Sunday July 12 2009: Seattle - California

We left Seattle right after meeting, planning to get a good start on our 13 hour drive to San Francisco, CA. After grabbing some lunch, for some reason, it was decided that we needed to find a place with internet services and Starbucks was the logical choice. Have you ever tried to use Starbucks internet? It’s very complicated. We figured it out right away of course, being the extremely smart travellers that we are. Well ok it took us a few minutes too, don’t feel bad. After about an hour’s delay at Starbucks we set out again.

A horrible thunderstorm soon slowed progress down to a crawl. Snacks were dug out and passed around. Martha even took a brief turn at the wheel. We would like to point out at this juncture that she did amazingly well and will not be getting off easy on this road trip!

The plan was to make it to our reserved campsite in San Francisco by around 1 am. We quickly realized that was optimism at it’s most optimistic and called the campgrounds to see if there was any way we could cancel our reservation without any fees. The lovely gentleman assured us it was no problem at all and we planned to aim for Redding, CA for the night. Redding has about 40 hotels and motels, who knew? We went to the cheapo section of town and drove around in circles vacillating between the Motel 6 and the Value Inn ( a $4 difference). We picked the cheaper one obviously and got what we paid for. We’re all wearing flip flops as we walk around the carpeted floor. Good times, I tell you!