Do not wait to evacuate

After a long 5 hour flight (Montreal – San francisco) we really just wanted to sleep, which we did in San Bruno, a suburb of San Francisco. The next day though, we immediatly went to downtown San Francisco. We started with a stop in the Cheesecake Factory, where we surprisingly didn’t pass by Penny (bbt). The Cheesecakes were good tho (but really really sweet).

We couldn’t go to San Fransisco without using the oh so famous cable car, could we? So, we did that. It was good, but they really stuffed the carthing to the last gap.

Next stop on the list – Pier 39, where we besides seeing sea lions, Alcatraz and the golden Gate Bridge also visited the “believe it or not” museum.

On our second day of sight seeing in San Francisco, we definitely didn’t want to skip Japantown. Especially not when there was celebration festival kind of thing. We also enjoyed going inside of the sweet little shops (mainly kitchenware and jewelry shops;)) as well as the luscious Japanese cuisine.

The final stop had to be the famous film location from a 90s tv-series. Can you guess which one?

For the following days we got a rental car and were now heading to LA. Driving through the Silicon Valley we sure had to stop by the Computer History Museum, where we learned and even played (pacman etc.) a lot. Looking at and sitting inside of a self driving car with no steering wheel got us thinking about Ferdi needing to get a drivers liscense or not…?

And driving through Cupertino we also had to have a look at the Apple Park (as loyal apple users – sorry Android fans). Taking some music creation classes and trying out some games inside of the App Store had been real fun, not even gonna lie.

Fresno a small or rather not so small city (525.000 inhabitants) right in the middle of the California Central Valley, in which we decided to stay some days, since there was a big waterpark (With 40+ degrees celcius, a waterpark was a must…) Tho firstly, we decided to play minigolf in an airconditioned building.

The slides in the Island Waterpark were amazing and thankfully (due to applying sunscreen every 2 hours) we didn’t get sunburnt.

The bass lake was lovely to eat lunch. We picknicked and Lutz even jumped inside the lake to cool off. We wanted to visit at least one of the national parks, which was why we stopped in the western city of Mariposa. It was scenic (we even toke some pics of the beautiful sunset), the AirbnB was amazing and the trip to the Yosemite Nationalpark was planned.

The next day tho, it started not smelling good and during lunch Susi noticed smoke on the other side of the street. It looked like there was a big fire.

Being afraid of how that fire will grow we packed all our stuff within 15 minutes. Next we headed to the tourist info to get some information. They told us that we are safe in the city because the wind was not in our direction but visiting Yosemite might not be the best idea. Back home we watched the cloud of smoke getting bigger and bigger. Unfortunately the wind changed paths and the fire was coming futher to us. We also got an evacuation notification on our phones.

We decided to leave as fast as possible.

Even after 2 hours of driving we were still able to see the clouds of smoke behind us. We were shocked by the amount of fire trucks and the big planes releasing tons of water. In recovery of this trauma we pursued the news on twitter. It is so terrifying to see that the Oakfire burned 80 square kilometers within the next days.