I left my heart in San Francisco. (not really)
(Note) since we returned home Penni can’t seem to stop talking about Rice A Roni, The San Francisco Treat, she was just sad that her job would not let her make this trip with us.
Kayna took a year off competition last year, which I believe she came to regret, so early in the season last year she decided she would compete again this year. The High School seniors, who are members of her team, get to pick one meet they want to compete in each year. This year they chose Miami, but that meet was cancelled due to hurricane damage and the second choice was San Francisco.
Penni and I pride ourselves in supporting our grandchildren in all of their activities, and we have been to most of Kayna’s meets over the last seven years. The problem with this meet is that we both can’t go because of other obligations. I won the lottery and was picked to accompany Kayna and Kristi to San Francisco. Penni stayed home to take care of Christian and her mom.
I have to admit I was a little anxious about this trip, I normally have my personal travel agent/guide with me when I travel. There were a lot of new adventures in store for us on this trip. Penni did intensive research and made all the plans and reservations for us, this is her specialty. We were going to stay in downtown San Francisco at the Courtyard by Marriott. The meet was scheduled for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the Cow Palace. We did not find out until December 22nd what Kayna’s actual day of competition would be and we had to make reservations back in early fall for airfare, so we had to have reservations for all 3 days. We flew out of Atlanta Thursday afternoon and would fly back Sunday night. Kayna’s competition was set for Sunday afternoon, the last session of the meet.
This gave us Friday and Saturday for sightseeing. Kayna and Kristi had an agenda, The Museum of Ice Cream, top priority, the tickets were difficult to obtain, but thanks to Penni’s diligence we did get them Tuesday before we left town on Thursday. Way to go Nana! We need to see the Painted Lady houses from the opening scene of Full House, we needed to see the Golden Gate Bridge, and finally we had to eat at “In-N-Out Burgers”. That was the “must do” list; we also wanted to ride a cable car (Rice A Roni, the San Francisco treat) and a street car.
Thursday:
Praise the Lord when we printed our boarding passes for United Airlines we have two blessings, TSA Pre Check and we will be boarding at Gate T at the Atlanta Airport. This makes getting to our plane much easier. Kris and Kayna meet us at our house and we head for the Airport. Penni drops us at the gate and we check our bags and head through security; of course I forget, after reminding the girls that phones have to go through the X-ray machine, to take mine off and send it through. Minor glitch.
We are at T gate, but at the very last gate, 17, I think, so we have to walk to the end. We have to stop by a shop and get Sweet Tarts, aka car sick medicine, for Kayna. Arriving at the gate, I decide to ask if I can get a seat change so I can sit with Kris and Kayna, no luck, “sir you have the economy tickets, they are very restricted” ; “thank you ma’m for checking”.
I wind up sitting between two nice ladies, but I feel sorry for them because my back is killing me, I am burning up and extremely uncomfortable. I have to change positions about 1,000 times. They were very gracious though. After what seemed like an eternity, drinks were served; I had a Diet Coke and a Water. Now I can take some Tylenol.
We land in San Francisco 5 ½ hours later, after about a 30-minute delay leaving Atlanta. We head to baggage and while we are looking for our carousal I hear this voice, “don’t I know you?”, I turn around and there is my kidney Dr., Dr. Sharma. What are the chances of running into someone you know on the other side of the country? Wow!
We talk a minute, then we go retrieve our bags. We head up stairs to departures because Penni says this is where we need to meet Uber. We go outside, I pull out the phone and open the Uber app, (my first time), it asks me where we want to go, I enter the hotel address and things begin to happen, the apps tells us where to stand and wait, then connects us with Zachery who will be driving a Ford Escape, and he is 7 minutes away, a map pops on the screen and shows us where he is and his progress toward us.
