The streets are narrow, traffic laws are treated as mere suggestions, and parking is expensive and hard to find.

We both read that driving a car around San Francisco can be a pain in the ass. Maybe we should plan our next group camping trip in the desert. Ironically, the last time we planned a campout with this group of friends was during the Western Deluge, an unusaully large storm back in March that pounded on us from Oregon to Northern California and nearly flooded our campsite at Folsom Lake. Oregon and Washington were bracing for some pretty intense weather and we were expecting some heavy rain later in the week. A Pacific typhoon had apparently redirected off the coastline of Asia and was making its way to the Pacific Northwest. Furthermore, the waves were pretty intense due to a large storm brewing off-shore. It was also a little late in the season for swimming. Like most Pacific beaches, the water was very cold. You can’t drive onto the beach, which we normally love doing, but without cars present the beach becomes very peaceful. The Limantour Beach at Point Reyes is perfect for walking. The two big draws here are the beach, obviously, and the Point Reyes Lighthouse, which we decided to save for the weekend because our bay area friends had never been. Our plan was to spend one day at the Point Reyes National Seashore and two days in San Francisco. We arrived on a Monday, which gave us plenty of time to explore the area before our friends arrived on Friday. The town was cute, despite not offering much beyond the basic needs of a San Francisco tourist spending a day at the seashore. Beyond the campground there was a nice restaurant with an attached market selling picnic foods, beer, wine, and sometimes ice, a bed and breakfast, and a visitors center and a resale shop, neither of which ever seemed to be open. It was so small that the campground also housed the local post office and public laundromat. Olema was one of the tiniest towns we’ve stayed in. Ouch!) Furthermore, we wanted to stay somewhere that would have space for all of the extra cars as well as room for Cody and Jaz to set up their tent. (I checked with three different parks closer to the city and found rates ranging from $75 to $100 a night. We were about an hour from San Francisco but the area was beautiful and the rate was less than half of what the RV parks within the city were charging. The plan was for us to camp outside of the city at the Olema Campground near the Point Reyes National Seashore. These are some of our favorite people and we were super excited that a weekend campout worked with everyone’s schedules. You may also remember them from our visit to Folsom Lake on our way to Texas in March. The last time we saw these guys was at our wedding back in April. With traffic it can be an hour and a half in the morning and two and a half to three hours at night. For those of you familiar with the area, yes, Coleman has one of the longest daily commutes of anyone I know. Our friends Cody and Jaz live on the east side of the bay and our friends Coleman and Kelly live outside of Sacramento but Coleman currently commutes to the bay for work. However, we were determined to make our visit to San Francisco work (despite its reputation for high prices) because we had an extra incentive: visiting friends! For RVers visiting a large popular city, there is often a choice of either staying close to the city (for a price) or staying far outside of the city, which somewhat kills the allure of visiting the city in the first place. Most notably, we completely skipped Seattle and Denver, both places we had hoped to visit. Neither of us had ever been to San Francisco (unless you count a couple of long layovers in the Oakland Airport), but we’ve had some trouble visiting large cities on this trip because we’ve found they generally aren’t very RV friendly.

Cities close to point reyes seashore