Are We Going...to San...Fran...Cisco??

This summer we finally had the opportunity to visit my aunt and uncle's family in San Luis Obispo CA.  I constantly stalk them and their four "kids" on Facebook but sadly don't have a chance to visit with them very often.  In fact, the last time I saw them was when my dad died about 7 years ago.  This time, my cousin Emily was getting married, and although it was every bit as busy as you'd imagine, it was a much happier occasion.  Even got to see my mom and brother from GA for awhile, which is always a great time that should happen much more frequently. 

 

That's the Lawrence crew above.  You'll never guess which cousin was the one who got married, would you?  She really looked amazing in her wedding dress, too, and everything about the ceremony was exceptional.  The wedding was actually held on a working orchard that grew lemons and avocados.  I'd never seen an avocado tree with actual avocados growing on it until that day.  It was hard not to pick any.

Another cool thing about my uncle's place is that he raises tortoises and has for many years.  We got to see his tortoise pen, and Becca fed some lettuce to them.  The scene looked similar to when we get Bella's food out and how she comes racing towards us and gets all excited and drools everywhere, only the tortoises (tortii?) were moving at about 1/100th speed and never looked you in the eye, they just stared at the lettuce, then did this big yawn looking thing and took a bite out of the lettuce.  After getting a mouthful, the tortoise would chew it up.  For some reason, seeing a tortoise chewing its food made me laugh.  

After the wedding, my family hung out with my mom and brother.  We did a quick hike and went to Avila Beach for an afternoon.  The first night there we went to dinner and then dipped our feet in the unflatteringly cold waters of the Pacific at sunset.  A little chilly for a swim, but a beautiful sunset anyway.

We stayed the weekend in SLO visiting, then Kathy and the kids and I drove up the coast to San Francisco.  It was a several hour long drive next to some of the most beautiful, foggy cloud cover I've ever seen.  Every so often the road would turn so you could see the often jagged cliffs we were driving in, which truly was amazing.  I really like the geography of the west coast...so rocky and "sharp".  But this is fog season, so unfortunately most of the time we couldn't see more than 50 feet in any direction.  We did stop at Montana de Oro state park on our way out of town.  We didn't spend nearly enough time there, but it would have been a great place to explore some of the coast around SLO.

One famous area of this road is where elephant seals like to hang out.  The day we saw them, there were only a couple hundred probably, but I  understand sometimes there can be a thousand at this place.  I believe this was my first wild elephant siting, which combined well with my first native avocado siting the previous day.  

We also spent a few hours at the Monterey Bay aquarium, which was every bit as impressive as we'd been told it was.  That evening, after enjoying our first In and Out Burger (1st #3), we got into SF.  We dropped the car at the airport and took a taxi into the heart of downtown.  

I'll spare you the agony of a detailed report of all the places and things we did in SF, but we did get to see quite a bit in 4 days.  No, we didn't take the Alcatraz tour (everyone always asks me that first, so figured I'd get it out of the way now).  We DID see Alcatraz from many different angles, and it was very cool looking.

This shot came from the deck of the tour boat we rode that gave us a quick tour of SF Bay.  We went around the back side of Alcatraz and also went under the Golden Gate bridge.  

The bridge was spectacular.  There is a large visitors center that tells a lot of the history and stats, along with all of the touristy souvenirs you'd expect.  Every day the bridge was enveloped with fog.  It was very interesting to me that there was a swath that seemed to go right across the bridge that always was a fast moving layer of fog.  The weather at the bridge when we visited was very dreary and windy and chilly, but just a few blocks inland, it was perfectly sunny and pleasant.  Apparently the "micro climates" around SF are well known.

Yes, we did ride the cable cars.  There was always a long line for them, and the cars were always completely packed.   The operators were generally very business like, even gruff sometimes, which surprised me a little.  When one of our rides stopped at Lombard Street, the driver said "OK there's the most crooked street in the US or whatever you want to call it.  OK?" and then he took off.  Not that this was a tour bus we were on, but it struck me funny how this guy must have driven past this street a thousand times and was obviously not so impressed anymore, nor did he understand why anyone else would be impressed either.  This picture shows how steep the streets were around there.