Zachery picked us up and we head downtown. We begin to talk and guess what, Zachery was born in Atlanta, Stone Mountain area; His parents’ jobs brought them to San Francisco years ago. We had an enjoyable ride to the Courtyard on 2nd St. The app shows the ride complete, asked me to rate Zachery and gave me a chance to tip him. This was great first experience with Uber. Kristi notice that parking at the hotel was $69 per day, turns out Uber was a bargain.
We checked into the Courtyard, I bought a Pepsi Zero so I could take my evening meds and we headed up to our room. 16th floor. It was late and time for bed. We had to get up in the morning and go to the Ice Cream museum.
Friday:
Up and dressed by 8:00 or 8:30, we make our way down stairs to Starbuck for breakfast. No other choices close to us; the girls are happy and I will make do. They have drinks and muffins and I have an English Muffin with sausage and egg, somebody needs to teach Starbucks that sausage should be browned when it is cooked.
The Ice Museum of Ice Cream is within walking distance, so we head out, we need to stop at a store for some supplies, IPhone charging cords since some of ours quit working, as they have a tendency to do. You know they will not let you take your knife on a plane, how are you supposed to get into the packaging on iPhone cords when you travel? We find a CVS pharmacy, and procure our supplies.
We drop by “Super Duper Burger” for lunch, Kris is upset, none of the places we have stopped into have heat and most of them leave the doors open. She has now determined she might be able to survive a trip to Alaska with us. The girls loved their hamburgers, and mine was OK, no bun, no fries, just the beef patty, bacon and cheese.
We continue down the street and he there is a Marshall’s. Kayna needs a phone case to protect her phone. (the $50 case I bought her from Amazon is at home). We walk by the purses, one catches Kristi’s eye and she sends pictures to Lauryn and we continue down stairs to find a phone case. Success, we have our case and we are on the way, just across the street to the Museum of Ice Cream. Our tickets are for 1:00pm, it is 12:15pm so we check to see if we are too early. We are, so up the hill we begin to walk.
Hey, that looks like Chinatown, yes it is, so we walk through Chinatown, where I find a Camera store. I want some UV Filters for my camera lenses for protection of the lens. We go in and this nice gentleman helps us, but he also tries to upsell us. I find what I want, a filter. He says I will clean the lens and install the filter. Great, now let me show you this new lens, I have to admit it was a very nice lens, but I was not in the market. I finally paid for the filter, as he said, “I did not charge you for cleaning the lens,” I laughed to myself and thought I did not ask you to clean it and we left. The part of Chinatown we saw looked like a bunch of tourist shops you would find in any vacation spot.
Now it is time to go to the highly anticipated Museum of Ice Cream. Pink banners were hanging on the outside of the building. They let us in the door with a group of other people, assign a team captain, give us a team name and send us down stairs in this former bank building, complete with vault. That was the last we saw of the team captain and the rest of the team.
All the walls are painted pink, painted on the walls is a brief history of ice cream, the Chinese invented it, some woman invented the first mechanical ice cream maker and so on.
We make our way to the first room where they give us a small cup of ice cream, you have to finish it here. Strawberry-Peach I think, not bad. They had two old time pay phones on the walls, they were pink also. The next room had metal walls with thousands of magnetic pink letters on it, you could get creative with the letters, Kris spelled out all her Children’s names.
The rest of the Museum was about photo ops, cotton candy clouds, cherry walls, including a climbing wall, gummy bears, giant push-ups, room after room of photo ops and free ice cream and cotton candy, not really free, I remember what we paid for the ticket. The highlight of the trip was Kayna’s chance to jump into a swimming pool of sprinkles, plastic sprinkles. Then to the sprinkles shower (compressed air), and then out to the sales floor. The had some cool swings for photo ops and some things to sell. That’s it, the Museum of Ice Cream is a wrap. I think she loved it.
Time for Uber to the Ferry Market Building. Ramu picked us up in a Toyota Prius. I messed up because I had directed him, via the app, to carry us to the Ferry Seafood Market. I change the destination in the app and here we go again. This ride reminds me of a Jitney Bus ride in the Bahamas or of an ambulance ride I took when I was in EMT training with a guy named Jimmy driving, a bit scary.
