Today we made our way the other direction – heading North-West. The first stop of the day was at the Muir Woods NM – home of some big trees.

The main valley trail here was full of bus tourists, so we soon decided to leave that trail and took one of the smaller hiking trails and ended up doing a two hour hike through the park – before getting back to the main trail.

After a quick stop at the cafeteria for some coffee / tea, we made it back to the car. The original plan had been to stop at a view point and have a picnic lunch there – however the view point was covered by fog (or just sitting in a cloud), so we continued the drive and ultimately ended up at the East Peak parking lot of Mount Tamalpais – at around 750m above sea level, we were well above the clouds here.

We decided to go for another small hike and made our way from the parking lot up to the actual peak – where we had lunch with more fabulous views (Mt.Diablo looking at us just on the other side of the bay) and being looked at by a little squirrel and a surveillance camera.

I guess, distance-wise the hiking today had not been much different from yesterday; also elevation changes playing in a similar league. The trail quality however made the difference – forest floor trails in Muir Woods and proper trails on Mt.Tam – so things turned out less strenuous compared to the hike yesterday.

From Mt.Tam we made it back to California 101, this time heading South for San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Downtown we had a bit of a struggle to find a good parking spot – once that was sorted out, we went for some pre-dinner drinks, before changing to the Mission District and an already known tapas bar 😉