Since three weeks, we’re in Berlin. We found a furnished apartment near the city center. From here we will look for new jobs. In the meantime, Koos is working on freelance projects and Ruth on plans for setting up a business of her own. As soon as one of us has found a job, we’ll look for a more permanent place to live.
If you feel like coming to Berlin, let us know, alright! You could stay at our place, it came with a sleeper sofa!
Our vacation is over now. Since our last post we drove to Portland, Oregon. Portland is the hipster capital about which you may have had a laugh with the TV series Portlandia. We found the city pretty laid back and nice. Nonetheless, if you come from Europe, you may just as well go to Sweden, because there they also have wool sweaters, mustaches and retro-styled bikes.
Driving from Los Angeles from Portland we made a few stop overs. The nicest of these was near Crater Lake:
Crater Lake is a huge volcano caldera, almost a perfect circle with a diameter of around 10 kilometers. It’s hundreds of meters deep and filled with thousands of years of rain water. When we arrived there in the morning, the water was completely smooth. The dark blue is the color of very deep water.
After Portland we went south again, because from San Francisco our plane back to Amsterdam leaves. We stayed in little towns, always at motels near the beach: Lincoln City, Newport and Eureka. Compared to California, Oregon is very quiet, with even more nature and a bit more European attitude. It’s also a bit cooler and we even felt some real raindrops! Stuff that’s wrong in California, seems to be better organized in Oregon. People drive a bit more safely, especially Portland is pedestrian-friendly and there seem to be less mentally ill homeless.
Our trip along the coast was very beautiful. The coastal towns themselves were not that impressive: built along Highway 101, they don’t have city centers. The 101 is not your typical European highway either: every time it enters a town border, the maximum speed goes down to 45 km/h. But as we said: the landscape was amazing: nice beaches, with rivers flowing trough them into the sea, sand dunes, forest and huge rocks in the water. The waves rolling in from the pacific ocean break violently, creating a loads of foam and causing a white mist that’s visible even a couple hundred meters landward.
The road meandered along the hillsides and the sea: a marvelous view all the way! In case you ever plan a road trip along the coast: make sure you have the seaside half of the road! Crossing the state border, we immediately noticed we entered California. The road was rough again and chaos started straight away. For some reason, people in California don’t care for safety and traffic rules, whereas Oregonians take their time and even maintain safe distances when driving behind other cars (sometimes).
At the Redwood National Park we stopped for a hike. It wasn’t one of the longest, but may have been the nicest of all hikes we made during the last half year. These redwoods look taller every time we see them and this time the rest of the forest was also very beautiful: lots of ferns, birds and even a waterfall!
Our last night in the USA we spent in Napa. Napa’s street plan looks a bit more like a city as we know them from Europe. The center is old not situated along a highway, there’s a river flowing through it and there are nice big houses. Napa Valley is famous for the wine that’s produced there: it’s one of the biggest wine areas of California. We didn’t have time to see much of it and try the wine though. Koos’ parents advised us not to drive too much on a day, but with packing bags, having breakfast, checking out and riving for about 5,5 hours, there’s just not so much time left before sunset.
Now we’re at San Francisco airport, waiting for our flight. We’re a bit sad too leave this beautiful country. We’ve already written about the drawbacks of living in the USA, but we will surely miss the wide open spaces, wonderful nature, the comfortable life, the climate of California and our new friends. We do look forward to seeing you in Germany and the Netherlands though! We’ll keep you posted on where we’ll be going next!
Edit 24 May 2014:
Here’s a map of our trip:
View on Google Maps
We’ve been traveling for ten days now and slept in another town almost every night and have constant regret over not having enough time to spend in the places we see but also look very much forward to our next destination. Little time to just sit around, so it’s gonna be a short post again.
After the barbecue with our old neighbors, first stop was Monterey. We’d quickly visited this seaside town once before, but only to have a quick bit there. This time we discovered that it’s a really nice, quiet place with beautiful wood houses and lush green gardens. Deers wander freely through the streets, birds everywhere and life in the sea is so special that we even watched a documentary about it on German TV a while ago. There’s all kinds of freaky underwater life and rare sea otters that you can actually see from the coast (although Koos had mistaken them for sea lions initially. TV docus can give you a distorted feel for proportions apparently).
They decided to show a bit of the vibrant sea life to the general public with a sea aquarium built within the buildings of an old sardine canning factory. It’s supposed to be one of the biggest and most beautiful in the world. We’ve seen only a few sea aquariums before, but we tend to believe that: it’s huge and very impressive.
From Monterey we took the 17 Mile Drive to Highway 1. The 17 Mile Drive is quite typical for how beautiful natural spots are made accessible for people who don’t want to leave their cars. You just stop at all the signs that show you where to spot animals and special plants and trees. Even though it was foggy, we got some nice views and saw some ground animals.
Big Sur is a huge nature reserve of which we got to see only a small bit, because of all the stops we’d made along the 17 Mile Drive.
Just where the fog ends, you can see the road we drove: Highway 1.
Big Sur is big.
At Piedras Blancas, just south of Big Sur, we observed this elephant seal colony. They constantly make farting and snorting sounds and throw around sand over their own and other’s bodies. Some are as heavy as a small car and they look like a bag full of liquid fat when they hop on the beach. Besides throwing around sand, they like pushing their trunks into the sand and then blow out.
We heard some bad things about Los Angeles, so we were prepared for run down buildings, badly maintained streets and lots of crazy homeless. It may partly be because we stayed at a nice hotel in West Hollywood, but we both actually found it a very pleasant city.