We get to the Ferry Market building and we know the Cable Car (Rice A Roni) is nearby, but we are not sure where and Google maps is not extremely helpful about where the boarding station is. So we start walking, OOOPS THERE IT IS, OOOPS THERE IT IS, a Cable Car across the street after we walked a couple of blocks. Man, just missed it, there it goes up the hill, so we stand and wait, about 10 minutes and here comes another one. We hop on and the conductor collects our fare, $7 each. The driver releases the brake and engages the cable and off we go at a speedy 7 miles per hour.
We are going to Nob Hill, we make stops all along the way picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. As we look back down the hill we keep getting higher and higher; this is more like the side of a mountain than a hill. The weather is nice, but when we lose the sun it is really chilly. We get to the end of the line, switch tracks and head back, I didn’t mention that we passed Cable Cars going in the opposite direction. I thought we had to pay for the ride back, another $7 each, but the conductor never collected. I guess as long as we did not get off we did not have pay again. We enjoyed the ride.
We get back to the Ferry Market Building and we want to go to Pier 39, all the gymnasts are meeting there, at the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner. They also have the old fashioned street cars there, the ones like I remember as a child in Atlanta. We go to the streetcar stop and try to figure this out. The sign gives us a price and says exact change, I have that, so the next car that says Pier 39 we hop on and here we go. But wait, the price on the money box is different, I don’t have that much in exact change, what do I do?
I see other people hop on, but nobody is paying, but I can’t do that, so I think the cost was $7.50 for all of us, so I put $10 in the box. We get to Pier 39, get off and start walking. It is way too early for dinner. Shop after shop after shop, this is the tourist district. We finally make it to the end of the Pier and there are a bunch of floating platforms in the water covered with Sea Lions, they are loud and some of them are playing King of the Mountain, like we used to play when we were kids, they keep knocking each other off the platform.
We find the Bubba Gump Seafood Restaurant, this is for another day and do some shopping. I must buy Penni at least a tee shirt and afterwards head back to the front of the Pier to the Hard Rock. Kayna is hungry, but she does not want junk food, so we begin to look at choices and she cannot make up her mind. She is trying really hard to eat healthy, but it is so hard when your favorite food is chicken and fries. The girls are cool so we decide to go to the Hard Rock and wait, it is about an hour till dinner time.
Hey I have an idea, do you want to order an appetizer and eat it while we wait, the answer was yes so we got a table and ordered the combo appetizer. It was good and when we finished we saw some of the team members at the door.
There were about 30 of us and they sat us at 3 different tables, one on the right wall of the restaurant, one in the middle and one on the left wall, we could not even see each other. The gymnasts were all on one table. We, Kristi, I and 5 other mothers and one dad were on the left side. Let’s just say our service was slow. Three hours after we got there we paid our checks and left. The team and the team parents at the other two tables were through over an hour before we were. The manager discounted our checks and Kristi’s salad was free.
Time for Uber, the driver, “Said”, will pick us up and take us back to the Hotel. We left the Hard Rock at about 9pm and returned to the Hotel (we arrived there at 4pm). Kayna was so disappointed that the Starbucks in the Hotel was closed for the night. It was a good day.
Saturday:
Up at 8:00 a.m. (early on west coast, late on the east). Breakfast at Starbucks again, it was easy and this is what the girls wanted. Uber with “Mohammad” to Pier 43 ½ to meet the movie tour. Not sure what we are looking for and we asked at the ticket booth, they tell us there will be a white bus to pick us up. We wait, take some pictures of Alcatraz, two people, two different people, (one was the Uber driver and the guy who volunteered to take a photo of the three of us with Alcatraz in the background), asked me if my accent is Australian, WHAT? no, Southern.
