Trip Report ~ Day One, Part One

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Well, here we go.

4 a.m. was here before we knew it. I got up quickly and got ready. My parents wanted me to wake them up so I knocked on their door. Within a few minutes I was all set to go in my comfy plane clothes and had tucked all my last minute items into my bags. I didn't want to eat anything so early in the morning, so we just sat down on the couch and waited for our town car to arrive.

Now, the previous day I was nervous about the weather for that morning. I kept checking it obsessively because they were talking about freezing rain. But I wasn't worrying about it too much because I figured by the time we had to leave it would be too warm to be icy. Before I fell asleep the night before I could hear the 'clink clink' of the freezing rain on the windows...which made me nervous. But by morning the roads were fine, and the freezing rain had turned over to plain old rain.

Within a few minutes our car arrived (nice and early!) so we said good-bye to my parents, loaded our bags into the car and started the hour ride to JFK. It was raining all the way but the roads were fine. It was a nice, smooth ride. When we got there we unloaded our bags and started looking around for where we could check our one bag, since there was no curbside check-in.

There were counters for several different airlines, and some of them were crowded, so I was a little nervous. We started looking for Virgin America, and ended up walking all the way down in the opposite direction! Anyway, we eventually found it and got on the really short line for bag check only. We checked our one bag (I had pre-paid for it and we already had our boarding passes) and headed down to security. There was a little line, but we got through it pretty quickly. Then we just waited for the plane to board.

They loaded the plane and we ended up taking off a little late. I watched Home Alone and some other shows. Somewhere over Nebraska we lost TV signal so I listened to some podcasts. There was no free food (but I did get a free water) so we just ate some of the snacks we brought. It was a pretty uneventful flight, and it wasn't as bad as I had imagined a cross country flight to be. Especially since they told us the flight wouldn't be as long as it usually was because the headwinds weren't as strong.

Here's a compilation of some video I took on the flight:







Once we got the airport, I was kind of in shock. After so many years of waiting, I was finally in California! We had left at 7 am EST and we arrived at about 9:30 PST. So it was about a 5 1/2 hour flight. We made our way to the baggage claim area - which was kind of strange. It was this huge room with no windows and one huge baggage carousel. It was like a closet! Anyway, we started waiting for our bag, and once they started coming, some idiot jumped on the carousel to get his skis, so the whole thing stopped and we had to wait for them to restart it. Thanks, asshole! But we finally got our bags, and headed out to the taxi stands by following the helpful airport signs.

We got in a cab right away. And the cab ride, was, well...interesting. If by interesting I mean FEARED FOR MY LIFE. It was so bumpy, and the guy was rude, and well, we'll get to it more than a minute. The important thing is we arrived at our hotel safe and sound. We were staying at the Holiday Inn Fisherman's Wharf. I was happy our room was ready. So we went upstairs, and dumped our stuff.

And here's a video where we describe our cab ride, and you can see our room:

Me in the doorway of our room.

So, since we hadn't eaten anything but snacks all day, we were pretty hungry. We didn't feel like wandering around, so we just went to the nearby Denny's that we referenced in the previous video. It was a really quick meal - I had pancakes and they were fine. Brian probably had chicken fingers.

After our meal, we decided to walk around for a bit. It was about 50 degrees in San Francisco, and for some reason on this particular day I was not finding it cold at all. We started to walk down near the Bay, just soaking in the new scenery. I knew San Francisco was hilly, but I didn't realize just HOW hilly until I saw it for myself.

Brian snapped this picture on our walk down.


Anyway, as we were walking along, I had a vague idea of where I was going, so I wasn't too surprised when we ran across this...

Ghirardelli Square! I love this shot. It looks like a post card.

So we headed up the hill (you're always heading up or down a hill in San Francsico) towards Ghirardelli Square and started to explore.

Hill! See! That's Alcatraz back there. This was taken from the upper part of the Square.

Christmas Tree in the Square. We had to wait for some other people to take a picture first and they took forever! How long does it take to snap a picture? Anyway, even though Christmas was just the day before, it already seemed like kind of a long time ago by this point. You can also see I'm wearing gloves in this picture - it was chilly, but I wasn't cold enough for a jacket. This is important to remember later!

A fountain in the Square.

Ghirardelli Square got its name because it was once a factory for Ghirardelli. Now it's a bunch of shops, restaurants and several (yes, several) Ghirardelli stores. Plus I'm pretty sure they were building condos in there or something.

So we just walked around and explored. There was this pet shop selling all manner of dog outfits and collars. A doggie boutique. Nothing we'd buy for our dogs! We also went into a store selling extremely expensive soaps and bath products.

After that we ran across this place called Kara's cupcakes which kind of reminded us of Crumb's Bakery, but the cupcakes were not as huge. They were, however, quite expensive - they cost $3.50! But they were all natural ingredients. And we're a sucker for cupcakes. So we bought some vanilla thing with a chocolate reindeer on top. It was good.

After our cupcake, we went into one of the many Ghirardelli stores and were handed a sample of their peppermint bark. Mmm... Peppermint bark... That stuff is good! They were having a sale on some of their products, and I'm a sucker for chocolate, so I started buying stuff, including a chocolate bar for my dad and a huge bag of assorted chocolates for me. (I'm still working my way through the bag.) There was also this cute little cable car tin filled with chocolate, but I didn't buy it. When I went to pay, they offered me this nice looking Ghirardelli logo reuseable shopping bag, so I bought that too. It actually came in handy during our trip.

So yeah, I've been in San Francisco for only a couple of hours and I've already bought souvenirs.

Ghirardelli is also famous for their ice cream, but we were too full to enjoy any of it now. We said we'd come back. Spoiler alert - we never did. :(

I kind of wanted to find Lombard Street - one of the several touristy places in San Francisco I totally had to see. I tried using the map on my iPhone, but I wasn't totally sure where we were going and didn't want to get totally lost, so after venturing up another hill (of course) we decided to head back down to the bay.

We wound up wandering around a pier where there were a bunch of historic ships. We didn't want to pay money to go on any of the ships (I'm not really into that kind of thing) but we explored the Hyde St. Pier and I was horrified by the people swimming the San Francisco Bay. I could not see how it was at all warm/clean enough to swim in. We made some East River jokes, checked out a souvenir shop, and then started to head back to our hotel. We were heading out to the San Francisco suburbs to see my friend Emily in a bit and I wanted to freshen up and get myself organized before we caught the BART train.

Here's a quick movie that shows our exploits at Ghirardelli Square and down by the historical ships (it bounces around because I just made a huge movie out of all the videos):




On our way back, we stopped in that Spy shop I posted a picture of earlier. Wow - did they have a lot of weird stuff in there! There were hidden cameras, weapons, books that had cameras in them and a whole bunch of these creepy powders you could use to ruin somebody's car or make them sick, among other things. It was interesting, to say the least.

We didn't buy anything, and retreated back to our hotel room to get ready for our evening.

And I want to let everyone know that my Flip video camera takes better video than YouTube leads you to believe. The upload quality is not as good as the actual quality.


COMING UP...

What MUNI really stands for...
A Rainy Tour
Brian Takes On A Quest