EPISODE 2 - San Francisco

If the travel Gods were smiling down on me in my trip to America, they were downright pissed off at me in San Francisco... or maybe they were just furious at Alice, my traveling partner, and I was just in the line of fire - because what was supposed to be a simple 1 hour stroll across the Golden Gate Bridge turned into a bush-bashing, death-defying 5 hour extreme sporting event. I blame Alice, who in turn, blame her imaginary friend who apparently recommended that we should take this particular 'stroll'.

The plan was simple enough - we were supposed to catch the ferry to Sausalito and then walk back across the Golden Gate Bridge... 1 hour tops, she estimated. Our ever brilliant plans, however, did not bother to factor in the convoluted web of freeways, highways and other assorted winding roads that were never designed for pedestrians... Well! We showed them! What's more, we did it the Australian way - so not only did we walk ON the road THROUGH tunnels, but we did it on the 'wrong' side of the road... so, essentially, we were playing a game of chicken with the oncoming road trains and trucks. A jolly two hours later, as we were crawling our way across a bridge infamous for its number of suicides (not surprising, given the length of the bridge... people probably just give up half way), Alice pointed to a building off yonder, proclaiming it to be right near our hotel.

"Are you sure?" asks I, dehydrated and delirious.
"Yep! I'm great with directions!" she responded chirpily, "It's not that far away!"

2 hours laters, as we were nearing the building, we decided that enough was enough, and rather than walking up and down hilly San Fran, we'd catch a taxi back to the hotel.... but then, every man and his dog were out in the park that day, and and they all seemed to have cottoned onto the same plan, so we ended up walking all the way back.

As we were heading back, we looked at the map, thinking about our plans for that night to go to the Castro section - Alice proclaimed, yet again, that it didn't look "that far away!". I hit her over the back of the head with the map.

--------------------Hour 3 of my great adventure-------------------