I left my heart in San Francisco - Part 3

Hi! Whether you've been anxiously awaiting this final post or are just glad that this series is almost over, here is the final installment of our San Francisco trip.

Before we even left for San Francisco I had planned out our first activity for Sunday morning. There is a flea market on Treasure Island (an island in the bay that can be reached from the bay bridge) that is only open on Sundays and supposed to be a good place to see some local art. Plus all the food trucks from the city are there on Sundays. Honestly, I was mostly excited about the food trucks :) The flea market was set up in and around an old naval base on Treasure Island, and I could definitely see it being somewhere I would go every Sunday if I lived in the bay area. There were tons of booths filled with vintage furniture and goods as well as hand made items and art. Since we couldn't take any of the fun furniture home, we bought some handmade soap and 3 watercolor prints that are now hanging over our piano. And of course, we hit up those food trucks! Joe got some sliders from one, and I picked up some pizza from another. A piece of banana-toffee cake from another booth rounded out our lunch. Everything was delicious! Luckily, the city buses run back and forth from Treasure island so we were able to catch one back to San Francisco after lunch and continue our adventures for the day.

Treasure Island Flea Market

Panoramic view of San Francisco from Treasure Island. From the Bay Bridge on the Left to the Golden Gate Bridge on the Right. 

First we stopped back at the apartment to unload our goodies and also to book a rental car for the trip to Sonoma on Monday and our Alcatraz cruise and tour for Tuesday. With those things taken care of, we decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and do some walking around areas we hadn't explored yet. First we took a bus to Alamo Park which is in the Haight Ashbury district. This is where the classic "Painted Ladies" houses are in San Francisco and you may recognize it from the opening scene of every Full House episode. The park was a big hill and there were some great views from it. Apparently it is also a good place to take a blanket and spend a day relaxing in the sun. We even saw several people with wine or beer out there, so I guess as long as you're not being obnoxious, they're willing to overlook the alcohol in the park. San Francisco Tip #5: Save some money for dinner one night by taking a picnic and some wine to Alamo park. We didn't do that, but I kinda wish we had. We did that one night in Italy on our honeymoon and it was one of our favorite dinners of the trip.

Some of the "Painted Ladies"

After walking around the park for a bit we decided to head down one of the adjacent streets just to see if we ran into anything else fun or cool. It was nice to know that pretty much where ever we went, it would be easy to hop on a bus back to somewhere familiar. We found some other really cool houses in the area and grabbed some coffee at a corner shop. Then we decided it would be a good time to visit The Presidio. The Presidio is a national park and former military post that has some beautiful original buildings as well the "Palace of Fine Arts" which was installed for a world's fair that was held in San Francisco. The whole park was beautiful and of course I loved all the old buildings! The big open space of the park was a nice change from the busy city.

The dome in the distance is part of the Palace of Fine Arts.

After walking around the Palace of Fine Arts, we wandered through another cool neighborhood with a completely different style of houses than we'd seen elsewhere in San Francisco. One of the houses was having an estate sale and I really wanted to go in, but they were charging just to look, plus we didn't really have time.

Some cool Spanish style houses as seen from  the Palace of Fine Arts. 

I'm not sure if I've got my events in the wrong order here, but I think that next we went to check out the famous Lombard Street. As you may know this is famed as the "curviest street in the world". It was crazy steep! The thing that really surprised me was there were actually houses on it. I can't even imagine having to back out of my garage every day onto that street! It was really cool though :) Definitely a must see in San Francisco. And 2 of the cable car lines have stops right at the top of Lombard street, so it would be easy to hop off there and check it out if you're already riding the cable cars.

Looking down Lombard Street. In the distance you can see Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill which is where we walked through that awesome "jungle" neighborhood.

How crazy would it be to live on Lombard Street?!