Several white buses arrive, but they are full of Oriental people, with Chinese or Japanese writing on them and they unload to get on the tour boats, I finally call Penni and to ask what kind of bus to look for, she tells me the name of the tour company so I look it up on the internet and get a picture of the bus.
Shortly the bus pulls up and a nice lady from Illinois gets off to greet us. She likes my John Deere hat, a few more people show up and off we go driving through the city as she points out filming spots and shows us movie clips of scenes shot in the city.
I got a little scared when she said it was a “three-hour tour.” (Gilligan’s Island flashing through my mind)
We go by the grocery store where Steve McQueen shops in the movie, “Bullitt”,
we also saw his apartment from the movie. We see many scenes on the screen on the bus and she points out the corresponding scene in the city. Some of the more significant sights were the “Painted Lady Houses”
from the opening credits of Full House, and Fuller House, the Park where they were having the picnic in the opening scene. We later saw the actual House the Tanner family lives in on the show Full House;
it is located on a different street from the Painted Ladies Houses. We drove by the High School from The Princess Diaries, actually a private home. We stopped at the Mrs. Doubtfire House.
We head to the Presidio which used to be an army base. There is an old fort located under the Golden Gate Bridge which we toured.
The tour was finally over and we made our way back to the area of the Pier, they dropped us a couple of blocks from the pier and we walked to Pier 39 and Bubba Gump Shrimp for lunch. Stuffed Shrimp for Kris and myself and Kayna had a grilled chicken salad, eating healthy.
Uber, with “Douglas”, back to the Marshall’s to buy a purse for Lauryn. Douglas was a tech guy and he and I shared some tips, he told me about a recording app and I told him about a PDF app. We buy the purse and walk back to the hotel. Wow, there are a bunch of homeless folks here. One guy was literally sleeping in the street.
We go to our room and research movies, Kayna wants to see “the Greatest Showman,” we find the closest theatre and a movie time that fits. We decide to Uber because I don’t want my girls walking on the streets after dark, Uber driver “Pauman” picks us up at the Hotel and drives us to the movie theatre and we go in. There are automated stations where you buy your tickets and select your seats, there are only about 6 seats available and there were not three together, this theatre has a capacity of about 50 persons. Kris and Kayna select two on the front row right side, I get one behind them on the handicap row.
Popcorn and drinks for dinner then we go into the theatre. We did not think about the fact that we were not sitting together when we bought the one big popcorn, so the girls decided to let me eat first then give it to them. They loved the movie, I thought it was ok.
Now, time for another bucket list item. In-N-Out Burger, (where Kayna hopes to see a famous person) so we Uber with “Muhammad” to the In-N-Out Burger near the pier and Kayna eats a burger and fries, Kris and I watch her eat. Look what is next door, Krispy Kreme doughnuts!
We decide to have one, yes only one a piece. We order three doughnuts; the lady pulls them off the conveyor. So fresh, so soft, they melt in your mouth. Kayna and I want more but we resist. So it is time to Uber with“Lazaro” back to the hotel. Time for bed.
Sunday: Meet Day.
We get up about 8am, we go down for breakfast and I decided to order Uber Eats from McDonalds, a couple sausage biscuits and a Sausage Egg McMuffin. Finish it off with a Diet Coke and we are fine. The order is in, set to arrive in 15 minutes. Something looks strange on the screen of the Uber App, looks like the order is going to 3rd Street instead of 2nd Street. but this is my first Uber Eats experience so I am not sure how to check. The ETA keeps changing, finally it is supposed to be here in 5 minutes, I go outside to meet it and it does not come. I get a phone call; the driver was on 3rd St. I correct the address and the order finally arrives; not sure what happened to the App, but something went wrong. We have our food, finally so it is all good.
My gymnast is a bit grumpy about having to check out of this hotel before the meet, but there is nothing we can do about it. We get ready, get packed, and check out at 10:59am. We hang around the lobby till 1:30pm and then head to the Courtyard by Marriott at Oyster Point to store our luggage until flight time.
