A few minutes later Zach is on the computer and, figuring that a) I would now be around for the weekend, b) it was Valentine's Day weekend, and c) we already had a babysitter (my mom) here ready and willing to take care of D as much as we wanted her to, decided to look up what hotel rates were for a night in San Francisco. Turns out the recession is still hitting the tourism industry (or must be) b/c we found a great rate, and so got to spend Sunday night in SF just the two of us.
I intentionally didn't bring the dslr with us, since I wanted to just spend time together, but I did snap a handful of pictures with our point&shoot that I figured I'd share.
Sunday morning started out by picking Jen up from the Caltrain station, then all of us heading down to the farmers market for some shopping. Then in the early afternoon Zach and I packed up a few things and drove up to the city. We got to the room and just hung out for a bit (I sometimes feel guilty about not making the most of time in the city by going out and doing stuff, but then again when you get free time away from the kiddo sometimes the nicest thing to do is just... be), then headed out to meet up with Zach's brother, Andrew, and his girl-friend Jakki, who JUST MOVED HERE!!! And are now living in a cute little apartment near Chinatown, with Frank, their pet rat (there's a whole story as to how they got Frank from Texas to California, but that will be for later telling... I'm trying to convince Andrew to write a guest post for me telling it, as he'll do it better justice than I).
We decided to go to North Beach to find a place to eat. We wandered around exploring different streets for a good half-hour or longer. I followed along, wondering from time to time why we were avoid the two streets in North Beach that have *all* the restaurants on them. Jakki wondered why we didn't bother deciding on a place before leaving their apartment. Meanwhile, Andrew started complaining about being disappointed by the lack of offerings by this hyped-up neighborhood.
Finally we decide to head down Columbus and lo and behold! We find a place within the first block. And it doesn't even have much of a wait. And the food was good.
(There's a lesson in here somewhere...)
But, dinner was good, we had a good time, and as we were having our dessert we even had a couple sit down at the next table who were carrying pillows so we got to ask them about the Valentine's Day Pillow Fight.
The next morning we thought about going to one of the many great breakfast places Jenny suggested... and decided instead to sleep in longer, then grab the free breakfast at the Starbucks in the hotel lobby. And then we went back to our room and enjoyed the view until check-out time.
I took this at about 11am. When we first got up a few hours earlier, it was so foggy the entire window was just WHITE. You couldn't see *anything.* Luckily, the fog did burn off for the most part, and it turned out to be a lovely day.
One thing that struck me is that the view is nice and all, except you see all the ugly tops of the buildings. One or two of them had converted the rooftops into patios, even with garden space, and I have to wonder why that isn't done more often. Seems an easy way to a) get more "green space" in such a dense city, and b) make the city and views as a whole much prettier. It seems to make even more sense when you consider that SF is one of those places where you could sit out on a rooftop deck and enjoy the weather most of the year.
After checking out we tried to drive to Golden Gate park to enjoy the nice weather, but apparently everyone else in the city had the same plan, to then we tried heading over to the beach, but that's where the gorgeous sun left us as we realized the water's edge was still engulfed in fog. So we gave up and started driving south, though did pull off to one lookout stop that Zach wanted to check out. And right there, in the middle of the parking lot, were these guys hanging out:
(And also this one, who apparently didn't like the provided stand)
We did stop at In-N-Out for lunch, then to REI for Zach to look at snowshoes. Then we went home. I know, not the most exciting of weekends. We certainly don't take advantage of all SF has to offer. But, then again, I figure it's ok to be boring as long as we're just enjoying spending time together. =)
No comments:
Post a Comment