They meant to name it Lombardo Street, right? :) 

By this time we were getting pretty hungry and we decided that some seafood sounded like a good idea for dinner. Joe did a little searching and found a tiny place called the Fairy Codmother that had awesome reviews. It was back down by Fisherman's Wharf so once again we hopped on a bus! Fairy Codmother was really just a trailer where they cooked the food with a window that you ordered at. Then there were a few tables and awnings around the trailer where you could sit and eat. The fish, shrimp and fries were awesome but we each got a whole order and it was way too much food! Luckily they don't mind packaging it up for you, so we took it home with us for lunch on another day.

After eating, we decided that if we rushed we could possibly make it to the far west side of San Francisco to catch a sunset. Our destination was Land's End lookout and there was really only one bus that went that way. It felt like there were 100 stops on this bus route! We literally saw the sun sink below the horizon as we stepped of the bus at the end of the line. It was beautiful, but we didn't get to sit and enjoy it like we'd hoped. San Francisco Tip #6: If you plan to go to Land's End Lookout to see a sunset (and you should) be sure to give yourself plenty of time to get there by bus. It was about a 45 minute ride from "downtown" to out there.

Now that we'd seen the two second sunset we had to wait for about 20 minutes to catch the same long bus ride back. Once again we crashed when we got home!

Monday morning was rainy again as we made our way from the apartment to the car rental place. It was pretty quick to get our car and by 9:00am we were on our way to Sonoma! The drive was about an hour and a half and there were some pretty areas but the rain and fog certainly didn't do the landscape any favors. Once we got close to Sonoma we started seeing all the beautiful vineyards though. I was getting pretty excited to try some wine at that point :) We stopped at a cafe in downtown Sonoma for some coffee and breakfast before we started our wine tour. It was still pretty early and we were worried that some wineries wouldn't be open yet. Before we got in the car to go to the first winery, we decided to stop in the Sonoma visitor center to see if we could get a map or something. San Francisco Tip #7: If you go to Napa or Sonoma be sure to stop at the visitor center for tasting coupons and tips. The ladies working in the visitor center were super nice! They asked us what kind of wineries we had in mind then gave us several 2 for 1 tasting coupons as well as making suggestions for other wineries we hadn't planned on going too. I also picked up a sticker that said "I heart Sonoma Valley". Just wearing that sticker on my coat let the wineries know we'd stopped at the visitor center and led to us getting some discounts! Unfortunately I don't have a any pictures of Sonoma since it was raining and I couldn't get any good pictures out of the car window. I'll just give you a quick rundown of which wineries we went to.

Roche Winery - The tasting room for this winery was right in downtown Sonoma and we had it all to ourselves! This was nice because we got lots of personal attention and they even took the time to teach us the correct way to taste wine. Swirl, sniff, and taste :) We got one bottle of wine there.

Loxton Winery - Another small winery where we the only people for a while. All the wines here were delicious and they had the whole fermenting and bottling operation right there in one room. At each winery we learned a little more about the wine making process for these small wineries. I did most of the tasting though since Joe was driving, so I'm afraid that I don't really remember all the things they told us :) We got one bottle of wine here as well.

Kaz Winery - This was my favorite winery we visited! It is also the smallest winery in Sonoma. Kaz is the owner and head of everything at Kaz winery and we were lucky enough that he was the one running the tasting room that day! Every wine was amazing! You could tell he was really passionate about his wines and he was also really fun to talk to. One of the fun things you can do at Kaz is bottle, cork and label your own bottle of wine. We ended up buying 2 bottles at Kaz and one of them was a variety we could bottle ourselves. So I did it and it was pretty fun :) I was surprised to learn from Kaz that they bottle every single bottle of wine they sell with that one little mechanical corking "machine". If you ever go to Sonoma, be sure to stop at Kaz! He'll even sign your bottle of wine for you.

Kaz was helping me bottle some wine. 

Next we stopped at place called Ty Caton, but we were not impressed, so I won't even talk about that one :) Save us both some time.

