and went into immediate time out on
general principles in the souvenir Elvis hat. It wasn't long before
ALL the frogs were begging to join him in the Elvis hat, they
wanted off the dashboard. Goose, who joined us at the Salvation
Army in Memphis where we stopped for summer outfits, hid his head
under the seat.
The ride to Tonopah from Veyo,Utah where we spent our last night
in Utah was extremely boring, I mean there was about 300 miles
of nothing at all. About every 50 miles there would be a white
cross by the side of the road where someone had died, undoubtedly
because they had fallen asleep at the wheel from sheer ennui.
We drove Highway 56, the Highway of the Grand Republic, also known
as the Extraterrestrial Highway although why any extraterrestrials
would want to waste their time there I simply can't imagine. Yesterday
more than made up for it.
We spent the night in a motel in Tonopah not only because there was no where else to go that had shade, but because we had a very restless night in Veyo. We weren't even supposed to be there, but due to my total inability to tell left from right or north from south we ended up in Veyo when we wanted to be somewhere else. We had pulled over to the side of the road to study the map when a woman pulled up beside us. "Are you lost?" she asked. (It must have been the out of state plates and the Rand McNally pressed to my nose that was the dead giveaway)" Why yes" I said, "how did you know?" I told her we were looking for a place to camp and she directed us to the Beaver Reservoir Forest Service Campground which was very nice but rather lonely as we were the only people there except for the "campground host": Bill, who frankly scared the bejeezus out of me, I think he was just lonely too. Then he told us all about his resident mountain lion with the result that Chris had nightmares and I didn't sleep any too well myself also we both woke up with backaches so I told Chris when we got to Tonopah we were going to motel it and get a good night's sleep.
Anyway we are finally here in fabulous San Francisco in a fabulously
luxurious Hotel Americania and have the fabulous good luck to
have arrived just in time for the Gay and Lesbian Pride Weekend.
The Parade is tomorrow and it is all too, too fabulous.
After we checked in we took the hotel shuttle bus to Union Square
and walked around Chinatown for a few hours. Chris saw a lot of
things he had never seen before like people sleeping on the street
and a lady with her feet wrapped up in newspapers. He insisted
on giving a lot of our available cash away but I balked at buying
up all the snapping turtles from a chinese food market so as to
take them home with us and give them refuge from being made into
soup. We tried to find the Japanese section of town as Chris wants
a kimono from San Francisco in the worst way, but due to my total
inability to tell left from right and north from south we didn't.
Perhaps the front desk has directions for the directionally illiterate.
love,
Zelda and Chris