California, Part 2

Thurs 9/17

We got up around 8 and prepared for the day. We got on the Powell St. cable car at the turn around and rode it a few blocks (just for the sake of riding a cable car) to Post St.

We were bad, and used our one-day MUNI passes for TWO days, ha! So we did get our money's worth at least! We then walked to the Avis car rental office, and got our car - a Nissan Altima!! It was a great car, actually, and I kind of miss it now. Anyway, we had a car and were on our way to Muir Woods! Holy crap, though, driving in San Francisco was SCARY. Until last week, I was unaware that people in CA don't stop at stop signs, so I had a very angry woman behind me screaming "GOOOOOO!" at every intersection. The stop lights are in weird locations and people will just walk right out in front of you. It was the craziest place I've ever driven.

Very pretty, though!

OK, so eventually we made to the freeway and drove across the Golden Gate Bridge!

After the bridge, we had to wait in stopped traffic for 20 or 30 minutes as someone flipped a camper trailer they were towing, and after a brief stop at Subway (where they have sourdough bread and avocado!), we made it to Muir Woods (coastal redwood forest).

The trees are huge and beautiful. We saw several deer as we walked around and took in the sights.

On our way out, we stopped in the gift shop/cafe for a few minutes, and here is a big difference between CA and FL that really makes me miss CA: this place was selling organic pastries (among other things), and out on the condiment bar, the ketchup was organic. Only in CA I guess. Or maybe Vermont, lol.

So, after that we left Muir Woods and headed back to SF to make our boat to Alcatraz. We came around a corner and saw the Golden Gate bridge draped in fog - an incredible sight.

Apparently the toll is $6. Good thing we had cash! We made it back to the Wharf and found a garage and paid an exorbitant amount of money to park the car. We got to Pier 33 and waited a few minutes in the stand-by line and then were allowed on the boat! It was a little cold and very windy on the ride out to Alcatraz but it was a beautiful day.

We got to the island around 3ish and started our explorations. It is such a gorgeous, amazing place and full of American history. The actual penitentiary can be a little creepy when you think about the things that happened there, but there is just so much more to the island than the prison.

We spent a few hours looking around at everything, and we did the cellblock audio tour and learned a lot about the penitentiary. Lots of crazy stuff happened there!

This is the view the prisoners had when they entered the recreation yard. I contest that at least they had a good view; Mark thought that made it worse.

This is the view from the front of the cellblock administration building. Not too shabby, though I'm sure it was a little different 60 years ago.

After several hours on "The Rock", we finally went back to San Francisco on the last boat of the evening. Visiting Alcatraz was definitely one of the highlights of our trip.

Once we were ashore, we retrieved our car and considered finding a few other places to check out, but we were really hungry, and it was getting dark, so we decided to go right to dinner. Originally I had made reservations at Sutro's at the Cliff House, but right before we left for CA I found another restaurant that seemed cool and wasn't quite as pricey. So we ate at Park Chow, which sounds kind of like an Asian restaurant, but it's actually a little, somewhat quirky cafe right by Golden Gate Park (hence Park). They have a lot of organic foods, including an all organic breakfast every morning, and packets of organic sugar on the tables, le sigh. For dinner I had a corn pudding, which was kind of like a cornbread casserole with this corn/vegetable/mushroom sauce on top. It was unique, and really good. For dessert, I had warm ginger cake with pumpkin ice cream - yum! After we ate, we drove up to Twin Peaks for a view of the whole city.

It was awesome. Eventually we made our way back downtown, and after about an hour, 6 or 7 wrong turns and major frustration, we made it to a parking garage right by the hotel. Parking at our hotel would have cost over $50 for the night. At this garage 2 blocks away, it was $6, as long we we got the car out by 8AM. Sold!!

Friday, 9/18

We got up at 7:30, got the car, found some Starbucks, finished packing and left the city to pick up Ji and Yuliana. After some major Tetris-ing of our luggage, we fit it all in the trunk of the Altima! We made a couple of pit stops at Ross, TJ Maxx and Trader Joe's (!) for supplies, and got on the road. Then we got off the road for some Subway. But then it was back on the road, and we were on our way to Yosemite!

Getting closer!

The drive to the mountains wasn't quite as scenic as expected, but once we started going up in elevation it was really cool. Actually, in some places, it was REALLY HOT. We stopped at a turnout and took a few pictures and I swear it was over 100 degrees.

Dear California: Please buy guardrails. Thanks.

And then we saw something that's foreign to Floridians: a sign that says "Next 5 miles, turn off air conditioning". So we did (though it was probably unnecessary), and UP we went. Around and around, sharp turns, and NO GUARDRAILS. By the time we got to a gas station I was feeling a bit anxious, but I powered through! We drove through Stanislaus National Forest and stopped at the Rim of the World Vista to take pictures.