The last place we stopped was a tasting room for the family owned Muscardini Cellars. This winery was recommended to us by a local we ran into earlier that day and it was a good tip! The guy running the tasting room let us taste and double taste a lot of the wines, and in the end Mr. Muscardini himself signed the bottle we bought. Bonus - there was super cute golden retriever named Bennie running around. A cute dog pretty much seals the deal for me :)

One thing we found at pretty much all the places we stopped was that even though the tasting fee was only supposed to include tasting a limited number of wines, most of the people let us try over the limit or even re-try ones we liked. So we didn't feel too bad about paying the tasting fees. Oh, and some of the wineries will apply your tasting fee to a wine bottle purchase. But anyway, after the final winery we had to hit the road to return the rental car back in San Francisco before 6. We made it back in the nick of time and started our bus trek back to the apartment carrying our half case of wine. For dinner on Sunday night we went to a completely different part of town called the Mission district and found a place called Pancho Villa Taqueria. It was almost like a Mexican buffet and the food was pretty tasty.

Now onto our last full day in San Francisco! We woke up to another rainy day but we had already booked our 9:30am tour of Alcatraz so we hopped on a cable car and rode down to Fisherman's Wharf where we would take the ferry to Alcatraz Island. By the time we got on the boat, our shoes were already soaked! Once we made it to the island we picked up our audio tour headsets and began our walk around Alcatraz. Despite the fact that it was a little creepy (especially in the gloomy weather) the prison and island were really cool. The guided tour is really well done and the history of the island is so much more than just a prison. I won't go into all the details but I'll just say that if you ever go to San Francisco, make sure to take a trip to Alcatraz! p.s. I may have gone a little overboard with the Alcatraz pictures :)

You can still see the writing on the water tower from when a group of American Indians occupied the island in the late 60s.

A typical cell at Alcatraz.

These were the solitary confinement cells. Cell Block D. 

I thought it was interesting that some inmates had art supplies and games in their cells.

In the bed you can see the paper mache head that a prisoner made to trick the guards into thinking he was asleep. He had actually dug out of the cell and was one of 2 prisoners who escaped and were never found. 

A few into the Alcatraz Kitchen. You can see the knife box with an outline of each knife. That was made like that so it could be seen at a glance if a knife was missing from the box. 

After taking the ferry home, we walked down to the Ferry Building which I had heard had some great restaurants and shopping. Well they did have a bunch of delicious looking food but it was pretty pricey and we had leftovers at home anyway so we opted not to get lunch there. However we did pick up a little chocolate cake at Miette Bakery for a little dessert. So we headed home and ate our leftovers and cake! After lunch and trying to dry our feet out for a bit we decided to take a final walk down to Chinatown for a visit to the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. The factory is a little hole in the wall place tucked down in an alley where 3 people sit and make fortune cookies all day You aren't allowed to take pictures inside (unless you want to pay 25 cents for each picture) but they let you watch for a bit before getting pushed out the door with a few free samples of unfolded fortune cookies. It was a quick fun stop and we did leave with a mixed bag of chocolate and vanilla fortune cookies for $5.

Unfolded fortune cookies.

Our final tourist stop of the trip was the Cable Car Museum which was just a short walk from Chinatown and also a short walk back to our apartment. It was so cool to see how the cable cars work, and I would definitely recommend stopping there. It's hard to believe that all the cable car lines are controlled from right there in one building.

These giant wheels pull all the cables for the cable car lines. 

For dinner that night we found a tasty sushi place and just tried to enjoy our last evening of vacation before getting back to reality :( We took the rest of the night easy and tried to get all of our things packed up for the next day. Then Wednesday we pretty much just finished packing and headed to the airport. I was sad to leave! We had so much fun in San Francisco and I feel like there were so many places that were left out of our adventure! I think if we were to ever go back there would be plenty of new things to do, but there are a handful of things I would do over again as well.

I think that wraps up the San Francisco trip! Finally! I hope you enjoyed the little tour and maybe it inspired you to plan a trip out there or to somewhere else that you've never been. Have a great night and thanks for reading!

