The Next Chapter in the Book . . .: Chapter 434

Happy 8th Birthday to our very own Payton!

Last week was our mid-winter break from school so my friend, Mary Lou, and I decided to go somewhere. Since I had such a great time with Kyanne in 2004 and Mary Lou had never been to San Francisco, we made our plans and set out to see what there was to see. I'll try to keep the captions short so you can just skim through.

We landed ourselves in San Francisco and found our way onto a monorail, our first of many styles public transportation we were about to experience.

We stayed in the same hotel that Kyanne found for us when we went to San Francisco in 2004. It is a cool old historic building and when I asked the clerk what year it was built she said "Sometime after the 1906 fire". Hmph. I could have figured that out myself.

We grabbed a hop-on-hop-off bus to take us across the Golden Gate Bridge. What wonderful weather we were having.

Albeit a bit nippy for Mary Lou on the top open deck of our bus.

Between loving the San Francisco sights, there was considerable whining on Mary Lou's part because, being a textile person, she was missing snow-dyeing fabric in our spring snow.

This is a sign I've never seen before but I'm sure we'll be seeing more and more of these as drone pilots get braver.

You can see the original old lighthouse down on the left built in 1856. It looks so dwarfed compared to the "newer" bridge.

Mary Lou and I decided to walk "a little ways" onto the bridge.

And soon found ourselves on the opposite side of the bridge looking toward the city and Bay Bridge.

All totalled, according to our Fitbits, we walked 40 miles in 4 days. That's the equivalent of walking to Lynnwood from my house! That's a lot of mileage for a couple of old ladies but we hung in there and lived to talk about it.

We walked far out onto a breakwater to the Wave Organ on our way into the city. The Wave Organ includes more than 20 pipes that extend down into the water of the Bay so the liquid music travels up the open pipes to welcoming ears. As you can see Mary Lou loved listening to the water gurgling in the pipes.

That's the Golden Gate bridge in the background that we walked across a couple of hours earlier. It didn't look that far away the day we walked that far!

At the waterfront, Fisherman's Wharf, we watched bread being made into crab shapes,

and sold for a LOT of money for a loaf of bread.

And a cool sculpture/topiary hybrid crab.

More whining from Mary Lou about missing the snow at home and how she's missing snow-dyeing the specially purchased fabric she bought just this occasion.

Then off to Lombard Street. Just what we needed. Something more to wear our shoes out.

Can you imagine living on Lombard Street? There is a garage at the apex of each turn in the road. The road was made this curvy because it was too steep for a straight road. To get this elite address and put up with tourists and traffic clogging every inch of your neighborhood, it will cost you a minimum of $5,000,000 for a 2,500 sq. ft. house (with single garage)!

Alcatraz was next on our bucket list. Since Kyanne doesn't do well on water, she sacrificed herself on our last trip so I could go. I appreciated that so was anxious to take Mary Lou on her first trip to The Rock. The water was calm ad the weather was great. You can see Alcatraz behind the begging seagull.

A good friend will bail you out of jail, a great friend will be sitting next to you saying "Damn that was fun!" This was the best of both worlds with freedom to walk out whenever we wanted.

The Golden Gate Bridge from Alcatraz.

One of the Alcatraz escapee cells. You can see the decoy head the prisoner left in his bed. In the center of the photo, you can see the hole in the wall the bad guy escaped through.

The Dragon Gate at Chinatown. We had to multi-task and grab a cache that was right by the gate while we were there. This place is a different culture and I feel kind of badly they are plagued with tourists just tromping through their daily routines.

A beautiful mural in Chinatown.

The Swan Bakery had a ton of beautiful pastries. I had this ham and squid ink roll. The dough of the roll was black. Not dark purple. BLACK.

This is the alley that the San Francisco Fortune Cookie Factory is on.

These 2 or 3 workers turn out 20,000 cookies every day and have been doing so since 1962.

Waverly Place is the main setting in Amy Tan's book "The Joy Luck Club" and has many temples built atop of day-to-day shops since using land to build temples was restricted for the Chinese.

Apparently eating in alleys is considered "ambiance" if you pay enough for your dinner.

Our ambiance included splitting a plate of green beans and chicken, and a fine bottle of ibuprofen while we rested our feet after out 12 miles of adventure this day.

The "Painted Ladies" houses featured in the TV show "Full House" that our kids enjoyed after their Friday night baths.

Painted Lady looking boats in the Fisherman's Wharf marina.

This is just one small area of the huge Britex fabric store we visited. They had everything!

A smiling Mary Lou as we set out to conquer street cars.

Several hours later a not so smiling Mary Lou after we nearly froze to death on said street car.

We rode on the running board a couple of times and I was sure I was going to get smashed by an errant rear view mirror and die an unceremonious death on the streets of San Francisco.

Not knowing there was a bus to get up to the Coit Tower, we walked up several steep hills and hundreds of stairs to get to it only to find it was closing. I'm glad I'd been working out at the gym because it definitely made all theose steps do-able.

The architecture of the tower is beautiful.

The view is even more beautifuler.

After a tricky trip home and many thanks to Erik for rescuing us from the airport, Mary Lou made it home in time to load up her bathtub with fabric, snow, and dye.