Day 2 - Anniversary Trip

Shell Vacations Club

These are the guys who allowed us to have a great dinner Sunday night... Shell Vacations Club. If you have never been to a timeshare presentation, I suggest you do one to get the experience. Plus a lot of them offer great packages along with the free gifts and stuff. However, allot a lot of time because they say the presentation is about 90 minutes. An d they are right. After the presentation, however, is when you start adding time with the negotiations for buying into the timeshare.

These guys had some good property, but it isn't our time to buy one right now.

Here's the restaurant where we ate with our $75 voucher - The Franciscan Seafood and Crab. Excellent seafood. La had seafood cioppino soup and then prime rib. I had a clam chowder soup (don't mistake this for New England Clam Chowder, which is better) the surf and turf (fillet mignon and tiger prawns). I topped mine off with a chocolate mouse dessert.

The menu in the restaurant was a book! This was a good thing because each dish had a picture, description and the recipe. They sold it for $7 if you wanted to keep one. After rolling ourselves out to go back to the hotel, we forgot all about it.

Hop On - Off Bus Tour
Monday morning was the start of our first full day in San Francisco. There was a little "whole in the wall" restaurant we picked up a hearty breakfast of french toast, eggs, toast, hashbrowns and fresh fruit. These guys really piled it on.

For us, I guess everything starts at Pier 39. This is where we jumped on the bus that was a part of our free City Sightseeing bus --> Hop On - Hop Off (compliments of Shell Vacations Club). For two days we were able to ride these buses all over the city. Just hop off where you want to walk around and every 30 minutes another bus comes by the stop for you to Hop On.

Now, La didn't bring her laptop, but she spent quite a bit of time on her crackberry.

I guess La wanted to show me taking a power nap during one of the bus' stops.
Nice Shots From Downtown San Francisco

This was some interesting artwork on the top of a building. Its a sculpture of a lady laying down. Do you see it?

The interesting thing about this dome is that they used real gold for the trim.





First Stop... Chinatown

We decided to do a little pavement beating and Hopped Off our bus in Chinatown. From watching the movies, you would would think this place was humongously large, but it seemed quite small to us. I loved the entrance.
Everywhere that served sushi, La checked out the menu.
We figured we would spend time with a few locals... monkeying around.

Speak no evil, think no evil, see no evil and hear no evil.

Back to Pier 39
Pier 39 is a great place for adventure, shopping and entertainment. So we made a bee line back to it where I decided to see how heavy one of those ship docking chains was.
Three links are enough for me.
I guess one link was enough for La.
Like kids, we had fun in the mechanical museum near the submarine and Liberty ship.

Here's a self portrait!


A great view of the activity.
All this adventure started making us hungry. So we decided to have a healthy snack of fresh fruit. La loved the size of these figs. Aren't figs a natural laxative?
Again on the phone ;-)
We didn't think about it until we had picked everything we wanted, but there were no prices at the fruit. Our little fruit adventure turned out to be a $15 meal! See all that we got... a few grapes (large and very small), figs, peaches (which turned out not to be sweet), and strawberries.




Very small grapes. I think I had about one or two berries. La ate the rest before I knew it.
A 17 mm (24 mm with DX conversion) lens and a closest object focus comes in handy for quick self portraits.
La wanted me to take the picture over so she could open her eyes. I really couldn't tell the difference except her eyebrows went up.
La found a guy with a large camera and figured he knew how to work mine to get a full body shot of us. Most people look puzzled when I have to explain the two finger focus I have set up on m camera.
Entertainment at Pier 39

The seals are a great attraction at Pier 39. Their playful or harsh actions (depending on how you see it) are entertaining. People lined the rails for hours just watching these guys. Like rubbernecking an accident while driving, we made our way through the crowd to get a few zoomed in pictures. No, we really aren't that close to these guys. They look fun, but I guess these guys can be pretty rough.



Now this guy was funny. He was a juggler who drew a crowd. One of the funnier things was that he was constantly pulling up his pants. He may have needed both a belt and suspenders.
This was a great trick where he sat four guys down and had them leaning on each other. Then he pulled out al of the chairs and all of the guys were still with butts in the air without falling. He had to lean in and help them down so they could get up. Try this at one of your next parties ;-)

The Famous Lombard Street

Lombard Street is a must see!

After our Pier 39 Adventure, we noticed we were a little short on cash and decided to walk to our nearest bank branch office. I typed it up on my iPhone and it said 1.1. miles. No sweat until we started our journey and discovered that this included a constant uphill hike. La had flashbacks of our biking tour in Punta Cona. Ask her about it sometime.

After making our withdrawal, we took the scenic route through the city and came across Lombard Street (of course from the bottom of the hill).


I guess this is a great idea if you don't want to come back to you car and discover that it rolled down the hill.
From the top of the hill, you can see how Lombard Street has a zig-zag pattern to help slow cars down.
This picture is actually of us at the top of the hill looking down. You made it La! It was funny to see a few people walking backwards up the hill so they didn't get depressed seeing the constant and steep up cline. I wonder how much the houses up her go for. The view is great.
On our trip downhill.

Ghirardelli Square - Chocolate Lovers Only Please

Ghirardelli Square is a chocolate lover's dream place next to Hershey (where I would like to visit). There are other shops there like food, wine, and apparel, but the main attraction is the chocolate.

I have another crackberry sighting... ;-)
As you can see, I had to try one out. I'll bring the rest home so my boys can help dad savor the delicacies.