I spent the first half of today doing a little shopping around San Francisco. I need to get more film and a few other things. I was going to try and get some of the pictures I've taken so far processed but I couldn't find a lab that could do it within the timeframe I had (I wanted to leave for Yosemite tonight). So instead I just walked around for a few hours. I finally got out of the city around 3pm and headed for Pacifica (on the coast, south of the S.F.) to see how the coastal area was looking. It was looking as bad as it had been for the last several days so I head off east for Yosemite.

Earlier while I was walking around downtown San Francisco I kept thinking this would be a cool place to live for a while. I kept on thinking this right up until I spent 1+ hour crossing what I had thought was one of the lesser bridges across the bay. Once across the bridge I spent another few hours just getting 50 miles or so outside of S.F. Rather than sit in traffic I decided to get a bite to eat and sit it out for a while.  With a little help from someone back in Seattle with access to the internet, we hunted down the nearest "In & Out" burger place and I made a little side trip to swing by. If you've never had an In & Out burger before, you've never had a good burger. After that I continued on to Yosemite.

I made it to Yosemite valley around 10 p.m. I drove around for a while and decided to just try my luck at the reservation center and see if there had been any last minute cancellations. When I parked the car, there was a crowd of people running around with flashlights. One of them stopped and told me that there was just a bear sighting and told me that I better not have any food in my car. Well, it's been full of food since I've been on the road.

The bears are famous in Yosemite national park for ripping the doors off of cars that have food in them. The person also told me that they saw 6 cars that had their trunk or door removed the previous night (last year bears did $600,000 worth of car damage in the park). With that, I decided to get back in the car and get out of the valley for the night. I had to drive back down about 30 miles and by the time I found a place I just decided to sleep in the car so I could get an early start the next day.