Saturday, June 11th

1.27 PDT - Tosj | Today is our last complete day in San Francisco and we want to spend it in a good way. As mentioned yesterday, Serge and Simon will join us on our bike trip over the Golden Gate bridge. So we set out at 8:30 a.m. and take the cable car from Powel to Mason. We only have to walk one and a half block from there to Bay City Bike Rentals in Taylor Street. After a short set-up we are ready to go and soon after that we are heading towards the Golden Gate Bridge through Golden Gate National Recreation Area. We take our time for making pictures and within an hour we are approaching the international orange bridge.

Biking the bridge was great, although it was quite busy at the western side where we had to go with our bicycles, we had magnificent views over both the pacific and the bay. On the other side of the bridge we went up the western hills and parked out bikes at the fort over there. Alex had just parked his bike, or he heard someone else call his name: it turned out to be Philipp together with two other German friends! They rented a car and actually bumped in to us there. Speaking about coincidence. Going uphill we did also find out that Simon was not really used to biking. We were up quite a while already when he and Serge, who waited or him, came up to the fort too. Serge had already filled quite a big part of his 512 Mb memory card, so he had to upload them to his iPod Photo.

From there we drove a bit further into the west, but because we had limited time and there was quite some fog, we decided not to continue our road toward the lighthouse, but instead we took another road towards Sausalito, the self acclaimed "Cote d' Azur" of America... We just missed the 12 o'clock ferry back to pier 41, so we went for lunch in Sausalito and had some hamburgers and burrito's with french fries. Perfectly on time for the Blue & Gold fleet ferry of 1.30 p.m. we boarded and set out to San Francisco just passing Alcatraz on our 20 minutes trip. We again had very nice views on both the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. Back in San Francisco we drove up Powel Street till California street, were we went west again. Because of a 'small' compression of the map, that was not indicated properly on the map, it turned out to be much further to the Presidio than we had expected, but in the end we did reach the woods of the Presidio and had a quick drive through them, exciting at Lombard street, because we wanted to return the bikes on time, but DID want to drive down that same street before we returned them. The road back was quite OK until three blocks before Hyde street, there Lombard street goes up so steep, that only Alex managed to get up there by bike. The rest of us had to walk parts of that last hill (Russian Hill). We were not the only ones going up there, there were quite a lot of cars in line to go down Lombard street as well. Between batches of cars going down we had space to take the same route by bike, and it was really fun to do so. As you can see on this page, we made quite some pictures there.

After returning the bikes, we went through Powell street for the third time today. This time we walked and finished our joint trip on Market & Powell, where Serge wanted to visit a museum, Simon had to go pick up his luggage and we had to prepare for tonights baseball game: San Francisco Giants vs. Cleveland Indians! Dressed up in orange (quite easy when you are from The Netherlands) we hit the road again at 5.30 p.m. and walked our way to SBC Park, Home of the San Francisco Giants. With our printed tickets we gained access to the stadium and had plenty of time to have a look around in the stadium. It was for both of us the first time we visited a baseball match, so we definitely had to see all the shops, levels and warm-up practice in there.

In the beginning of the match we were quite skeptical about baseball in general, and because the Indians were leading quite soon already, also in the Giants. But as the match proceeded, we got to see also the better part of baseball and especially in the last half of the last (9th) inning, the stadium exploded. The Giants still had the opportunity to tie up with the Indians in that half. The Indians lead the game from the first half of the first inning, but in the last half, they caught up till 6-7. It was then that we also became enthusiastic about the game and we cheered along as the Giants were closing in on the Indians. Unfortunately the Giants didn't make it and the game came to an abrupt end with the score of 6-7. We really liked the match and just wanted to say: "Go, Giants!"

Now we are packing our suitcases for the trip back to Amsterdam. We will fly home tomorrow with North West Airlines. First to Memphis where we have to change and then on to our home base.