San Francisco!

The view from our living room... see the city in the distance?

Spring break has finally arrived, and this year Matt and I opted to ditch the kids for half the week and take off for the West Coast. San Francisco, specifically. I love traveling with my children, but it's good to get away every now and then. We felt less guilty knowing we would still have half a week with them once we returned. Also making our decision easier - Matt's parents had an apartment booked for a a couple weeks and had invited us to join them.

I was already sweating having to make a 7 p.m. flight through spring break Friday afternoon traffic. So imagine my anxiety as I watched the the I-85 bridge spectacularly blaze and collapse the night before. I did something I've never done... I begged for a favor. We're not supposed to ask off the day before (or after) a holiday break, and I fully admitted it was a first-world problem, but I crossed my fingers and asked for a half-day sub. It helped that my AP was also trying to get out of town... we both ended up taking a half day! So what was going to be a fingernail-biting departure was instead a leisurely stroll, with a stop for lunch at Lukas's CFA before hunkering down at the airport. After being delayed a couple times, we finally took off an hour behind schedule but all's well that ends well, we made it to San Francisco.

Tourists!

The first thing we did was to be total tourists and hop on one of those red double-decker sightseeing buses. The theory being - we'd see everything and be better informed about where we wanted to invest our time. It was great! Everyone told us it would be surprisingly cold, foggy, prepare to buy a sweatshirt kind of weather, but Mother Nature smiled upon us. It was perfect! We ditched our jackets and basked in the top deck sunshine. The tour started at Fisherman's Wharf, took us through the city, all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge, through Golden Gate Park, past Chinatown... we saw it all. Thanks to our tour, we decided we would definitely be going back to the Bridge, the Park, and that Fisherman's Wharf is an overcrowded tourist trap that must be necessarily navigated through to reach far superior destinations.

Strolling the pier before hopping on the bus. There's Alcatraz! And the Ferry Building!

Coffee stop at Boudin Bakery

A picture-perfect day! Over the bridge lies Sausalito.

Chinatown

We hopped off the bus in Chinatown so we could stroll the streets and pick up some lunch. A co-worker of mine counseled avoiding anywhere we saw white people eating (haha!) and so we found the random hole in the wall vegetarian place, crowded into one of the few tables, and proceeded to stuff our faces. It was delicious! We finally made it back to the waterfront so we could catch our train home to Noe Valley. We were experts at public transportation by the time we left. After the traffic mess we were abandoning in Atlanta, San Francisco's system was just fine with us. No need for a car here! The train stop was only a few blocks from the house and a thirty minute ride would put us right into the heart of where we needed to be.

It's a shame our weather was so bad. Just hideous. 

City on the Bay