On the flight from San Francisco home to San Diego after a glorious long weekend in the city. David and I wanted to get away for our tenth anniversary, and my brother and his family were sweet enough to host Jarrah for three days so we could! Since they live in the Berkeley area, we flew into Oakland and spent an afternoon with Karl, my SIL Carrie and two nieces Stella and Ruby, 15 and 12. Then we hopped the BART to downtown like giddy kids on the lam.
As is my wont, I'll take you through this experience day by day, but a few highlights (and one lowlight) before I proceed. First, a shout-out to the classy Hotel Palomar in SOMA for upgrading us to a ginormous suite based on my filling out that little box on the internet that says “Notes” with “It's our tenth anniversary!” It was the nicest room ever (well, except for our wedding night at the Westgate, but that suite had seven rooms!) and came with a super-deep jacuzzi tub that we filled with bubbles so high we couldn't see over them. Nothing like a hot soak after a day of climbing hills.
Another plus in the happy column goes to Jay Gifford of the Victorian Home Walk, for being adorable, entertaining and freakishly knowledgeable about both SF history and its incredibly diverse architecture. I will detail that delightful couple of hours anon, but for now I'll leave you with one of his quotes about the furnishings of the period: “It wasn't unusual to have a moose head, a bear head and a shrunken head all in the same room.”
I want to say “boo!” to the next item, but I can't really blame the sky: we took an increasingly unpleasant, progressively faster but unavoidably three-mile walk one afternoon in driving rain, with no umbrella or appropriate clothing of any kind. The best part was riding the BART at the end of it with water dripping off my nose and squelching in my shoes while everyone gave the pathetic, sodden people a wide berth. Whee!
Back to the beginning, Dear Readers. Join me, won't you? I'll launch this journey tomorrow with scads of color photos.
4 comments:
Shame you're not in SF anymore, would have loved to actually meet up. Glad you had a good weekend, though. Happy Anniversary!
Can't wait to hear about your adventures!
I TOTALLY hear you about the giddy "kids on the lam" bit. I think Lo Gung and I giggled the ENTIRE three hour drive down the coast on our kid-less adventure!
Can't wait to hear all about it!
Hey Congrats on the 10 year aniversary, it doesn't seem that long ago.
Ian, Kate and Violet and +1
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