This year over Labor Day weekend I decided to go visit my Dad and Cynthia in California. I flew out of Midway airport Thursday night after a slight delay due to an unscheduled switch in planes.
By the way, I found out how luggage gets lost. As we are taxiing (is that how you spell that?!) out to the runway, I look out my window and see one of those little luggage carts driving along. All of a sudden a suitcase falls off the cart. You would expect that the cart would stop and they would load the suitcase back onto the cart, right? Wrong. They kept going! Never even looked back. For a brief moment I wanted to bang on the window and let the driver know that he lost a suitcase, but then I realized he wouldn't be able to hear me. So here I am, the only person in the entire world who knows about this suitcase that's gone overboard, and there's nothing I can do about it! Hence the guy standing at baggage claim in Houston in about two hours wondering where the heck his suitcase is. Sucks to be him.
Anyway, so I fly in to Sacramento, and my suitcase comes out right away (thank goodness!) I stepped out of the airport into the beautiful, dry California heat and finally felt like I was on vacation. The next day when we left the house in Vallejo it was 96 degrees. Destination: Golden Gate Bridge. We get to San Francisco and it is 66 degrees! Now I'm beginning to think the weather in California is as crazy as Illinois. I couldn't believe the temperature difference! So here I am standing at the Golden Gate Bridge in shorts and a tanktop freezing my little tushy off! There was so much fog you could hardly see the bridge and could only catch glimpses of the tip tops of buildings in the city.
Next stop: the coast. We drive through a residential part of San Francisco (which to me does not look residential at all seeing as how there are no trees and no grass!) and end up down at the coast....or what is supposed to be the coast, but all I can see is fog! Whoops, that's not what I ordered! So we drive along the coast for a while and finally end up at a place where we can see the ocean, aka Half Moon Bay. Beautiful! There were some wetsuit-clad surfers braving the chilly water (see tiny speck in second picture below), so it was fun to watch them for a while.
Next we drive further down the coast to this cute little town called Capitola. There were actually a lot of people down on the beach, which I thought was crazy seeing as how it was only in the 60s! We decided we better go dip our feet in the water just to say we did, so off come our sandals and down the beach we go! Brr, that water was cold!
After getting our fill of chilly water and washing the salt and sand off our feet, we walked around and visited a couple of the local shops. I'm still kicking myself for not buying that really cool wine bottle holder. Darnit! Then we ate dinner at Margaritaville where I ate the best salsa and drank the smoothest strawberry margarita ever! Yum!
The next day we decided was shopping day. "Ok, twist my arm guys, I guess we can go shopping." We went downtown San Francisco and had to pause to take my picture with the monkeys.
Then we shopped at Bebe's where I got my awesome trench (thanks Dad!) and Macy's where I got my great new sweaterdress (thanks Cynthia!).
After making our way through the gigantic Macy's we decided we were starving, so we headed down to Fisherman's Wharf for dinner. We had a wonderful seafood meal at Alioto's, sitting at a table right by the windows where we had a gorgeous nighttime view of the bay. Dad and I tried escargot for the first time and loved it!
After dinner they drove me up and down all the crazy hills in the city. Make sure you get your brakes checked before driving around in San Francisco! We even drove on "the crookedest street," Lombard St. I didn't take this picture, but this is what it looks like:
Highlights from the rest of my trip include: souvenir shopping, driving through Napa and checking out all the vineyards, finding two pairs of cute shoes (yes, I fulfilled my mission!), lounging around and watching coverage of Hurricane Gustav and the Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin, staying up late looking at pictures and talking, playing with Kingsley the cat, eating pizza with extra garlic from Roundtable Pizza, sleeping in every day and still drinking coffee, and of course watching the weather and laughing at the doppler radar because it's summer in California, and there's never ANYTHING on the doppler radar!
That pretty much sums it up...what a great little mini-vacation!
Maren showing Clare the bell in her Mom's house.
