Back from San Francisco

K. and I got back from San Francisco late last night. It was a very long drive home. I suppose it was a long drive there as well, but it's always more fun driving to a place rather than driving back from a place. After about 16 hours in the car yesterday, I was pretty ready to be done with driving altogether.

We took off from Seattle about 8:00 AM on Thursday, and spent the hours catching up on each other's lives, listening to audio books, answering trivia questions, and screaming in excitement when we made it to the In 'n' Out Burger! We got to SF about midnight on Thursday night and checked into our hotel, the Columbus Motor Inn. We were pleasantly surprised at how nice it was, and it was in a great location - a couple of blocks away from Fisherman's Wharf, so it was very convenient to the things that we wanted to do.

On Friday morning, we got up early and headed down to the Wharf, where we caught one of those hop on/hop off buses and got a good tour of the city. It was a lovely day, yet not overly hot, so we were very comfortable. We did some fun shopping around the way and had the best sandwiches at a little French bakery off of the Wharf. We found a coupon for $25 off a dinner at a couple of different restaurants, so we decided to head back to the hotel, take a short nap, then head back out to find one of the restaurants on the coupon. We found the Northbeach Restaurant, a lovely little Italian restaurant that was fairly close to our hotel. Our waiter was a fabulous Italian guy, who hooked us up with a great wine for our appetizer and main courses. We also had the best olive oil I've had in a long time - very peppery and delicious with the foccacia bread they brought for us. After our dinner, we went to the Queen Anne Hotel, and met up with a group for a nightly ghost hunt in the Pacific Heights area of SF. It was really fun, and I got to demonstrate with haunted object outside of one of the houses. It was really cool. The architecture in the part of town is amazing. Our guide pointed out that the houses there were the tract houses of their day, which is interesting when you think about how much everyone loves them now and how much we hate current tract houses.

On Saturday, we slept in a bit, and then headed into Chinatown, where we spent a good portion of the day shopping and looking for a couple of Fu dog statues for my door stop. I ended up finding a cute pair of silver ones, along with a bunch of beautiful silk purses, coin purses, and other items that I picked up for my mom and sisters. I also fell in love with an adorable pair of pigs called Monokuro Boo, so I bought a wallet and coin purse with their faces on them. After our shopping expedition, we stopped at an Irish pub for some beer and appetizers. We then walked all the way to the Aquarium of the Bay, which while kind of cool, was a little sparse. It was neat to walk through the tanks and see all of the fish, but it wasn't really huge. I guess after seeing Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, I was a little underwhelmed by Aquarium of the Bay. That night, we were supposed to meet up with one of my friends in town for dinner, but he ended up being part of a regatta, so K. and I just fended for ourselves and ordered pizza in. After walking for almost 8 hours, we were pretty beat.

On Sunday, we woke up early and drove out to San Jose, where we toured the Winchester Mystery House. It was a really impressive place, and the tour was really interesting. Poor Mrs. Winchester. She was really nutty to have built a house like that. It makes for a really interesting place to visit, though. We then went out of our way to find an In 'n' Out Burger, and saw parts of San Jose that we'll probably never see again. We were pretty thankful to finally make it back to the freeway. We ended up at Great America, and went on a few of the big rollercoasters, including Invertigo which goes both forward and backward. That was my favorite. We drove back to SF, got cleaned up, and then went to the Stinking Rose for dinner. It was incredibly delicious, and unfortunatelly really quick. Our dinner came within minutes of our appetizer, so the whole experience was over pretty quickly. We took it as a sign that we needed to get to Ghiradelli and have one of their world famous sundaes.

Overall, it was a really wonderful trip and I hope that my feet will forgive me soon. We walked everywhere over the last three days, and it's definitely taken a bit of a toll on my poor feet, but it was great nonetheless.