Well, you guessed it, Uber with “Sultan” to the hotel to leave our baggage (pre-arranged plan). The desk clerk knows nothing about it and he says it is against policy. I call my friendly travel agent, Penni Cooke, she made the arrangement before we left home. She talks with the Desk Clerk, he reluctantly agrees to store baggage. Hey, we would have rented a room to store the baggage, but they offered to keep it for us. Lack of communication on their part.
We had to let our driver Sultan go because it took too long to store baggage. Uber driver “Nabeel” picks us up and carries us to the Cow Palace for the meet. We looked for a place to eat lunch but we could find nothing except fast food, so it is straight to the Cow Palace. Surely they will have some concession stand food. They have to drop us in the drive way or pay a parking fee, so we walk to the venue from the drive way, not a long walk.
Two events taking place today, a Gun Show and a Gymnastic meet; man, this place looks old and kind of bare. We pay our $20 get our wrist bands and go in, this place is bare looking, two concession stands open, only popcorn, pretzels, some chips and candy. Not much selection for lunch, we opted for popcorn and a coke it is, same thing I had for dinner last night. $10.75 for Popcorn and bottle Diet Coke. Wow, San Francisco is pricy. The meet sessions are running about an hour behind schedule. We go in and find a seat. The place is old and it looks it. Seats are theatre type, old type, padded seat with a wooden curved back. The view is great tho, one of the best venues for viewing gymnastics I have seen. The seats are comfortable and the view is good for all apparatus. Great for taking pictures except poor lighting so the pictures will not be great.
Kayna has a good meet considering she did not compete at all last year, she ends up 7th all around, middle of the pack, for her group. Her friend Quinn is competing in a different group and she has a great meet, she is first all around. We only had to move over about a dozen seats for a great view of the awards, we had a great time.
Back across the parking lot to the drive way and Uber with “Theodor” back to the Hotel, pick up our luggage and wait on the airport shuttle. The young lady who made the original arrangements for us to leave the bags there is now on duty. She was great. I asked her if we had gotten her in trouble and she says no, the person on duty when we left the bags did not know about the arrangement, but everything is fine. We miss the shuttle because Kayna is changing clothes, the desk clerk, nice lady, went out to flag down the shuttle as it passed back by the hotel before leaving.
Made our way to the airport, we had TSA pre check on the first leg of the trip, but on the return we did not. Who knew a gymnastic leo would set off security alarms? We do now! They stopped Kayna and wait for her mom, they tell here they have to search her. I wish she had remembered her Me-maw impression (hilarious) from the time on the cruise ship when in the security line, my mom set off the metal detector, but Kayna didn’t remember in the middle of the stressful situation. They searched Kayna, found no threats and now we search for dinner. Dinner at the airport, where do we eat? There is a Sushi place, nope, Burger King, if we have to, but we don’t want to, around the corner and there is the Mission grill, this will do. A quesadilla, a hamburger and fries and fish and chips, $75, I want to go home for some cheap food. Now it is time to wait on the plane. We exited security at gate 71 our plane is at gate 70, praise the Lord. It is near 9:30 now – we are tired.
Not many people waiting on this plane, I hope beyond hope that it is not full. The plane loads, we have economy tickets so we board last. Large plane, lots of empty seats, I am seated on a row with two other people, two guys, but one moves to a row with two empty seats. So I get lots of room. I sleep all the way home.
We land at T gate again and make our way to baggage claim, Kayna spots another Starbucks, I give her money and we finally gather our baggage, meet Seth outside waiting, and shortly we are home.
Observations from trip:
- San Francisco is a great city to visit, very unique, I hear there are some great restaurants, but we did not get to try them because of our schedule.
- The sites are unique and very interesting.
- Cable car rides are slow, noisy and lots of fun.
- Getting around the city with Uber is very easy.
- When you stay downtown there is a wide variety of thing to do within walking distance.
- I will go back and take my darling wife one day, and bring plenty of money for food and drinks.