San Francisco, October 2001

At any rate, we made plans to go, and started looking through travel guides, and drooling over the places we could go and (especially in my case) the things we could eat.

^* We travel to see each other all the time, and we went to St. Louis for her cousin's weddings. These don't seem like "real" trips though.

Day One: September 4th

OK, So it's probably not technically really Day One. I got into the airport somewhat after Sandy, sometime around 9pm. We took a taxi to the Andrews Hotel, where we were staying, on Post Ave, a few blocks from Union Square. We checked in and spent a little time getting re-acquainted and relaxing after spending half the day getting there. The hotel was very nice, and something that you don't typically see in american cities. The room was fairly small as hotel rooms go, just big enough for the (huge) king size bed, a dresser, a chair, and a little room to walk around. Size is pretty much unimportant though, since we were more or less just going to be sleeping there. The bathroom was so tiny that it was almost cute. In order to sit on the toilet you had to scoot under the sink a little bit. The shower was, alas, not really big enough for two. They had a decent breakfast set out on each floor every morning, with little trays you could bring back to your room. It was a nice touch and very convenient to get breakfast in my pajamas.

Day Two: September 5th

Friday morning is when we really got going. We got up around 8 or so, had a decent continental breakfast outside of our hotel, and I finally had to resort to nudging Sandy a bit to get going to see everything. I'm sure she would have been ready soon anyhow but I was eager to see everything and wanted to leave the hotel. The first thing we did was wander down to the beginning of the cable car line to buy a 3 day bus pass. I was reluctant at first because it didn't seem like we'd really be taking a ton of busses, but it turned out to be a good idea, since getting anywhere tended to take at least one transfer and it was just tons easier than fiddling with money or transfer slips. It took quite a while to get oriented to how to get around. Unfortunately I don't think we really got the hang of it until it was time to go. I think we both would have liked to have another day or two at least. From there we headed to the one place that we both wanted to go to before we even consulted each other about it: Alcatraz. We purchased our ferry tickets, but it was about an hour until it was time to go, and around lunch time, so we decided to get something to eat. We were sort of in the Fisherman's Wharf area, which is kind of cheesy, and I didn't particularly want to eat there. We wandered for a bit and finally settled, out of lack of real choices, on a sort of denny's-type diner or what have you. It was OK. Alcatraz itself was fairly interesting. We more or less climbed straight to the top to the actual prison area, and took the audio tour, which was nice except I was afraid to stop the audio in case it would start over, which means that we couldn't poke around as much as we wanted, and we got a little behind at one point. We took a rather odd way out of the prison and wandered around, and eventually had to go back up to hand in our audio sets, which was kind of a pain. Before we ate lunch, we'd walked by a Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum, which we decided to stop into. It was fun in a kind of corny way. Some things in it were genuinely neat but there was some kind of blah stuff too. Anyhow. After Ripley's we decided to head to the Golden Gate Bridge. We'd originally planned to go to the Exploratorium but it was already getting kind of late and the Exploratorium closed at 5. It wasn't exactly easy to figure out how to get there. We had to walk several blocks to find the bus stop and from there figure out where/how to transfer to the bus that would actually take us there. The bus driver was really helpful and we made it without too many problems. We walked halfway across the bridge, and decided to turn back. It was pretty cold, and pretty far across. I knew if we walked back I'd know where to get on the bus, and I wasn't sure how to do it from the other side. And we were not going to walk all the way across and back. The sheer size of the bridge was impressive, and the view of San Francisco was very nice. Some sun and warmer weather might have been nice, but we were OK. We went to eat dinner at the most amazing vietnamese restaurant I'd ever been to*. A friend of mine had recommended it to me, and both of our books highly recommended it. All three sources invited us to ignore the crappy part of town it was in and go there anyway. So we did, and it was well worth it. It was a tiny little hole in the wall. Two, maybe three tables and a few bar stools. Lots of people standing around waiting for their take-out. I had the best vietnamese iced coffee I'd had in years. The "Imperial Rolls" were great, and our main dishes, pork fried rice and ginger chicken, were good and huge. We really only ate a small part of it and took the rest back to the hotel, although we never really had a chance to eat it or anywhere to put it to save it. What a pity. We hung out at the hotel for a while and took a rest before going to see Beach Blanket Babylon at Club Fugazi. The guy at the front desk indicated that it was only a 15 minute walk, although I think it was at least twice that and we were pretty tuckered out already from walking all day. We were both hurting pretty bad when we got there. The show was fun, but not spectacular and luckily we were able to take a bus home. Turns out we could have taken it there, although I didn't know that until the next day. From the map and the street corner it seemed like the bus only ran one way, but if you went a few more blocks north the street was two ways. Ah, well, what can you do? We finally got home at around 12:30 or 1am and fell into a blissful slumber.

^*Tu Lan, on 6th and Market Street

Day Three: September 6th

By this time we were both pretty tired so we decided to take it easier on Saturday. We both wanted to see the exploratorium so we left the hotel around 11am. On the bus on the way there we saw a dim sum place in chinatown that looked interesting, so we got off to go take a look. On closer inspection it didn't look that good, and we walked around a while, looking for somewhere to eat. We wandered out of chinatown fairly quickly and found ourselves in North Beach, which is mostly Italian restaurants. That wasn't sounding great to either of us, but we walked past The Stinking Rose, a restaurant that featured garlic rather heavily, and we decided to eat there since we'd both heard of it and love garlic. It was pretty good! Sandy's was better than mine. I had gnocchi with asparagus and Sandy had chicken with ravioli and mushrooms. It was all served with a tremendously garlic-heavy, but good, pesto and lots of bread. So, sated once more, we got back on the bus and headed to the Exploratorium. There were tons of cool exhibits in it. It's more or less a science museum for (I think) somewhat older kids, but there was plenty in there to amuse us as well. Everything was hands on, and although most of the principles were not exactly news to us, it was fun to play with them. We both especially liked a pair of really strong magnets with a ton of iron filings to play with. You could make sort of a bridge or rope with the iron filings to connect the two magnets, which was quite odd. There were tons of exhibits, we probably only saw 1/2 to 2/3 of them, and didn't examine most of them very closely. We finally had to leave when they closed at 5pm. We were both beat, Sandy's feet and my hips hurt (we're just tired old people these days, aren't we?) so we took it slow getting back. We rested in the hotel for a bit, considering whether we wanted to go to Good Vibrations or not. We finally decided not. We ate at a very nice Thai restaurant across the street from the hotel and took it easy for the rest of the evening.

Day Four: September 7th

And that's more or less it. My flight left at noon so we had to leave the hotel at 10am. We got everything packed and after waiting in line for a few minutes at the wrong airline (my ticket there was through American Airlines, my flight back through United, both tickets had American Airlines in the top left corner) we found the right place for my flight, and said our sad goodbyes. Hopefully we'll be united in Houston again for good and we won't have to endure any more separation. I won't bore anyone with tales of full cavity searches and hot light interrogations. I'll leave that to your imagination.