After spending  a week and a half with Wendy, Mathew, and Tyler we left Nevada City, CA and headed to San Francisco (“SF” to those in the know). This was one of the places Maria was really looking forward to seeing and it did not disappoint. Our friend Carlos had moved there a year prior and did a great job showing us around.

We stayed in an RV park the first two nights in Marin a town just North of SF, before taking Stanley into the city. We knew this was not as simple as most towns with SF’s narrow roads and 45 degree hills. Smartly we stayed to the outer edge of the city where it was flatter and less congested.

Parking  in SF turned out to be more complicated than most cities as there are not a whole lot of long curb sides, because of complex system of under building garages. After spending one night boondocked on some random curb, we were able to find a spot behind Carlos’ apartment. This worked out perfectly as it was Friday and over the weekend it is not a two hour limit spot.

We haven’t been very touristy in our travels thus far, but we branched out and visited some of the standard stops such as the Fisherman’s Wharf, “the world’s crookedest street”, and the Haight Ashbury district. We also got our culture on at the SF MOMA, but were a bit disappointed in the diversity of work as it seemed like 90% of the exhibits were photographs.

The next day we met up with Carlos, Jenn, and our fellow rubber tramp Brendan to hit up the Exploratorium, which is essentially a giant hanger filled with little science projects and interactive stations that run the gamut from physics to how the mind works. It was a bit overwhelming, but after about 4 hours in there I felt I was able to see about three quarters of the exhibits.

Exploratorium - spectra shadows

Exploratorium - mirror room

Saturday we relaxed at Dolores park with dogs and spent Sunday fixing the bike rack on Stanley and getting ready to head Monday.

Great time in SF and it definitely made the list of top 5 cities been to thus far. Thanks to Carlos and Jenn for the being great hosts.

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While making our way from Longmont to Fort Collins we drove through the small town of Lyons. We were originally just looking for a spot to buy some of Oskar Blues famous Pale Ale in a can when we stumbled upon a pinball museum of sorts.

Lyon’s Classic Pinball is essentially the house of a pinball enthusiast who turned it into an arcade. There were over 35 pinball games from the 1960’s to 2000 with such rarities as the world’s largest pinball machine and the only three tiered pinball game made.

We had a blast playing the only two player (versus) pinball game where you stand across form each other and try and send balls to your opponent’s side.

One of my favorite’s was the Disc’s of Tron (based on the game played in the movie Tron) video game that had to be one of the first games to try and use 3D video projection that would make dizzy if you looked at it too long.

After some retro fun we were on to Fort Collins via Estes Park. Maria had looked up a cool dog park in Estes with three different sections and a swimming area. When we arrived we were excited to see that they had a mini obstacle course for dogs. Our immediate thought was “Oh, Ernie would love to do this!” Turns out Ernie wasn’t interested, but Buddha picked it up right away. After a couple of times showing him how to go up and down the ramp he was running the course like a pro.

As you can see he had trouble with the last jump, but we just wrote it off as a prejudice obstacle.

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