Eventually we got to the guard booths, paid our fee, and we were in Yosemite National Park!

It was beautiful, but kind of a scary drive, what with the extreme lack of guardrails. The drive to the lodge took a lot longer than expected. Google said it was 4 hours, from San Francisco, but it was more like 6, not really counting our stops. Finally we got to Tenaya Lodge and checked in!

Hooray for free valet! Our room was really nice, and it better have been considering how much we paid for it!

We had dinner at the lodge at the Sierra restaurant. It was expensive, but good. We ordered drinks with dessert...and it turns out that I'm not a fan of hot cider with goldschlager. Gross! Anyway, after dinner I did stupid homework and then we went to bed early, as I would need to get up early to do MORE HOMEWORK!

To Be Continued, again!

California, Part 1

OK!

We are back from California (got back on Weds night actually, and have barely had a spare moment since then, what with working and school). We had an absolutely AMAZING time. It was so beautiful and we did SO MUCH in such a short span of time. And now it's time for a recap!

Tues, 9/15

On Tuesday I got up at 8AM, since we would need to get up at 3AM on Weds to make our flight. I figured I'd get up early, and go to bed at 9 or so and still manage to get some sleep. Unfortunately, that's not how it worked out. Tuesday afternoon I got my hair done and then went to the bank. Mark and I ran a couple of errands and then didn't get home til about 7pm. And uh oh - I still had to pack - and do laundry! Packing took a lot longer than I had expected, what with having to research carry-on guidelines, tracking things down, and packing my carry-on and regular suitcase. I didn't finish packing until 1AM. I then fell asleep around 2!

Weds, 9/16

After a year of planning, the day we had been waiting for had finally arrived! Woke up around 3AM, so I got approximately 1 hour of sleep. I had plenty of adrenaline though! I showered quickly and got dressed, and we were off to pick up Andra and Greg (bride and groom!). We were running a few minutes behind schedule and I was a little worried on the way to the airport, but being that it was 4:40 in the morning by the time we got there, waiting at security was a non-issue. Of course, I had Googled proper security protocols so I wouldn't look like an idiot when going through the line. Once we were cleared, we took the shuttle train to the terminal, stopped at Starbucks for some much needed caffeine, and got onto the plane with several minutes to spare! Now, this was my first time flying since 1997. I was a bit anxious and I had a prescription for Xanax if I needed it. I hadn't taken any yet, and actually it ended up in my carry-on in the overhead bin and I couldn't get to it. I started to feel really anxious as we made our approach to the runway (which took FOREVER!) and was trying really hard not to cry. I'm a freaking wimp. Anyway, once we were in the air, I felt better, and our plane had wi-fi (which we got for free!) so that distracted me pretty well on the flight up to Atlanta.

It really was a quick flight, and when we landed it was still dark. We made our way to our new gate at ATL (very big) and settled in for an almost-hour wait. I did take a tiny bit of Xanax during the layover - this next flight was almost 5 hours. We got on the plane and there wasn't much room left in the over head bins, and so Mark tried to put his computer bag in front of my feet. OMG. I couldn't move AT ALL and I was starting to freak out. I couldn't stand it and I made him move it out from in front of me. So he put it in front of him but there really wasn't room for it. Finally the random guy next to Mark said that he thought there was room left in the bin above us and he would put it up there. Thank god! I was able to calm down after that and it wasn't a bad flight. There were on-demand video screens on the back of every head rest, and this flight also had wifi (free with our promo code!). So we stayed pretty occupied, and I tried to do some homework but didn't accomplish much.

It was pretty cloudy over most of the southeast so I couldn't see the ground. I was trying to take a nap eventually, but I kept looking out the window every minutes, not wanting to miss anything. It was clouds, clouds, clouds, clouds...and then, ground!

And we were about to Colorado by then and we flew over the Rocky Mountains and then all sorts of mountains and plateaus and whatnot. It was so pretty.

I ended up listening to the whole 70-minute Soarin' queue loop while staring out the window. Very cool. The video screens in front of us had GPS that showed where we were, how fast we were going, and our altitude, and it was really cool to be able to look out the window and know where we were.

Eventually we got to California and watched as the scenery changed as we got near San Francisco. We landed around 10:30AM Pacific time, and were exhausted, but so excited!

San Francisco!

The bride and groom!

Our original plan was to take the BART train from the airport to our hotel, as the station was literally right in front of it. But then Andra and Greg offered to drive us there since they had to go into the city first before their trek out to Yosemite. So we found the airport shuttle train and made our way to the rental car center. Eventually, they got their car and we shoved 4 huge suitcases and multiple smaller bags into a Ford Focus and made our way into San Francisco. Thank god for GPS!! We got to our hotel around noonish and were able to check in right away, yay!! We were so tired as at that point we'd been up for about 30 hours on 1 hour of sleep. We went right to our room.

