August 7, 2011 - It's Sunday morning. Laela and Miranda have just departed from the SFO Holiday Inn for their flight back to Ohio. I miss them terribly already. It's going to be a lonely ride back to Columbus from here. I'm currently doing my laundry (which by the way is DAYS overdue). We've had a fantastic time as a family on the west coast. The last two days we've spent exploring San Francisco. I have two observations: 1) Two days is not nearly enough to take in all that San Francisco has to offer. 2) I am NOT a big city person.On Friday we arrived in San Francisco (actually Thursday night but we really didn't do anything but sleep). After we woke up on Friday we drove across town to the hotel we booked for the weekend. Once we got settled in, we took the hotel shuttle to the airport so that we could pick up the BART and go downtown. Naturally since Miranda was with us, our first order of business was visiting Chinatown. The first thing that struck me about the city as soon as we disembarked the BART was how crowded the city streets were. It is amazing how many people crammed the sidewalk. The girls were darting in and out of stores enjoying the shopping while I spent my time on the sidewalk people watching. The stores all seemed to contain the same items so after I went in a couple of them, they all seemed the same.
After Chinatown we made our way to Fisherman's Wharf (because that's what you're supposed to do in San Francisco right?) So we spent some time walking around taking in the sights and shopping there too. The weather was in the 60's and windy the whole time we were here and made it feel more like fall in Ohio than the first week of August. It was quite refreshing and I'm sure that I'll be missing it as soon as I start to travel inland. We had dinner at a seafood restaurant. It was fair, kind of what I expected. How does one mess up fried shrimp and fish anyway? (you can take the boy out of Ohio, but can't take Ohio out of the boy) After dinner we continued walking down the street until we went sea lion watching at Pier 39. We got some cute pictures.
They're really loud and watching them wrestle and play "king of the hill" on the docks was a lot of fun. When we finished watching them we found what? You guessed it...a Ripley's Believe It Or Not Odditorium! We spent the remainder of the evening there. It was MUCH nicer than the one in Newport, OR and much more spacious. We had had enough walking around at this point and decided to go back to the hotel. Looking at the map, I hadn't realized how far we had walked and I ended up submitting the girls to an almost 3 mile death march back to the BART. Once back at the airport, it took almost an hour for the hotel shuttle to come and pick us up. That was more than a little frustrating, but we finally made it back to the hotel for a good night's sleep.
Saturday morning we got up and were advised by the hotel staff that the best way to get to the ball game was to use the CalTrain rather than the BART. The CalTrain had a station close enough to the hotel to drive to. We parked there, boarded the train and were down to AT&T Park in a short four stops. AT&T Park is a great facility for baseball and every bit as picturesque as it appears on television. It was a sold out game vs. the Philadelphia Phillies so I was going to be happy no matter who won because it was my favorite NL west team vs. my favorite NL east team. We stayed in our bleacher seats for the first three innings and then got up and really spent the next four innings exploring the park. Laela and Miranda both went down the slides in the Coca-Cola bottle. When we went back to our seats in the 8th inning they were occupied by some elitist assholes (they reminded me a LOT of the girls we encountered in DC Five Guys last year). They were made aware that they were in our seats and made to move. They grumbled and bitched the rest of the time they were there. Fortunately they decided they'd had enough by the 9th inning and beat it.After the game we didn't really have a plan for how to spend the rest of the day so I decided that we should do a "Ride the Duck" tour of San Francisco. It was pretty cool; although, of all the duck tours I've been on I'd have to say that was the least entertaining captain we've had, but the first that I'd want to go have a beer with when he's off duty. The other thing about this tour was that over the course of the past two days, we'd walked most of what we drove through. It was nice to get the history of the places on the tour though. The water-born portion of the tour was right through McCovey Cove so we got another fantastic view of the ball park.
We got finished with the duck tour, hopped a cab back to the CalTrain station and were back in the hotel before 11:00. 4:00 am this morning came too soon and it was then that I bid farewell to Laela and Miranda. I really loved getting to hang out with them on the west coast and am glad I got to be with Miranda the first time she went to the Pacific ocean. It's going to be a long 13 days before I get home. I'll probably leave at about noon today, but right now I have to go get my laundry out of the dryer. Until the next time I have intertube access....