 




That said, we later road a regular bus across town, and the driver of this bus was more than happy to talk with anyone.  He seemed to know some of the regulars that got on during the trip, and after they left he'd give us their history like he was best friends with the person.  Every bus driver should have been like him.  He wasn't just doing his job, he was genuinely being a friendly guy and was more than happy to help all the tourists who had pretty basic questions about where they needed to go.  Awesome guy.

We made a visit to Coit Tower, which is visible from just about anywhere in the city.  It used to be a fire lookout, and there is a lot of history associated with it, but it really was a basic, tall tower with amazing views of the city and the bay.

The second shot is across Fisherman's Wharf, which is the main touristy entertainment/dining district.  Alcatraz is beyond that.  A couple things stand out on our visit to the tower.  First, we had to walk several blocks to get to it, and those were some of the most ridiculously steep roads I've ever seen in my life.

The grade of this hill is just over 30 degrees.  THIRTY.  This picture doesn't do it justice. And people were actually jogging on streets like this.  The other thing that caught my eye was the capacity sign on the completely packed elevator we took to the top of the tower.  2000 lbs.  And there were 15-20 people on all the rides.  Math was never my strong suit (well, actually, yeah it kinda was), but I'm thinking the capacity was exceeded a time or two during the day on that tower.  I'm sure the safety factor was about 10 though, so it was probably fine.  If you are claustrophobic, I would recommend trying to find your view of the city elsewhere though.

We also visited the California Academy of Sciences, which was a very well kept science "museum" of sorts with lots of focus on nature and the environment.  It even had an "earthquake simulator".  And then there was the Exploratorium, which was a hands on museum that explained everything from sound waves to inertia to optical illusions to human behavior, with interactive exhibits to help get the point across.  It was also very well maintained, especially given that with any interactive exhibit, kids are going to find ways to interact with it in completely unintended ways.  Needless to say, all the scientists in my family really loved that place.  It was behind this building, the Palace of Fine Arts.  Very cool looking dome and park area.

Chinatown was another unique experience.  We went out that way once looking for dim sum, but every place that was recommended looked like you really had to know what you were doing in order to do it right, so we went back and forth across the area for quite awhile before settling on a place that looked like it was totally made for clueless tourists, but at least we could say we did dim sum in Chinatown.  Many of the markets there were packed, with constant streams of people just picking through the produce and I assume paying someone for what they wanted.  The whole place seemed to be in constant motion with tourists scattered about just gawking or trying to figure out where they were on a map.  The picture below was from the main entrance.

The opposite of this scene was across town at the Japanese Tea Garden, which was a very tranquil place with gardens and ponds and trees that a person could just lose himself in for hours.  For a few bucks, you could even have a geisha perform a tea ceremony for your group.  We opted instead for the more affordable "serve yourself" hot tea and mochi ice cream balls.

Speaking of tourists, there were a lot of us there, and we were from all over the globe.  My favorite were the French tourists.  Almost every French family I saw had sons that looked like they were trying really hard to be in fashion (and maybe they were...I certainly wouldn't know fashion if it bit me on the behind).  The daughters looked remarkably snooty and almost all of them wore scarves.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be judgmental, but it always reminded me of a scene from the movie European Vacation.  I'm sure they were all very cool people, but the stereotypes in play made me laugh.  I did get to see a very young French girl who was being scolded for something by her father, and she just sniffled and whimpered "wi" in the most pathetic voice you can imagine.  So I bought her a pony and told her dad to lay off.  Adorable kid.

I finished the trip over drinks with an elementary school friend of mine from Morris, Charles Lee.  It had probably been about 30 years since we had seen each other, and we were easily able to pick up right where we left off.  If any of my Morris friends' ears were burning a couple weeks ago, I swear all the talk was of good times.  It was great to get caught up again.

So after promising not to go into exhaustive details....there are the exhaustive details.  We had a great time seeing a lot of my family, and the touristy parts of SF that we saw were a lot of fun and made me want to go back and check out more of the outdoorsy stuff there.  I wish my cousin and her new husband a lifetime of happiness, and I hope it doesn't take another major life event to get us all together again.