Location: Marin Headlands, California, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco
Okay, that’s where the tent is, not the computer for emailing. You get the picture. Who’d have guessed we’d be spending the day in San Fran, walking on Lombard St, the curviest road in America, and strolling along the beach looking out toward Alcatraz prison.
Now, despite the fact that downtown San Francisco swells with a myriad of delicious and (sometimes) inexpensive ethnic restaurants, Phil and Aaron have once again proved that they are creatures of the outdoors, not the urban jungle. We entered a quiet Asian restaurant in Chinatown, and Aaron ordered a broccoli in oyster sauce type platter. In his far from diverse experience with Midwestern Chinese cuisine, he fully expected this $5 meal to be a sort of stir fry over noodles dish.
Not quite.
His place setting was soon filled with a large pile of what appeared to be a hideous cross breed between asparagus and spinach, covered in brown sauce.
Phil: “Are you some sort of gorilla now, with your leafy greans and your
greasy hair?”
Aaron: “Ugh?”
Phil: “You know, it’s going to take at least 4 stomachs to digest that!”
(Note: as Biology major alumni from Gustavus, we do realize that gorillas are not ruminants…it just sounded funny at the time)
But the presence of only a fork and chopsticks would not deter Aaron from the enormous green stalks – bet you’ve never seen a Northwoods boy pull out his Leatherman knife inside an Asian restaurant. Get yourself one – they’re as handy as duct tape.
That was yesterday. This is today. You’ve laughed and now you’ll cry. See, the Krisco Kid seems to have a chronic illness of…well…everything.
Imagine a truck being driven over the vast flats of North Dakota for much of its 148,000 mile lifetime. Which parts of the rig do you think got the least amount of use? What seemed to keep going and going like the Energizer bunny?
Yeah, the breaks.
Well, they still got use over the years and now we’ve been using them even more on all these steep hills out West (although believe us, we are damn good manual shift engine breakers). So like everything else with the Kid, it seemed to be the breaks’ time to approach St. Peter’s Gate – we heard some nasty grinding while nearing San Francisco. A VW mechanic (we know enough of the personally no to speak nearly fluent German) told us they are shot. Legally, he can’t even let us back on the road without fixing them – “Unfortunately,” he said “it’s nice to go, but you need to stop.” Damn that 8.5% California sales tax. This is really going to hurt. There isn’t any sales tax in Oregon, that would have been a nice place to break down…oh wait, we did break down there already.
Once again, the veggie system works wonders, is not at fault, yada yada yada. Still, with all these car problems, we’d like to promote the use of some other alternative sources of transportation. Bike. Walk. Crawl.
Okay, we’ve made it to California. We’re trying to get to the Sequoia’s for Thanksgiving. Then we’re just going to try to get home.
Love to you all and thanks for all your supportive emails and calls! Phil and Aaron