I left my heart in San Francisco - Part 2

And we're back with days 3 and 4 of San Francisco! As I mentioned in the last post we had a big day ahead of us on Friday with plans to rent bikes and ride over the Golden Gate bridge to the town of Sausalito. The place we rented our bikes from was called Blazing Saddles and they had several locations all over San Francisco. It was really easy to rent from them and fairly reasonably prices. They charge $8 per hour with a max of $32 for the day. We kept our bikes for closer to 7 hours and it was still only $32 dollars. What they don't tell you initially though is that the $11 ferry tickets they "give" you to come back from Sausalito still have to be paid for when you turn your bikes back in. It's worth it to take the ferry back over though, especially if you're crazy like us and attempt to ride up to Muir woods on the bikes. But I'll get back to that part later :)

First thing Friday morning we took a cable car north toward Fisherman's Wharf since there was a Blazing Saddles location near the end of the cable car line. We were able to rent bikes very quickly and get on our way. Armed with maps from the bike rental place and our smart phones, we headed out towards the Golden Gate Bridge. The ride between Fisherman's Wharf and the Golden Gate was a nice mix of coast line, parks, residential areas and some great spots to stop and get some pictures of the bridge.

One of the only pictures of us together from the trip. Proof that we were there!

Not going to lie, the ride across the Golden Gate bridge itself made me a little nervous. The side walks along the side of the bridge are kind of narrow and you have to look out for other cyclists and pedestrians. As long as we were riding I didn't focus too much on how high over the bay were were, but when we stopped at a look out point it kind of hit me and I was ready to get on some solid land ASAP! I will say that the bridge is an awesome piece of Art Deco architecture and it was really cool to see close up how it was built. Unless you're really afraid of heights, I would definitely recommend riding or walking across the bridge!

That's a lot of rivets!

I believe that's Sausalito in the background. 

Once we made if off the bridge we started the mostly down hill ride to Sausalito. By the time we got there we were already getting a little tired so we decided to lock our bikes up and walk around a bit. Plus, it was almost lunch time by this point :) Sausalito is a pretty little town that is built right along the bay. There were lots of pretty little houses up on the hill and a nice downtown area full of restaurants and shops.

We walked around until we found a tiny burger joint that had some promising reviews online. The inside of the restaurant was just big enough for the kitchen area and two tiny tables at the back. Since it was still pretty early, Joe and I were the only customers and were able to snag one of the tables. The burger and fries were great! Joe got a burrito and he said it was good too. Once we refueled, we hit the bike trail again with the plan to get to Mill Valley park. We were told that we could see some giant sequoia trees there. We not only saw some beautiful trees but also some amazing homes up in the hills surrounded by these huge trees and all kinds of other plant life. It would be a pretty incredible place to live!

This is one of the Sequoia trees near Mill Valley Park. 

We made it to the park relatively quick and for some reason decided we could ride all the way up to Muir Woods. Big mistake! Muir Woods is a National Park where you can see some of the really impressive redwood and sequoia trees. According to our maps it looked like it should be a fairly short bike ride from Mill Valley Park. What we didn't realize was that the ride to Muir Woods was ALL UP HILL! And not just a slight hill. A "so steep you can't even ride so you have to walk your bike up the hill" hill. We persevered for a while but eventually gave up since we new we still had to make the ride all the way back to Sausalito. Luckily after our long uphill ride, were able to coast down the hills for a bit and get some energy back. Even though we never made it to Muir woods, I'm glad we got off the beaten path for a while and saw some areas that we never even would have known existed! Below you can see the path of our bike ride that day and the ferry ride home. Joe captured this with our Garmin watch, but he forgot to turn the watch on until we'd already been riding for a mile or so. The red line is our path, the blue area in the graph at the top is our pace, and the green area is our elevation change.

So we made our way back to Sausalito and chilled out on a park bench while we waited for the ferry. We were both pretty exhausted so we had zero plans to bike back over the Golden Gate Bridge.

