20250403 Chico to the Chinese Embassy in San Francisco

20250403 Chico to the Chinese Embassy in San Francisco

We had a comfortable night’s rest at Chico Rice, and Sammy came by to see us off as we broke camp and headed south.  

We thought we might have found cheap diesel on the Gas Buddy App in Dunnigan, but it turned out to be too good to be true.  While it was 50 cents less expensive per gallon, it turned out to be B20 biodiesel, which is 20% biodiesel. Our Sprinter can only take No.2 diesel and no more than B5 or 5% biodiesel.  We will just have to get used to paying more for diesel in California.  

We stopped at a Planet Fitness in Vacaville, where we took showers and refilled our drinking water containers.  It’s handy to have a Planet Fitness membership when traveling by RV over long distances and durations.  

Our next stop was the Jelly Belly Factory in Fairview.  Although they now charge $8 for the museum and factory tour, they have a huge store and restaurant gift shop, and in the back, they have a room full of discounted candies.   Who says a mutant double jelly bean can’t live a fulfilling life as a belly flop? 

From Fairview, it was a straight shot to Los Altos.  Fortunately, we only encountered traffic in a few places like Hayward, and managed to arrive at Ben’s sister’s Los Altos home before 1 p.m.  Ben saw that it would take an hour to get to the Chinese Embassy in San Francisco, and although he thought he had read earlier that it was open until 4:30 p.m., a quick check on the internet showed it closed at 2:30 p.m.  We decided to take a gamble and see if we could deliver our Chinese Visa applications today, which would allow us to return back a day earlier to deal with filing taxes and upcoming appointments.  

Thankfully, people in the Bay Area are not afraid to drive fast.  We unhitched the Bronco and flew with the traffic along Hwy 101 into San Francisco like the wind.  We were largely off the rush hour traffic but did encounter one major slow down just before dropping down into the Civic Center.  The Chinese Embassy is just a block from Japantown where they have a large public parking garage so we were able to park there for $4/hr (bargain compared to $16/hr in Seattle’s downtown).  

We got in the door at 1:55 p.m.  There was a line at the windows for accepting Visa applications but they had 4 windows staffed and we got up to one of the windows at 2:10 p.m.  We had seen several other people have problems with their applications like missing photocopies of their passport pages or copies of prior Chinese visas, but Ben had been extra paranoid in reading about the documentation requirements and had color copies of all passport ID pages, proof of residency, and old China visas from our 2006 trip.  The gal behind the counter carefully went through double-checking each item and then handed us receipts for picking up and paying for the Visas next Tuesday.  We had a total of 3 visa applications submitted. We were out the door before the 2:30 closing time and very happy to have accomplished that.  

We did hit more traffic leaving the city, but while we hit multiple rolling slow downs, it was nothing compared to the worse traffic we have encountered in Vancouver, BC, and Seattle.  

After getting back to Eileen’s place, we set up camp in their driveway and had a late lunch of chicken sandwiches with the Costco roast chicken.  

Eileen and Brevan got home from work and got ready to go to their kickboxing gym workout.  We got to do some laundry and unloaded 11 computers to be donated to Tony’s nonprofit.

We made a trip to the Apple Park visitor center, which is on the campus of the Apple headquarters building shaped like a giant flying saucer.  Ben had broken an earpiece on his AirPods and picked up replacements while Janet got to order a replacement screen protector glass, which got cracked during this trip when it slid off the Bronco’s dashboard and onto the pavement.  That will get shipped to our home for later installation at an Apple Store closer to home.

When we got back, we finished our laundry and watched some TV with Eileen while Brevan and Coby were doing some fantasy footballing.  Ben got to drink some homemade beer that Tony had brewed using a kit that he had received from his son Alex for Christmas.  It was quite good, but Eileen complains it takes up a lot of space in the refrigerator, so Ben will drink enough to make space for the razor clams we gave them.

Ben made ramen with Costco rotisserie chicken for dinner in the RV.  Now that the China visa applications have been filed, we relax and think of things to do and see over the weekend.