A day to forget

When you travel you experience good things and bad things, live trough easy times and hard times and even though the good times are mostly longer and the easy times are more frequent, it is the bad times that leave the bigger impact in that moment.

The day we left Pozo Valley was definitely one of those bad days that can overshadow a whole week of good. Ryan, Michelle and their kids dropped us off in Paso Robles, a small wine town in the middle of "not much" from where we planned on traveling to San Francisco. It was 7:30 am when we found the train station, only to see that we had to wait until 11 o'clock for it to open. We walked around town for a bit with all our stuff before we found a café with free WiFi where we stayed and started to plan our trip. We had a few options that we could choose from and we decided to take the cheapest, a bus/train connection, that took a bit longer than the others but also left earlier. The coffee was good and the chairs comfortable and the wait wasn't even that bad. We didn't have access to the internet while we were on the farm which meant that we hadn't contacted anyone to stay with and non of our other contacts were able to host us for the next few days which meant that we had to stay in a hostel if we didn't find an emergency couch to stay on. We were both stressed out by the time we left from writing all those couch requests and looking for rides with rideshare and my head felt as if it would explode every second. We arrived at the train station where we had to find out that the bus wouldn't take the surfboard which blew over all the plans we had made. I asked the women if I could at least take my surfboard on the train and she assured me that I could so we decided to take the Amtrak to San Jose, a suburb of SF, from where we would take the local transportation to the next hostel. We wanted to watch a movie at the local cinema but they didn't have any good movies so we just sat down in a little shop where I had a pasta salad and we met a nice girl who we talked to for a while who was very exited about our trip and loved our stories. We changed our location back to the nice little coffee shop where we had internet and continued to look for a place to stay. After almost 4 hours we heaved our stuff on our back again and went back to the train station. We were tired and pissed because everything was going wrong so far, we didn't have a  ride, a place to stay or a plan for SF and it seemed like such a big effort to organize everything on one day that we even considered to go back to LA from where we would organize everything with more time. It seemed like giving up though so we decided to take the train to SF and work something out from there even though we would have arrived at 11pm in a very shady area with no place to stay. I called the Amtrak number to buy our tickets over the phone and had everything worked out with the friendly lady until I asked about the boards. I had asked a few hours ago but to be sure I asked again and she told me they couldn't take the board on the train, not even if I paid extra. This fucked our plans all over again (obviously we wouldn't leave our board there), it was dark already, we hadn't found a place to stay, not even in the town we were in, and we were both so tired that we could have slept right away and the only thing that seemed logical to us at that point was to call Dani and to ask her if we could come back to her place. That was no problem and an hour later we found ourselves on the very expensive Greyhound bus towards LA. The six hour trip went past quite fast, Bekki slept through most of it and I watched some series, and we arrived in Downtown LA at 11pm from where we only had to find the metro station that would take us to Long Beach. I had looked up the way on a map and decided that the distance was walkable which turned out to be a bad mistake because it was longer than I had expected, we, especially Bekki, were more tired than we had thought and the area we had to walk through was full of homeless people and prostitutes and has a very bad reputation (which we found out afterwards). After a long and scary walk we arrived the metro safely and were glad to rest a bit during the 45 minute drive to Long Beach. Dani picked us up from the station, it was already 1:30am, but she said that it was OK because one of her friends had done the same for her during her travels and from now on it was up to us to do it for someone else. Tired but relieved and happy to have a place to sleep we sunk into bed. It had been a long day with a lot of bad news since we got up at 6 o'clock. We had waited a total of 11 hours in Paso Robles, spent about 9 hours on the road and carried all of our luggage around with us... It is still too much.