The bike ride from the ferry landing back to Blazing Saddles was a quick one. Oh, and I think I know why they call it blazing saddles. It's because after sitting on that bike seat all day, it hurts to sit on anything at all :) hehe. After we turned our bikes in we walked to the end of the block to the Buena Vista Cafe for one of their famous Irish Coffees. If you go to San Francisco, you have to go to Buena Vista Cafe just for the experience!

It was much stronger than I expected and I had to ask for more milk in mine half way through! After the Irish Coffees we were still hungry for dinner so we decided to head over to Japan Town and find a place to eat. We settled on a ramen place and slurped some noodles before going back to the apartment and crashing. It was a long day!

On Saturday morning we woke up to rain, but there was too much on our itinerary that day to let that stop us!

We walked down to China town to catch a bus to Golden Gate Park where we were planning on visiting the California Academy of Science (this was another attraction included in the City Pass). I was hoping the the Academy of Science wouldn't be crowded since it was a rainy day, but it was still pretty packed with families, tourists and school groups. The Academy of Science is basically a fun science museum. Different than the Exploratorium though as it was less hands on and had more exhibits. There were some awesome aquariums, a butterfly and bird dome and an amazing green roof.

All the kids were yelling about seeing Nemo and Dory :)

We were also able to get seats for a show in the planetarium about dark matter and space. It was really cool with the giant screen that wrapped almost all the way around the room. After we'd seen everything there we decided it was time for lunch so we took a short bus ride out of the park to a nearby area that looked like it had lots of restaurants. Joe and I are very indecisive when it comes to which restaurant to eat at so it usually took us a good while to walk up and down the streets past all the choices before we finally just gave in and picked one. I'm happy to report though that we never ended up with a poor choice! After lunch we decided to walk back to Golden Gate Park instead of taking the bus. This time we were headed for the Botanical Gardens. It cost $7 to get in to the gardens but we really enjoyed just walking around and seeing all the different plants and specialty gardens. Plus, since it was a rainy day the gardens were pretty empty.

I named this hill "Donut Hill" since we sat on a bench at the top and ate the donuts we picked up after lunch. 

We were going to stop by the Japanese Tea Gardens, which are also in Golden Gate Park, but that would have been an additional $7 a piece so we decided one garden visit was enough. Our plan after that was to take a bus to a park called the Presidio, but our plans changed when I discovered that at some point throughout the day, I had lost my City Pass :( womp womp. Lucky for me, we'd already used all the parts of the pass that would get us into various attractions. The only thing we were still using it for was transportation. So instead of going to the Presidio, we bought me a single bus ticket and made our way to a Walgreens where we could buy a 7 day bus pass that would last me for the rest of the trip. Although I'm pretty sure we still got our money's worth out of my City Pass, I was still bummed. By this point, we were pretty tired and our shoes were soaked so we decided to head home. On our way we stopped at a Trader Joe's for a few more groceries, where I made my 2nd mistake of the day by buying whole bean coffee instead of ground. No coffee for us the next morning!

We hung out at home for a while and let our feet dry out while doing some research about where we should eat dinner. We settled on a place called Nick's Crispy Tacos, which I would highly recommend! They were delicious! Once again, we went home, drank some wine and went to bed :) Well, that's the end of days 2 and 3! Only one more installment of our San Francisco trip left. And it will be pretty long since it will cover 3 days. Thanks again for reading and I hope you all have a great weekend!

I left my heart in San Francisco - Part 1

I'm so excited to share our San Francisco adventure with you guys! In order to keep the length of the posts and number of pictures to a somewhat reasonable amount, I'm going to split our trip up into 3 posts. This first post will cover the first 2 days of our trip. Some days I took a lot of pictures, other days I don't think I got any! Through out the post I'll be adding my personal "San Francisco Travel Tips".