Only because of the insane traffic situation, we wouldn’t prefer it over San Francisco. We though we’d seen some big highways, but it was nothing compared with the six lane minimum width mesh that’s laid out over this huge city. Worst thing is that all roads seemed continuously congested and we were even following the advice of not driving around meal times.
LA is kind of what we expected, but much better looking. There are tall palm trees everywhere, lots of other trees and blooming plants. The architecture is much more modern and varied than in the Bay Area and there are a lot of art galleries (sadly the ones Koos particularly wanted to visited were closed).
Despite the traffic, it’s just fun to drive on streets like Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive and see names like Beverly Hills and Compton that after all Hollywood stuff we watched sound so familiar but only get really real when you’re there. Where San Francisco’s full of billboard ads for apps and web stuff, LA takes it a bit further. Seemingly every show no one has yet heard of, gets signs with huge proportions that we’d only seen in developing countries:
To get a feel for the scale of things, look down from the butt of lady on the right.This is not just along some highway, but at Santa Monica Blvd. We think the poster is supposed to show a marketing director thinking “OMG I spent my whole budget on buying this wall and now I can’t afford a designer who understands perspective”.
Besides eating lots of good food at the restaurants Melinda advised us, we visited some special buildings in Downtown LA:
Designed by Frank Gehry, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is quite a striking building. We went inside and took the free audio tour, which was well worth the time.
Built in 1893, the Bradbury Building is really old for American standards. The big bright atrium with cast iron stairs looks pretty cool, so the building was used as a set in many movies, like Bladerunner.
LA was our southernmost stop and now we’re at the nothernmost point of our trip: Portland. It was a 1000 mile drive getting here, so we’ve made a few stopovers in between. We’ll tell you more later!
Edit September 20th: Added elephant seal picture.
It’s over! Koos’ work is kind of done and tomorrow our vacation starts. We’re a bit sad to leave San Francisco. It’s a great city to live in. We’ll miss the bay, the pelicans, sea lions and gulls, the hills and the nice people.
Luckily, we have a nice trip planned until we come back to Europe on the 25th. We are both very much looking forward to this. Tomorrow we leave our nice apartment and go south along the coast. But not before making a stop in Cupertino and having a barbecue at Paula and Wouter’s!
We’re a bit in a hurry: we have to pack our stuff, so later more. For now, here are some pictures from last Sunday. That was Ruth’s present for Koos’ birthday: a sailing trip on the bay. It was, well, awesome!
Last weekend Ruth’s aunt Britta and uncle Fine were visiting San Francisco. On Friday evening we went to our weekend-begins routine to Off the Grid Food Market in Fort Mason. There you can get anything from Asian and South American street food to The Whole Beast (if you crave for meat) to European food at the Old World Truck or you go for something new like Korean-Japanese fusion food or chocolate tacos. The food needs to be enjoyed standing or, if you are lucky on one of the rare free plastic chairs. And you have to bring warm clothes: when the sun goes down you feel the chilly sea breeze. Therefore after eating we warmed up at the hotel fire place.
On Saturday we went over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County to see the Muir Woods National Monument Park. There are the coast Redwoods to which the tallest tree in the world belongs. It’s quit difficult to get the over 1000 years old and over 70 meter tall trees on a picture. And you experience that your brain tries to make the trees appear smaller, because trees can’t be that tall.
On the way back we passed by Sausalito to eat something. We found a nice restaurant at the sea with beautiful view and good food, only when we wanted to pay there was a power outage. After we smelled that also the ventilation didn’t work anymore, we decided that we don’t wait to pay with credit card but just pay cash. That was a good decision because the outage lasted nearly two hours.
Fine and Britta went on to Hawaii and we are looking forward to see them again on their way back in San Francisco.
In four weeks, when Koos will be kind of done with his project, we will go traveling. Because then we won’t have a home, we’re now thinking about what to do and where to go. Koos’ contract won’t be extended, but the client is satisfied about is work and there’s big demand for designers in Silicon Valley. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a job here.
We won’t look for one though. It’s a lot of fun to be in the US, but to really live here has some big drawbacks. Visa issues aside (all work visa for 2013 are issued already):
Except for that last point, we weren’t really inconvenienced by any of the above yet, so we really like that we still have some time left here. Every time it’s wonderful to walk along the bay near our place, looking at the sunset, seeing the pelicans flying by, to go on forest hikes, have nice chats with the Americans we randomly meet on the streets and to enjoy live in the city. We very much look forward to the two and half weeks of vacation that we’re going to plan now!
We like it here!
Today Ruth walked along the sea at our Marina neighbourhood and saw this:
When getting closer to take a better picture, it seemed to get ready to spray, so Ruth decided to better watch the little fellow from a safe distance.
Last weekend, Koos’s parents and aunt Cobie arrived in San Francisco! It was nice and sunny on Saturday, so we headed straight for the bicycle rentals and cycled around together. At the Palace of Fine Arts you can usually find a wedding party on a photo shoot. That’s really something Kees is up for too, so he joined in with the fun:
Maria, Kees and Cobie have started their tour through the US and will probably see a whole lot more than we will have time for (envy!). At the end of their trip they will return to San Francisco, so we’ll have two and a half week to get to know the city better ourselves and prepare for some proper tour guiding. We’re curious about their adventures and look forward to see them in a few weeks!
Land of the free
Police like Stasi
Light the fireworks
Translating takes time
Cheap poetry is easy
Back to work now
This weekend Koos rented a bike, Ruth took the used bike she bought here and off we went to cycle the Golden Gate Bridge. The entrance to the bridge is about 3 miles from our home. To our surprise we discovered that there is a long beach between the bridge and our home area, where people are going kite- and windsurfing.
