If You're Going to San Francisco

The Bad...

3:45 AM.  A massive headache.  Hitting a construction barrel with the truck.  A busted plastic cup which resulted in a pink smoothie explosion.  Bird poop on the lunch table accompanied by dirty silverware.  A bug floating in a water glass.  Spider crawling on a wine glass.  A note on the windshield which states I have your license plate and next time you park here you'll be towed.

The Good...

Vacation to California.  No damage to the truck.  The smell of strawberry.  Some free parking.  Sightseeing and playing tourist. Dinner with a good friend.  Driving a rental car - go ahead and record my license plate.  Spending time with my husband.

It's true.  The above has actually been the start to my vacation in California.  Justin had to be in California for a work event, so I decided to use some of my vacation time to go with him since I've never been to the West Coast.  However, only Justin would book a plane ticket for a flight which leaves at 5:45 am.  In all fairness, I shouldn't complain because I flew to Cali for free on a voucher that Justin had received from volunteering to bump flights a while back.  However, United has very specific rules on when you can use a voucher which resulted in our VERY early morning flight.  

My body doesn't like to function like it should prior to 5:00 am (EST) and I woke up with a massive headache in the back of my head that made me feel like I wanted to vomit.  I was praying the first flight to Chicago would result in a short nap that would make me feel better.  As we were driving to the airport, a construction barrel came rolling into our lane.  With no where else to go, Justin had to hit it with the truck.  We later learned the truck took it like a champ and there was no damage...however, we  will both be glad when the construction on 465 is done.  Then at the airport, Justin decided he wanted a smoothie.  However, his laptop bag fell off the top of his suitcase, knocked the suitcase over, and the handle came crashing down splitting the smoothie cup in half.  The result was a pink explosion all over the new carpet at the Indy airport and on Justin's luggage....right when we were supposed to be boarding the plane of course.  Our trip to Cali got off to a rocky start.  

With the early flight, we arrived in San Francisco at the start of the day due to the time change.  Justin was very adamant that we head to Pier 39 to see the seals as soon as we got there.  We spent some time at that pier and decided it was time to find some lunch...we were starving!  We grabbed some lunch at one of the Pier 39 restaurants (so we could get some free parking) and enjoyed the rather warm-for-this-of-year-in-California weather.  Here is where the bird poop and dirty silverware comes in.  I get it...I've worked in food service...this stuff is hard to control when you're outdoors...but c'mon people!  I shouldn't have to ask you to clean it up.

Seals at Pier 39

After lunch we took a tour of Alcatraz.

Alcatraz

Shower Room inside The Cellhouse

A typical cell

The Rec Yard

More cells at Alcatraz including "The Holes" which were the cells similar to solitary confinement.  There were no lights inside these cells.

Here is a cell where prisoners carved away at the wall to plan of one the escapes from Alcatraz.

Since we were only in San Francisco for one day, I told Justin we had to go see the Golden Gate Bridge.  (Insert Full House theme song).

From there, we had some time to kill before we met one of Justin's friends from business school for dinner, so we were off to find Ghiradelli Square and just happened to come across Lombard Street, the curviest street in the world.

We eventually made it to Ghiradelli Square where we of course had to pick up some chocolate!

Afterwards, we made our way to the restaurant for dinner with Twinky.  I don't know what they are teaching food service employees in California, but I had a bug floating in my water and spider on my wine glass at the restaurant.  Again, I had to ask for new glasses.  Parking in San Francisco is a bit of a nightmare, however the restaurant told us to park down the street at a business called The Jug Shop.  They ensured us that is where we were supposed to park and we would not be towed.  However, the note on our windshield said otherwise.  All I could think was "Whoop-de-do!  You have my license plate.  Too bad it's a rental and most likely I will not be back in the same car."  Despite all of this, we had a fantastic dinner with Twinky and were able to catch up.

It was 8:30 pm (Pacific Time) when we went to bed, but we had been up for 20 hours.  We were exhausted!