Ok, let's get started! First off, before we ever left home for California, Joe and I did some research on things to do in San Francisco as well as buying City Passes. SF Travel Tip #1: If you're going to be in SF for 5 or more days, buy a City Pass! They're $86 per person but worth it if you plan on seeing many of the main attractions.  I'll point out throughout these posts what all we used our City Pass for. We also booked a VRBO (vacation rental by owner) apartment for our week long stay. It was a little cheaper than a hotel and we had a small kitchen so we could eat breakfast there every morning and store other snacks as well. The apartment was small but in a great location and felt very safe. Now onto the trip itself.

Wednesday (day 1)
We arrived in SF around 1:00pm and took a BART train from the airport to the city. Since we had not picked up our City Passes yet (which would allow us to use the bus and trolley system) we had to walk up a couple of serious hills to get to our apartment. It was easy to find though and I was grateful that we only had to walk up those hills once while dragging suitcases. After quickly settling in, we located a grocery store near by and picked up some food basics for breakfasts and snacks. SF Travel Tip #2: Bring your own reusable shopping bags, or you'll be charged 10 cents per bag like us :( We dropped those things off at home and walked down to the SF visitor center to pick up our City Passes. Even by this point we'd already seen some of the fun characteristic things in SF like China Town, the cables cars and the steep hills. Once we had our City Passes in hand we set out on foot in search of a late lunch/early dinner. The City Pass let us ride anything within the MUNI transportation system which includes the buses, cable cars and street cars. Those rides would usually range from $2-$6 each time, and we rode A TON. So I feel like we got our money's worth with MUNI rides alone.

Our plan for dinner was to find a restaurant we'd seen on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives but it ended up being closed. It was a happy accident though since just a few doors down we found a place called Garaje that turned out to be awesome! Our first meal in SF was definitely a winner.

Yes, they are just as greasy and delicious as they look. In that glass is their version of sangria which was awesome!

We took a bus home and decided to wander up to North Beach, the Italian neighborhood, in search of some gelato :) Another bus took us up to North Beach and we walked around checking out all the restaurants and the pretty Washington Square in front of the church. We finally found some gelato and decided to walk home through China Town instead of taking a bus. Even with all the China Town businesses closed up for the evening, it was cool to walk through. We turned in pretty early on Wednesday since we were still running on central time, and planned to head out early on Thursday to see as much as possible.

Thursday (day 2)
As soon as we were ready on Thursday morning, we walked to the end of our block where, very conveniently, there was a cable car stop. We hopped on one and took it all the way north to the piers at Fisherman's wharf. Riding the cable cars was just as exciting as I expected! It was a little nerve wracking to be flying down a hill on one towards an intersection and wondering if we'll really be able to stop on time.

At the end of the cable car run there is basically a huge lazy susan in the ground where they're able to turn the cable car around. Then it can just regrip the cable underground and head back up the line!

Since we made it down to the bay pretty early and a lot of places weren't open yet, we walked out on one of the public piers to get some pretty views of the city, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate bridge. We also walked around an old military area called Fort Mason that had some beautiful homes and buildings. It wasn't something that we'd planned on seeing but it was a nice surprise.

That is Alcatraz island on the right. 

One of the officer's homes in Fort Mason.

Looking back toward Fort Mason from a pier where an old ship was docked. 

Then we walked up to Ghirardelli Square. Yes, that Ghirardelli :) We bought some chocolate and walked around some of the shops.

In the Ghirardelli building you can see the original process in action for making their amazing chocolate. Plus, free samples!

Then we walked across the street to the Maritime Museum. It was free to get in, but they seemed to be under construction or in some kind of transition because there was very little in the exhibits. It was still a cool building though, and like I said, it was free! By this time we were getting hungry for lunch so we headed toward the most touristy pier, Pier 39, in search of some of that famous San Francisco sourdough and clam chowder. We found that at Boudin Bakery! We got our sourdough fix and even saw some of the bread being made. Then we found our way to those crazy sea lions that hang out by the warves. They were fun to watch :)

One of the street cars that ran along Fisherman's Wharf. The difference between a street car and a cable car is that the street car is powered by electric wires overhead and just runs on rails, and a cable car is literally pulled along by a constantly moving cable that is underground. 