I showered off the plane contamination and then took a wonderful nap for about 2 hours. We had tickets for Alcatraz for 3:55. Oh, and we hadn't really eaten besides snacks on the plane, so we were starving. We found some food quickly and attempted to figure out San Francisco public transportation. It took a little longer than expected but finally we made it on to a streetcar headed towards Pier 33. We ended up missing our Alcatraz boat by about 5 minutes, so we exchanged our tickets for stand-by tickets for Thursday, and walked down to Pier 39.

We did some shopping and took some a ton of pictures. We saw the sea lions! So many sea lions!

We had a nice view of Alcatraz too.

We had a great time, even though it wasn't what we originally planned for our first day. Anyway, I had carefully researched restaurants for us before we left, and we had reservations for a nice restaurant near our hotel, but we were really tired and hungry and didn't feel like going to the hotel and changing and then going back out. So we decided to just pick a restaurant on the pier. We decided on Fog Harbor Fish House. As we were being seated, I stopped in my tracks. Sitting there, in a booth, in freaking San Francisco, is Mark's aunt and uncle (who live in Virginia)! I just stood there for a minute, looking at them, trying to make sure it was them. And Mark didn't even see them at first. Finally, we said "What's up guys?" and they finally looked up at us. Ohh, the shocked looks were fantastic. So, we ended up having dinner with them. As Dr. Horrible would say, "What a crazy random happenstance!". Our dinner was delicious - clam chowder in a fresh sourdough bread bowl. Oooh the sourdough. After dinner, we said goodbye to the relatives and made started on our trek back to the hotel.

View of the city from Pier 39

On the streetcar!

We got off the streetcar for a quick stop at Walgreens. They had tons of organic snacks there! And Vitamin Water was cheaper than in Florida - how is that possible? Such a shocker! Ha, anyway, we crashed really early and slept great.

To be continued!!!

Just a little bit crazy

I'm taking 2 classes right now for my MSN. Both are generally worthless and the assignments don't have much to do with actual nursing. But that's generally what a lot of nursing school is like (hello, care plans). Anyway, one class is on public health nursing, and we have to pick a "public health topic" and make some kind of teaching plan and brochure to educate people about the topic. One of the stipulations is that it has to be something basically unrelated to areas in which we have experience. So instead of picking something directly related to babies or women's health like I would have otherwise, I had to look into other topics. As I had recently been looking into different chemicals in soaps and whatnot, I settled on a topic about pesticides and other toxins and how to avoid them. So I did a little bit of research and now essentially I've gone a bit mad (even a bit more so than I was before). It would appear that there's a lot of stuff out there that's really bad for you. As far as produce, the biggest offenders in the pesticide department are peaches and apples. Apples!! Everything I was taught previously was that strawberries were the worst, not my beloved apples and everything that goes along with them - juice, sauce, butter, pie, etc. So now I've resolved to not eat apple products if they're not organic. Well doing this research lead me down a very slippery slope, which culminated in me going to the health food store and buying organic everything, $150 later. And then I drank a smoothie the color of pond scum. I think they called it a green splash. My husband calls it crazy.

The green smoothie was actually pretty good, and I felt fantastic for the rest of the day. Even pulled a 16 hour shift. So I sought out my own jar of green stuff. Did a bit of research and decided on this one:


Field of Greens. It's essentially a bunch of dehydrated grass. Delicious, dehydrated grass, and grass juices! I settled on this one as it was organic, and didn't have all the "extras" that some other greens mixes have. Not quite ready to hop on board with chlorella and spirulina. I'll stick with plain grass for now.

Cheers!

This time it's a good thing!

Acceptance!

On Sunday we were set up to look at about 4 or 5 houses. The first one was blah and the 2nd...oh my god. While square footage-wise it's smaller than we were hoping for, it's a 3/2 and the bedrooms and kitchen and closets and living room are of decent size and it's a good floorplan. Plus, it's a double lot with a giant fenced back yard with a deck and a mature orange tree. The roof is new, the A/C is new. It's completely tiled and in great condition. Block construction and a non-evacuation zone. We did not see the other homes we were planning to see that day. We stopped everything and put an offer in - a really good offer.

And today it was accepted!!!!!!

It's a short sale so we do still have to wait for the bank, but we offered over the list price so hopefully it looks like we are very serious. If everything goes as planned we will get our house!

Cute open kitchen with 2 bars!

I will be able to Twitter, "I'm sitting on the patio".

Orange tree!! And for some perspective, that fence back there is six feet tall!!