San Francisco - Wednesday & Thursday

I sat at the computer for an hour this morning working on updating this crazy blog with our San Francisco trip and after I finally got finished and hit publish, it erased all of it!! I was so mad. So here I go again. This time I will post day by day so it won't be so long.

Our trip started Wednesday morning. We dropped Maggie off at school and away we went. I am not sure if drop off was harder on her or me. I cried for the first part of the drive to Nashville. She looked so pitiful getting out of the car. I didn't know then that that would be her last sad moment. She never missed us again :-).. We arrived in Nashville without any problems and had plenty of time to spare. All of our flights were right on schedule and we were in San Francisco around 5:00. By the time we got our luggage, we got to the Bart just in time to catch the 6:07 train. We checked into the Marriott on 4th Street by 7:00. We didn't allow ourselves to get settled because we still needed dinner and I think we both knew if we sat down we would be history. We ate dinner that night at LuLu's and it was delicious. We didn't realize it was served family style, so we had more food then we could eat. After dinner we walked back toward our hotel and stopped by the Virgin Megastore to look around, but I didn't last long. It was going on midnight to my body, so I was ready to hit the bed. Our room was very nice and spacious. I love Marriott beds (and their pillows). The only thing that wasn't great was the lack of a good air conditioner.

Thursday morning started dark and early at 6:00 AM. We went to Mel's Diner for breakfast before being picked up promptly at 8:00 AM by the shuttle for our Muir Woods / Sauscalito tour. When we arrived at their office, we were informed that they had overbooked the tour and they needed a volunteer to take the City tour for free and do the Muir Woods later. FREE was all I needed to hear and we were off the shuttle and onto the bus where we spent 3 1/2 hours listening to a guide named John tell us all the facts about the city. San Francisco is 7 miles by 7 miles (49 square miles). There's 900,000 people in the city and 41% of them are Asian (33% of them are Chinese-American). 51% are Caucasian and the other 8% are a mixture. Of the 900,000 people, 10% are homosexual. It wasn't like I expected. They are not everywhere you turn around. I only encountered 2 couples and one set was flaming, the other could have passed as friends. The city tour took us to Twin Peaks where you could look out over the city, the Golden Gate Bridge and through basically all of the major districts. It gave us a great opportunity to decide which areas we wanted to go back to on our own to spend more time in. At the end of the tour, John let us off at Pier 39 which is very much like Gatlinburg. It has all of the shops, Hard Rock Cafe, etc. The best part about Pier 39 is the Sea Lions. They are very interesting to watch and they are extremely noisy. After grabbing a bite to eat, we headed toward Pier 33 to catch the ferry over to Alcatraz. We took the audio tour of Alcatraz which allowed us to hear a narration by three prior guards and three prior inmates. It was neat hearing the information first hand. The most interesting part to me was the isolation chambers. Men would spend 19 hours in total darkness with the exception of daylight for twenty minutes three times a day with their meals. One of the prisoners said that when he would get out in isolation that he would take a button off of his jumper and flick it up in the air and then get down on his knees and search for it. I can safely say I would have been insane within thirty minutes let alone 19 days. They told about the great escape and the attack on the guards. I didn't know a lot about the prison, so it was all very interesting to me. Once we got off the ferry, we began our unofficial walking tour. We went by Buena Vista and had a couple of Irish coffees - a first for me. They were yummy even though I am not a huge coffee drinker. Then we stopped by a couple of art galleries and Ghiradelli Square. We made our way to Washing Square to have dinner at Pomodoras which was my favorite restaurant. They had the best pesto sauce and their dinners came with a small portion option which I loved. I will never understand why all restaurants do not offer that. Our server was a young girl that had moved all the way from Boston to go to school. All I could think was how heartbroken her parents must be since she was an only child. I will die if Maggie or Molly ever move that far away. After dinner, we started our journey by foot back to the hotel, but the map reader (not me) went the wrong direction and before we knew it, we were back where we started at Pier 39 and we could hear the Sea Lions again. We turned around like troopers and walked back. 35 minutes later, we arrived at our hotel.