They're so graceful in the water, and so funny when they're trying to jump up onto one of the platforms. 

After lunch we went to the Aquarium of the Bay which was one of the attractions included in the price of our City Pass. It was a fairly small, but nice aquarium that showed a lot of fish that are native to the bay as well as some cool tropical fish. There were a lot of little ones running around and they were completely crowding the "tide pool" area, so poor Joe didn't get to touch any of the starfish :(

There were some fun jellyfish though. And no, this picture is not upside down. They were all just swimming/floating like that. 

Looking down one of the public piers toward Treasure Island. 

After the aquarium we decided to get away from the very touristy Pier 39 area and take a bus up some seriously steep and curvy roads to Coit Tower which is at the top of Telegraph Hill. The tower itself was closed for renovations, but we were able to take in some awesome views of San Francisco.

At one point there was actually a signal for ships on this hill. 

Our little excursion to Coit Tower also led us to one of the coolest residential areas that we walked through in the city. The "streets" down the east side of Telegraph Hill were really just wooden walkways and stairs that you had to take to get to the homes. Huge trees were growing on the hill and completely shading the walkways and homes and there were gorgeous flowers everywhere. Then at the end of the walkway there was a very steep staircase going down to the next street. I just thought the area was so cool! It's definitely near the top of "places I'd love to live (but could never afford to) in San Francisco". haha So I guess my SF Travel Tip #3 is go to Coit Tower and walk down the hill through the neighborhood!

Joe really loved the little tower on this house. Also, that is the Bay Bridge in the background.  (Not to be confused with the Golden Gate, which I often did)

This is one of the walkway "streets" I was talking about. 

That little gate is someone's front entrance!

Stairs to the bottom of Telegraph Hill. 

(Don't worry, we're almost done with Day 2.) After we walked down the staircase from Telegraph Hill, we found ourselves in a little square by the Levi Strauss headquarters. We kept walking and made it back to the piers hoping to go to The Exploratorium which was another attraction included in the City Pass. The Exploratorium is basically a super fun, hands-on science museum. When we got there it ended up being only a couple hours before closing, but the person at the front desk told us we could come back that night from 6-10 for their adults only event. Basically it was for adults to run around the Exploratorium and play with all the exhibits with out the kids getting in the way :) Plus they'd be serving drinks. So we chose to come back later and headed out to do some quick shopping and get some dinner. I'll skip all the details (for once haha) and just tell you that we found dinner at a little hole in the wall place called Golden Boy Pizza which was in the Italian neighborhood and the pizza was awesome, and cheap! I had the clam, spinach and garlic pizza and was able to get one huge piece for only $3. SF Travel Tip #4 Use you smart phone to search for "affordable" or "cheap" restaurants in the area. Siri on my iphone helped us find Golden Boy Pizza :)

After dinner we dropped our shopping purchases off at the apartment and headed right back down to the Exploratorium. We had a ton of fun just walking around the place and playing with all the different exhibits. I think people who aren't nerdy engineers would even enjoy it :) Joe did get a little carried away with the circuit making station and I had to peel him away from there. We stayed right up until closing then took a bus and a cable car home.

Ok, so I know this picture doesn't look like anything special, but it was a huge concave mirror and when you stand in front of it and reach out, it was like your arm was coming right back out of the mirror and you could almost touch it. The best way I can describe it is trippy. 

This sculpture is made entirely of toothpicks! And it is still a work in progress. You can see the ping pong balls at the bottom. Those are there because there are actually several ping pong ball tracks built into the sculpture. It was pretty amazing. 

As you can see, Thursday was pretty packed for us so by the time we got home, we crashed. After all, we needed to rest up for our planned trip of biking across the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning! Two days is enough for this post though. If you even made it this far in the post, then thanks for sticking around.

