USA 2012: Day Sixteen - Seattle to San Francisco

Day 16 involved catching Flight 884 to San Francisco on a United Airlines Boeing 757; however, due to heavy rain in San Francisco, our flight was delayed for almost two hours. To make matters worse, once we had boarded the aircraft, the Pilot instructed us that Air Traffic Control had allocated us a take-off slot in an hours time. So what we did was taxi the aircraft to a holding point at which the Pilot shut down the engines, and we waited, (and waited). So instead of getting into San Francisco at around 1000h, we got in after 1300h.

Strangely enough, there were no issues whatsoever when picking up our Rental Car. We decided to book a Hotel at Oakland, and after my taking various turns contrary to what the GPS was telling me, we eventually arrived for checking in. Earlier in the day, we came to the sudden realisation that we had a Basketball Match to attend today, rather than tomorrow as we had thought, so we hastily worked out how to get to the stadium (which is walking distance (1.3 miles) from our hotel).

So we walked to Oracle Arena for the match between the Golden State Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs. What we didn't realise was that the walk would take us through what seemed to be the gang-land area of Oakland. This was okay on the way to the Arena in daylight, but I confess to a level of anxiousness during the walk back to the Hotel. Nonetheless, we survived.

The Match was won by the Spurs with an Australian, Paddy Mills from the Spurs top scoring for the match with 32 points. Sadly, another Australian player Andrew Bogert was not playing on the Golden State side. The night was also the last game this season for Golden State, so they had a fan night where all food and beverages were 50% off. The fact that the standard stadium prices are four-times the norm makes this only slightly positive. In all honesty, I don't think this game had anywhere near the atmosphere that we experienced at the Miami Heat match a few weeks back.

Here's some pics;