Wednesday 25th March

Off to the Mission’s Kitchen again this morning for breakfast, had the classic pancakes with sausages and eggs. Covered the pancakes in maple syrup, lovely stuff! It is such a great eating place, rough and ready but friendly, and clearly full of locals. We saw a guy who looked like a bum helping himself to coffee behind the counter, and we thought that maybe they just let these people come and have free breakfast and help themselves, then the guy answered the phone and started talking to us, and we realised he probably owned the place! We loaded up on fruit and water and headed to the Castro district on the way out of town. We saw the Castro Theater and the Twin Peaks café and the Harvey Milk Plaza and lots of outwardly gay people. Heading out of San Francisco across the East Bay Bridge, we realised just how big the city is. We drove east towards Yosemite National Park, having decided to enter the park at the southwestern entrance on Highway 140, which we had been told would be open at this time of year. Tonight we would stay somewhere just outside the park, and go into it early tomorrow.
We picked the town of Mariposa where the 140 intersects with the 49, an old gold mining town. We were well into the Gold Country now! We have heard about ghost towns in the desert that were abandoned after the mines dried up, so we are hoping to see some of them. The town was quiet but very pleasant, and we had plenty of fairly cheap motel options. We went for a place called The Mother Lode Lodge, and while Greg had a shower I went for a walk and found a nice little park with an outdoor pool, ampitheater, tennis and basketball courts and a skate park. They certainly provide plenty for people to do in such a small place. A lot of the buildings were very Old West style, it was hard to tell if they were genuine or had been recreated in this way for the tourists. I think it might have been a mix of both.
We went out for food at a place that had just opened called The Butterfly Café. Had a cracking burger and met the owner called John, who had come from Canada to live in the town with his Belgian wife. He seemed very happy to talk to us, he was telling us how from his perspective he found a lot of the townspeople very insular, so I guess he was pleased to talk to some more outsiders. He sat down with us and gave us wine and cheesecake on the house and some leftover pastries, generous fellow! We went over the road to a bar called the 49’er and met a guy called Gary Walker, quite a man of the world and very interesting to talk to, seemed like he was probably quite a bit further left than a lot of the people in the town. He gave us some different ideas about where to go next, basically to head north over the Sierra Nevadas after Yosemite and to head down the 395, which is apparently an amazing road between mountain ranges. He said that we would be better off seeing more things inland than the coast, as we have seen so much of it already, like Death Valley and even The Grand Canyon. Gave us much food for thought.