Three nuggets and one Golden bridge

When I was leaving school for the final time the first week, I really didn’t have any plans on how to spend my evening.

Much to my surprise, this changed instantly when Nicole and Jesper came up to me: “Hey Rickard, wanna come with us to walk the Golden Gate?” Nicole is from Austria and Jesper is from this funny little country called Denmark (sorry my man, but you know where you have me). The problem for me though was that Jesper was a teacher, educating Danish pupils in… German. So, yeah, there were a lot of discussions between them where I just stood and expressed my regular “Okey” as an answer (if you watch the episode of Frasier where the two brothers end up in the same hotel room, with Frasier’s ex-wife, you’d understand). Sure, I spent three years learning German when I was young but how much of that has my brain been able to save? Pretty much… none; zero; zip; nada. I just nod and pretend not to hear (another favorite contradiction of mine). Fortunately, in this case that is, the noise pretty much made it impossible to have any sort of conversation going on during the walk over.

I agreed to go, of course, and soon I was sitting on the bus that were to pass through the Golden Gate area. The choice of day to do this “adventure” turned out to be a really good one; sunny, not to windy and, best of all, no fog. Many days you pretty much even can’t see the top of the bridge while walking it.

This golden (even though it’s red) bridge measures 2300+ meters across and with windy conditions, you pretty much can expect an hour to get to the other side. The distance though is not what throws you over; the overwhelming noise from the traffic is constant and leaves you chasing any opportunity to get away from it, if only for a few seconds.

Having crossed to the other side (no, not “the other side” as if we managed to fall into the ice cold water and freeze to death), Jesper really wanted to catch the view from the vista point before going back. Even though we were tired after a long day we decided to go for it (I mean, come on, it’s the Golden Gate for Christ’s sake) and yeah, we got rewarded for going with that decision. The view was really cool and we were able to catch the sunset over the hills in the background. All hail Jesper, (“Hail”), and his will to push us to the top.

After the sun had set it soon got a (hell of a) lot cooler as we made our way back down the mountain/hill/pile of gravel and onto the “little red bridge” again. The 2.3+ km was a breeze (funny, right?) with both the wind and the sunset in our “backs”.

All and all it turned out to be a really successful “hike” and it was a nice feeling to be able to cross of “walking the Golden Gate” from my bucket list.

Even better, I had really good company doing it.