Landed

Lara has very generously offered to loan us her car for our trip. A boon for us (although the much beloved volvo is sadly a bit ghetto these days after an untimely meeting with another automobile, rendering the rear left door unopenable and resulting in a worrying grinding noise when going over bumps. Plus... the breaks squeal alarmingly, the tires are bald, the sun roof doesn't work, the a/c is broken, and using the car requires buying a carrier to go on top to hold our camping stuff. But still). Renting a car big enough to hold everything we need for our camping trip would require a $600 mini van rental. The fact that the car is technically a salvage vehicle doesn't bother me at all. Nuh-unh. Free ghetto volvo or $600 pristine mini van with air-conditioning and ample space. Free volvo.

One of the stipulations of the loan, however, is that Lara needs to use her car tomorrow for a doctor's appointment, and next Wednesday she needs to present it at the dmv to sort out its post-accident status in some mysterious way. Fortunately our plans are all too new to be written in stone, and we decided to spend the day in San Francisco while we wait for our stuff to arrive from Amazon.

While driving into the city we whipped out our guidebook, and decided that we would head to a point where we could hop onto one of the ever so famous San Francisco cable cars with the kids. We ended up parking under city hall, and did the following:
1. Ate falafels and sweet potato fries from a great food cart in front of city hall;
2. Used the very high-tech public bathroom buildings (a hit with the kids);
3. Hopped on the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf;
4. Sampled some sourdough;
5. Used the cool art deco bathrooms above the Boudin Bakery;
6. Took a boat tour around Alcatraz;
7. Found the bathrooms again;
8. Wandered through a spy supplies shop (BIG hit with John);
9. Took a street car back to the parking garage; and
10. Cruised through the massive public library (to find the bathrooms of course).

The day was fun. The kids had a blast. San Francisco was lovely, and I think we saw every public restroom in the city. John very much wishes that the San Francisco library was his hometown branch. He looked up at the building and said "Wait, you mean this whole huge building is one library? Wow, they must have every book I could ever want to read!" Nothing like a bit of travel to make one's own life look dinky.

The falafel truck:


Grace chomping on her falafel with the weird sycamore trees around here in the background:


On the cable car:


The kids (on the cable car):


Alcatraz: