23 March 2004
It’s Bigger Than My Head
| Michael didn’t realize what he was getting himself into when he ordered a pot pie for lunch at a local diner. It really was as big across and as deep as it looks! Yum!
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Heaven
| A giant art store with multiple rooms jam-packed with different kinds of paper -- Kaylyn was in heaven at the San Francisco Flax Art store!
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Ocean Beach
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This is Ocean Beach. It’s a beach that’s...well, on the ocean. One of our many-moon traditions is that if we’re anywhere near an ocean we dip our toes into it. Given that we’re usually visiting in mid-March the water is usually rather chilly -- which is why we only dip our toes!
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Ruins
After the tour we walked down to the Exploratorium. The ‘Torium itself is a science museum, but we never made it inside. We had too much fun wandering around the giant colonnades on its grounds.
We don’t know what those ladies in the last picture are looking at, but it must be pretty interesting, because they didn’t stop looking at it the entire time we were there!
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Makeup!
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One of the highlights of our trip was a walking tour of some of the beautiful Painted Ladies and other wonderful houses San Francisco is famous for. The house in the top picture is the Haas Lillienthal house. Owned by (can you guess?) the Haas family and then the Lillienthals, it’s now a museum run by the local architectural preservation society.
We learned all about the different types of houses (Early Queen Anne and Late Queen Anne and stick oh my) and saw many really cool houses in varying stages of (dis)repair. One we remember because it had half an arch – some rich guy was going to build two houses side-by-side for his two daughters, but the one daughter refused to live anywhere near her sister, so he never built the mirror-image house.
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No funny stories about the houses in the second picture; we just like their looks.
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Museum-Go-Round
| What would a vacation be without visiting at least one museum? This is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the bus ride out to it was as long as its name.
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The Rock
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| We didn’t go visit, but we were always aware of Alcatraz sitting out in the distance.
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Here We Go Loopy Loo
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This is how you turn a cable car around: you push it onto the turntable, then you push it around, then you push it off. Simple!
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Tie Me Up
As seems to always be the case, it was cloudy pretty much our entire visit. That still made for some spectacular views, however. One afternoon we walked along the Bay from Fisherman’s Wharf all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.
It’s hard to visualize how big this bridge is. The cables holding it up are as big across as Kaylyn’s hand is wide! And to think it opened in 1937 ahead of schedule and under budget (just $35 million).
Fort Point, at the base of the Bridge, was used as the base of operations for the construction. It’s a little older than the Bridge, having been built from 1853 to 1863 for the Civil War. It saw plenty of gun powder and cannonballs, but no actual action. Now it’s a Hysterical Monument, just like the Bridge.
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See Food
Fisherman’s Wharf is one San Francisco’s most famous landmarks. Which, of course, means it’s way overrated. All it is is a bunch of shops and restaurants.
We found a good restaurant with an excellent view of the sea lions. We “ark ark”d our way through an excellent lunch (Crab Louie for Kaylyn, something decidedly non-seafood for Michael), then moseyed our way on down the street.
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Come On And Do The Twist
This, of course, is famous Lombard Street. The curviest street in the world – and steep, too!
A tourist destination, yes, but also a movie studio. A team was filming an independent short film when we were there. You might think it was glamorous but it was pretty boring, really. Just some lady in business clothes walking up the hill pretending to talk on her cell phone. Again and again and again.
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Up Hill And Down Hill And Up Hill And...
Ah, San Francisco: city of hills and...umm...hills and hills and hills. Up and down and up and down we went.
Those hills do make for good watchpoints. The tall tower in the first two photographs is Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. Mrs. Coit was a bit bored we guess, since her favorite pastime was riding along with the firefighters to fires. The Tower was built in 1933 as a memorial to the men who fought the fires after the 1906 earthquake using money Mrs. Coit left to the city.
No good stories about the last picture, just San Francisco skyline.
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Living With The Maids
We celebrate our anniversary each year with a mini-moon. Our destination this time: San Francisco. We stayed in a lovely old hotel...which of course means it was a bit odd.
Take our room, for example. As you can see in the first picture, the door to our room appears to also be the emergency exit! Oh, and there's no lock.... Go on through that door, however, and you find our actual door –- right by our own private stairway!
The hotel also had a little rooftop garden and running track (which must take something like seventy-five circuits to make a mile). Michael went out to see it, but as we forgot the special key that would let us back in Kaylyn had to stay behind to let him back in. She wasn’t so happy about that...
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