Good Fortune Smiles in the ‘City by the Bay’

We are standing on Stockton Street in the busy heart of Chinatown waiting for Matilda to break open her fortune cookie. Barbecued ducks, fried pork and an array of unidentifiable animal parts hang in the storefront window behind us.

Matilda cracks the cookie shell and hands us the slip of paper.

“Here,” she says.

“You are heading in the right direction,” the fortune reads.

We all smile, happy to be back in sunny California.

The ride to San Francisco began a week ago in the fog on U.S. 101 in the far northwest corner of the state.

Soon after Crescent City, the highway leaves the coast and rises along a mountain ridge into Redwood National Park. We share the road with RVs and trailers carrying redwood-seeking tourists and logging trucks laden with redwood timber from adjacent forest land.

Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, a state-administered oasis on the fringe of the national park, is a first-come, first-served campground that sells out soon after noon during the summer.

The campsites are large and rather secluded, covered with ferns, blackberry bushes and bear warnings. A few summers ago, black bears broke into more than 50 cars and forced the park to be closed.

“A Coleman cooler is like a pinata to a bear,” says our park ranger.

After packing our food away, we take a hike into the redwood forest and are surrounded by the tallest trees on earth.

Some of the redwoods are more than 2,000 years old and grow taller than 300 feet. Large enough for a car to drive through, they are shaped like darts with wide trunks that rise to spindly leafless points.

We leave U.S. 101 south of Humboldt Redwoods State Park and turn toward the Pacific Ocean on California 1.

The highway takes its time down the coast, winding through artists’ communities such as Gualala and Mendocino.

The road hugs the bays and headlands, making motorists steer overtime through its constant twists and turns. There are few passing lanes and too many slow and awkward RVs.

South of Bodega Bay, near Pt. Reyes, we pass a handful of cafes that sit out over the edge of the calm waters, overlooking oyster beds.

The restaurants are open only on weekends, but the farms sell shellfish all week long.

We pull off the highway down a dirt road to Tomales Bay Oyster Co., where a suntanned Becky Stenberg is standing over a vat of water full of freshly harvested oysters.

“Oysters are best in winter, but summer is when most tourists are here to buy them,” Becky says.

Her oysters, straight from the bay, range in cost from $4 a dozen for cocktail size to $12 a dozen for giant cowboy oysters as large as saucers.

“I eat about a dozen a week and like them raw with a raspberry vinegarette,” she says.

We buy two dozen medium-sized oysters to shlurp au naturel with our Marin County hosts, Kim and Bob Holtz and their 2-year-old, Henry.

After a good night’s sleep in real beds, we head off in the morning to San Francisco, the “City by the Bay.”

Kim is driving, and along the way she points out roadside landmarks such as George Lucas’ modest home in Marin, the bright yellow San Quentin Prison and the floating houseboats of Sausalito.

Henry and our children--Henri, 5, and Matilda, 2--are jumping up and down in the back seat because ahead there is a tunnel and the Golden Gate Bridge. To the kiddies, this is an unexplainable double dose of excitement.

Kim, a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital, speeds us over the bridge and onto the city’s roller-coaster roads. “You wanna be my patient?” she shouts at pedestrians who walk blindly in front of us, ignoring “Don’t Walk” signals.

“I learned to drive in New York,” she explains.

Bumper-to-bumper tourist traffic and wall-to-wall video cameras accompany us down “the crookedest street in the world,” Lombard Street. “Wheeee!” the kids exclaim with a laugh as they are thrown from side to side in the back seat.

We drive into Chinatown, where the sidewalks are overflowing with people. Luck is with us: The only vacant parking space is at a broken meter with no time limit.

Across Stockton Street is the Mee Mee Bakery, which has a fortune cookie factory in back. Simon Chow is happy to show tourists around his small operation.

“No photos, no photos,” he says, waving his hands and leading us toward a circular machine that bakes, inserts fortunes and folds 20 cookies a minute.

“Yes, I believe in fortunes,” Simon says. “But I don’t read them because I would go crazy.”

Nearby on Washington Street is the budget Sam Wo Restaurant, where the food is dirt-cheap (most expensive item: $4.50) and the service abrupt.

Sam’s menu advises: “No coffee, no tea, no B.S.”

The five of us feast for $14.

There are so many sights, from Chinatown and North Beach past Union Square to the Tenderloin District and then Castro Street, where men in leather walk hand-in-hand. We drive through Haight-Ashbury, where teen-age hippies and a few genuine relics of the ‘60s perpetuate the “summer of love.”

The kids don’t blink an eye.

Our city loop rises to the large mansions in wealthy Pacific Heights with their bay views of Alcatraz Island.

Down the hill, not far from J. Paul Getty’s house, a police car is parked outside the Russian Consulate. Officer Al Glover is in the passenger seat reading the paper.

“What’s up?” we ask.

He tells us he is here because Russia has troops outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. But his job will soon be abolished, Al says, because of the easing of tensions between the two countries.

“This is a nice safe job, but it’s too nice and too safe,” he says, folding his newspaper to the sports section. “I’m moving to San Diego when the job ends next month.”

Our destination is also Southern California. But first we drop into the ruins of a historic coastal home called The Cliff House, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Located on the Great Highway, The Cliff House is now a restaurant, gift shop, seal-rock viewing area and amusement parlor.

Strange machines, some more than 60 years old, include performing puppets, nickelodeons and eerie-looking mechanical fortune-tellers and palm-readers. Many of them were saved when a nearby theme park, Playland at the Beach, was closed and bulldozed for condominiums.

Henri spends a quarter on a guillotine machine that cuts the head off a puppet. “Maybe he did something bad,” our son says.

We drop a family quarter into another slot and ask a worn-out, bearded doll called “The Wizard” for his advice.

A pink card pops out of the machine. “Travel is not recommended and it may be better for you to remain in a familiar environment,” it reads .

Good advice, Mr. Wizard. We are on our way home.