A San Francisco Saga-- Part 1

Our first day in San Francisco(or would that be 1/2 day) was spent walking around getting a sense for the neighborhood. Our hotel, the Maxwell, was very close to the Hilton where the geography conference was held. The Hilton was about a block down and a block over from our hotel. The cable car line was at the end of the block.

We walked up a steep hill and turned. We went to China Town. Passionfruit took pictures of the girls on the lions where the gate marks the beginning of China Town. I saw something that I hadn't noticed the first time to China Town. There is real jade carvings on the roof of the gate. I was amazed that these pieces hadn't been stolen. They must be worth a mint or two.

By the time we got back to our hotel I just wanted to lay down and sleep. I had been up for over 11 hours by that time. The kids were still raring to go. So Passionfruit took them out for some more sightseeing and dinner. They went to the Yerba Bueno gardens and playscape. After that Passionfruit took them back to the hotel for dinner. Miss Independence fell asleep in her seat at the restaurant. Storyteller quickly followed suit. The only one still wide awake was DQ. Passionfruit had a dielemma. He couldn't carry two children and DQ was still eating her dinner.

Well some nice ladies at the next table told Passionfruit they would watch two of them while he took one upstairs to the room. Once depositing MI with me. Passionfruit returned to pick-up the other two. It became a running joke at the hotel restuarant that the food puts our children to sleep because the same thing happened to me the next day when I took the girls to dinner. Luckily Passionfruit was expected to join us there at the restaurant so a sleeping child wasn't such a burden.

I wanted this trip to be a learning experience for our girls. So the second full day in SF I took the girls for a relatively long walk. My idea was to hook up with a bus; however, the bus was a lot cheaper than I expected it to be. I didn't have exact change... only a $5 bill. So we continued to walk until we got back into another business area. This made it an extremely long walk. We finally made it to a restaurant where we had lunch and recopirated from the forced march. MI fell asleep in my arms. DQ and ST needed to go to the bathroom. I had to send the waitress in to look for them because they took forever. I think they were in there for 20 minutes.

We then walked a half a block to the bus stop. I had made change at the restaurant so I could pay the fare. I didn't realize that the bus was announcing the next stop. I thought it was telling us where it was going. Anyway it wouldn't have mattered because a school group got on and I don't think anyone got off. They couldn't because you couldn't battle a group of 50 to 60 kids getting on the bus. I thought we could get off on the opposite side of the road when it looped around in the parking lot of the Golden Gate bridge. Boy was I wrong!! As I sat there trying to figure out where we were going and where we could get off to get near the Exploratorium I finally realized that we weren't ever going to be able to do this because 1) we would have to battle the school group just to get near the door 2) the bus wasn't going anywhere near the Exploratorium. We finally got off somewhere in South San Fransisco.(We were almost into Daly City) Getting back to down town was quite an experience too! The ticket machine was kind of broken. It could except dollar bills but that part was broken so I could only purchase tickets with quarters! We had to recross the freeway and go into one of the stores in the shopping mall. Then we had to recross the freeway for the third time. We got the tickets and waited for the the next tram to take us back to downtown. I met a nice guy on the tram who helped me figure out where I needed to get off.

We were all exhausted by the time we got back to the hotel so we ate at the hotel restuarant. I made everyone stay awake. We quickly ate dinner and went to bed. Which is what I think I need to do with this post. So I would have to say that I taught my girls about public transportation that day. We walked, rode a bus, rode a tram and rode a cable car (back to the hotel).