P.s. We said goodbye to Mollie bear today. She was part of our family for over 15 years, and as far as I'm concerned she was pretty much the best dog ever. I love you Mollie! Here's a cute picture of her from a few years ago.

Joe's Picnic Table

Long time no post! We've been pretty busy around here lately. Between the last blog post and now, I don't think I hardly had a free night to blog! First, Joe and I went to Rolla for St. Pat's and it was just as much fun as I had hoped/remembered. Though it did make me wonder how we ever survived Rolla in the first place. As soon as we got home from Rolla, I packed my bags and headed back out the door for a week long work trip. My work trip consisted of driving around West Virginia and Kentucky. It was a bit of a mess trying to get to West Virginia in the first place because of a snow storm, but once we finally got there, the weather was beautiful. The best part of that trip for me was stumbling upon the Blenko Glass Factory and buying one of their signature pitchers. The guys I was traveling with kept giving me a hard time about being so excited about this pitcher, but ever since I saw a PBS special about Blenko Glass I've wanted one! Here's a link to what I'm talking about: Blenko Glass. (Prepare to be underwhelmed haha)

The same day I got back from Kentucky, we had some friends and family coming into town to visit for the night and the weekend. It was great to catch up with all of them and we even squeezed in some time to go bowling and do some shopping. Then Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights were spent preparing for our trip to San Francisco and for the baby shower that we hosted last night. Since we were only going to have 1 night between the baby shower and getting home from San Fran, I tried to do as much as possible before we left. Bright and early Wednesday morning we hopped on a plane to California! San Francisco was amazing and I will most likely be devoting 2 blog posts to it soon, so I won't talk about it too much now. This post is supposed to be about our awesome new deck table that Joe built!
 

I can take VERY little credit for this table. Beyond some help on finalizing the design and standing on pieces to hold them in place during the building process, Joe did all the work. Which is probably good because Joe is much more of a perfectionist than I am when it comes to these types of things and that's kind of important when building furniture haha. His attention to detail paid off because this thing is SOLID. We based the design off a very similar table at Restoration Hardware. Their version is over $5800!!! Granted, it's made out of teak and ours is cedar, but STILL. If I had that kind of money laying around to spend on a dining table, then well... I don't know what I'd do with it. :) Invest it or something. Our table cost a total of about $150.

Joe started the work on this table by making a model in Google Sketchup and making different variations of lengths, leg styles, and leg spacing until we found the one that was just right. We were able to use a lot of leftover lumber from building the deck, but we did still have to buy a few boards. You can see in the next few process pictures that pretty much all of the connections are made using pocket holes that we drilled using our Kreg Jig. Joe started by building both of the X end pieces. He used various clamps to hold them all together while attaching them with pocket screws.

Then he made the table top. He separated the boards with nails to get even spacing. Then he clamped them across the width and used cedar 1x4s to tie all the boards together across the underside of the table top. These connections weren't done with pocket screws, but were attached from the bottom side so there wouldn't be any fasteners visible from the top.

Once the table top and the two X ends were done, he laid the table top down with the bottom side up, and attached the 2 "X" ends with more pocket screws. Once those were attached he was able to add the cross bracing pieces.

The final part was to trim the ends of the the table top boards off so they're all even. To do this, Joe tacked a yard stick to the bottom side of the table top to use as a guide for his circular saw. This made it super easy to get a nice straight cut.

Overall Joe said it was pretty simple construction, but making all the angled cuts and attaching the angled pieces on the Xs were kind of tricky. He also had to make sure that the end pieces where perfectly square and level so that the table wouldn't wobble or be slanted. I'd say it turned out about as perfect as possible! I can't wait to get some good use out of this table this summer. I guess we first need some chairs though.

Well, that post got out of hand pretty quick. Stay tuned for picture overload from San Francisco! I hope you're all doing well and having a nice springtime! Thanks for reading!