Home For The Fourth

It is 38 degrees Celsius outside our Chicago home. Crazy. Unlike most of our American neighbors who are barbecuing on the terrace or at Lake Michigan behind the house we are staying in tonight. But the garland featuring little stars and stripes is hanging and we have bought like fifty hot dog buns for our guests to arrive later this evening. After eating on the road for the past three weeks (sometimes literally so) it feels good to do some good old cooking again. It also feels good to be inside our own four walls. Besides the shelter for heat, they also offer peace and quiet and protect me from other people. I have always thought of myself as a particularly sociable person but turns out with age, I am quite a Monk (you know the TV series where this detective has all kinds of complicated phobias, needs everything clean and quiet). I will obviously need to work on that but the reason I have thought of Monk often over the past couple of days is that we spent some very nice time in his home town San Francisco. This is actually how I knew the city before we arrived there. Of course the TV producers would always make sure they shoot on sunny, clear days, which is why it hit me as a complete surprise that this place at the Pacific suffers from severe fog-overs for most of the time. As the city is naturally air-conditioned this way, the temperatures are half of what they are here in Chicago, and we could enjoy walking up and down the 43 (!) hills of SF, even wearing a jumper. 

Do you see what I mean? The world famous Golden Gate Bridge (when you can see it).

The world famous cable cars that drag hundreds up those killer hills are the city`s most attractive ways of transportation. With 6 bucks a ride probably also the most lucrative one. The manually operating heavy-wrestlers on the cars fill`em up with dozens of tourists at a time, we calculated that one car makes about four rides an hour... They start at six in the morning and this is when we took our ride with a cable car. The only time you can get a seat. 

SF has a huge Chinese community and it shows

Alcatraz actually is a rock, there is no earth or water on the island

Sitting there in the fog Alcatraz is still spooky, even though it has not been used as a prison for a long time.

The last day of our whole trip San Francisco treated us to a sunny view on the beautiful red bridge. Actually, the color is called international orange and the strait of the bay Golden Gate. 

The moon is almost full again, our road trip is over. Chicago is only one loaded flight away.