The Road to Saratoga—or—The Drive Where I Thought We Might Die

Pay no attention, girls, to the drug deal going down just to our left...

Early dinner reservations awaited us at another site of historical significance from our pre-marriage days. The road to La Fondue in Saratoga—where Rachelle and I shared several romantic dates way back when—took us on CA Route 17 over the mountains. I didn't give it too much thought ahead of time, but it turned out that this was a terrifying drive in the RV. This is a super-windy, narrow road with concrete dividers along much of the centerline and cliff walls or drop-offs along the edge of the road. Cars drive really fast on this road. Amaya and I in the RV followed Keiko and Rachelle in the rental car, but I couldn't go anywhere near as fast as she. Climbing the mountain was slow, but manageable. The downhill portion, however, was a white-knuckle experience like I have never experienced before. The steep and curvy downhill required that I use the brakes a lot so as to avoid the sensation that we were going to tip over. Better yet, after a few minutes of steep descent, the RV began to "shudder" when I applied the brakes. The more I heavily I braked, the more severe the shuddering/oscillation/lurching behavior became. I surmised that the brakes were overheating, so I tried to use them as little as I could, but then we would accelerate to uncomfortable speeds. Fortunately, the grade leveled out and the brakes had time to cool and the shuddering went away. By the time we got to Saratoga, however, I was pretty wiped out. A few days later, I called Jeff the rental guy to ask him how to avoid these kind of uncomfortable situations in the future. He said, "did you use the brake assist?" "Ummmm....what's that?" I replied. Nice. It turned out that there's a switch on the dashboard that forces the transmission to take on some of the breaking function. In retrospect, I should have thought to downshift to a lower gear, which would have accomplished much the same thing—but in the white-knuckle moment, I guess I didn't have the presence of mind to consider this. Amaya was a little freaked out too. Not something I wanted to repeat.

Nice Teeth!

I have an eerie feeling that someone is watching me...

What do you mean we're eating Buffalo?

We were the first patrons at La Fondue with our 5:00 reservations. Since we had been there last (Summer of 2004 when we did a home exchange in Berkeley) The restaurant had moved to the space next door, but the menu hadn't changed and neither had the vibe. We had three courses of fondue: traditional Swiss, meat fondue including buffalo, and a killer chocolate fondue. 

Damage Done

We rolled out of there at around 7:00 and still had to return the rental car to the airport in San Jose before driving up the peninsula to our campground. It was starting to get dark and we were down to 1/4 tank of gas, but we cruised up I-280 and then to Route 1 through the Western section of San Francisco and over the Golden Gate Bridge. The tunnel preceding the bridge was pretty exciting by itself, but the bridge was a new level of stress. Trucks and RVs are restricted to the right-most lane because it's the widest lane (God save anyone who was driving a truck in any of the other lanes). It felt like we had about a 6 inch clearance between the right side of the RV and the bridge structure. Meanwhile, cars are whizzing by us, seemingly inches from our left side. I'm not sure if I too a full breath for the entire span. Holy crap. That was cool, but I don't need to do that again in this lifetime.

It was just a few minutes more until we reached our RV park in Greenbrae. It was pitch dark in the RV park and we were supposed to back into a very narrow spot (that also happened to have a giant speed bump right down the middle). An old-timer who owned one of those 45-foot-long monster big rigs helped us maneuver into our spot. I'm pretty sure that his act of kindness saved our marriage. I don't think we could have backed into our spot without him. It's hard enough to back that thing up in the daylight. At night, the reflections cast by all of the different glass surfaces make it impossible to use the rear view mirror. Our RV was equipped with a backup camera, but it only functioned about 20% of the time—and was never operational when we were trying to park. He stood by my window and gave me step by step instructions for when to turn. It wasn't until the next morning that I saw how we had bee shoehorned into the tiniest spot possible.

After we had shut down and had set everything up for sleeping, I told Rachelle that I had no adrenaline left in my body. The girls didn't care. They asked me to help them with math problems...