Weekend Getaway

As I posted before, Stevie recently had a special birthday and with the move and the new house and the new job and the new city and all the other "news" it was getting a little lost.  I mean, for my 40th I had an awesome surprise birthday party and then a trip to China.  So since Grammie is here to take care of the kids, I decided to indulge Stevie with a trip to San Francisco and Sonoma.  I was trying to find some place we'd never been, some place not too far away and some place we probably wouldn't want to take the kids - San Fran and the wine country seemed perfect!

Stevie had to take call on Thursday so I picked him up at the hospital early Friday morning and we headed strait to the airport.  By 1:00 we were in San Francisco and at our hotel - sweet!  The hotel (which I picked online) was supposed to be a cool art deco place with interesting rooms.  Our first room reminded me more of a youth hostel in Europe than a fancy upscale hotel, so we voiced our concerns and got upgraded to a better room.  It turned out that our upgraded room's air conditioner wasn't working so we got upgraded again to the best room in the place - again I say sweet!

Funky lighting in the hotel hallway.

We spent most of Friday looking around San Francisco doing the absolute tourist thing.  You know - cable car, Pier 39, seeing the sea lions and Golden Gate bridge and Lombard Street, eating chowder in a sourdough bread bowl, etc.  The weather was fantastic, although cool.  I did not realized that San Francisco is always cool (think low-60s) until 10:30 the night before we flew out.  I had to quickly re-vamp my packing to include a few layers and sweaters.  Still, I had to buy leggings when we got there.  Hey, even Stevie ended up buying socks!

Stevie in the cable car

On the cable car.

At the top of Lombard Street

At the bottom of Lombard Street



Looking out to Alcatraz

Alcatraz with the Korean America's Cup boat

Pier 39 and the sea lions

Do it yourself pic

Contemplating his 40th year?

It was glorious sitting out on a sidewalk cafe eating our chowder and watching the crowds of people go by.  Another thing about San Fran I did not realize is what a popular international tourist destination it is.  Rarely (and this is not exaggerating) did we hear English being spoken by people passing by on the street.  They must have been running a special from Europe to California, although that seems like a long way to come for a holiday.

We capped our first day by walking around Chinatown with the intents of getting something to eat.  Call us pretentious, but Chinatown was not very impressive to these travel-snobs.  It was a lot of bazaar-type stores that we had been exposed to frequently in Japan and China and Hong Kong so we ended up leaving and heading to a Thai noodle shop near our hotel for dinner.  Yum!