San Francisco and Sausalito

I've been feeling a bit stressed as of late, so on Thursday Nicki suggested that we get out of town this weekend, even if just for a day. The kids haven't spent much quality time in the Bay Area, so we thought it would be fun to go there for the day. We started out in Sausalito, which is the community just north of San Francisco, immediately across the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Discovery Museum in Sausalito is tons of fun for little kids, and ours helped the place live up to its name. We had a blast between the art room, the wave room, bay hall, and the outdoor exhibits and play areas. Nicki had packed a picnic lunch for us, so after an hour or two of playtime, we took a break for lunch before getting back into the action. By about 1pm, Sam started to act very tired, so we decided to pack up and head out.

The good news is that our next stop involved crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, which is just awesome (I'm a civil engineer, so the nerd in me was totally jazzed). Surprisingly, traffic wasn't too bad crossing into San Francisco, so we made it to our destination - Japantown - in little time. To our surprise, they recently opened a Daiso location in Japantown, so Nicki spent an eternity looking through all the various goodies the store had to offer. She returned to us, bag in hand, with all kinds of edible treats and a few dishware items. After Daiso, we walked a few blocks of Japantown before heading back to the car. I gotta admit, walking through Japantown reminded us a lot of our four years in Yokosuka, Japan. It's probably the first time since moving back last year that we truly missed the sites, smells, and tastes of Japan.

Moving on, we wanted to show the kids the Fisherman's Wharf area before heading out, so we hopped back in the car and headed back north. Sneaky me, I took a hard right turn at Lombard Street, a detour to tackle the world famous curvy section. Heading east on Lombard gets very steep at certain points, and we actually had trouble getting up the final hill before the curves. Our poor little Vibe just doesn't have the get-up-and-go pep that is needed to traverse the streets of San Francisco on a regular basis. After peeling out a few times on the way up the hill, we had to become accustomed to the smell of burning rubber. But eventually it was our turn to go down the hill and the kids loved it - especially Joshua. Though he admitted that he wouldn't want to live anywhere near that road (I bet he'd feel different if he knew what those houses were worth!).

We eventually made it to the wharf, where we immediately parked and hiked up to Ghirardelli's famous location. After stopping for a couple large cups of the delicious ice cream, which we shared with the boys, we strolled back to the car and headed home.

Upon our return, Joshua asked, "Did we have dinner yet?", to which I replied, "Yes, you had ice cream". Without a moment's pause, Joshua replied, "Great, I want dessert!"