Hi, Everybody! Not much gardening going on, here. I get envious of the Fall garden pictures posted around the web--our Fall begins with rain and everything soon turns to brown mush. And, no, I am not going to memorialize the brown mush in blog photos. Instead, here are some cell phone snaps from our recent, Thanksgiving trip to the Bay Area.
Obaid loves In-N-Out (headquartered in Los Angeles, where we used to live, but unavailable in the Pacific Northwest) and I suspect he chose our hotel based on the fact that In-N-Out was our immediate neighbor. This important criterion aside, our hotel was well-located--just a block or so from Fisherman's Wharf.
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| Zachary is giving us the stink-eye. |
This was Zachary's first trip to the Bay Area, so we planned the sorts of sight-seeing adventures that would appeal to an almost-ten-year-old.
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| A colorful restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf. |
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| Tall ships at Hyde St. Pier. |
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| We chose not to buy tickets to tour the ships, but there were plenty of interactive displays available on the pier. |
We'd previously watched a TV Food Network show about the Boudin Sourdough bakery, so we made a special effort to see it "in real life". We ate lunch there, toured the bakery, and bought a couple of breads to take away.
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| A tiled entry mat at Boudin Bakery--Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco. |
The bakery makes specialty breads in a variety of decorative shapes--turtle, alligator, fish, crab, teddy bear, lobster, turkey, etc. We bought a couple of crabs to take with us to Thanksgiving dinner.
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| Shaped breads displayed at the factory tour. |
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| Bakery workers viewed from the tour catwalk. |
Zachary really wanted to go on the open-topped, double-decker bus tour. It was a good way to see the city and, had we planned differently, we could have bought two-day passes and hopped on and off at each destination around the city.
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| I enjoyed seeing the city from the slightly different perspective of the open-topped double-decker bus. |
Zachary's favorite part about the tour was that the lower-hanging street trees came inside the coach and would whack you if you weren't ready to duck.
This tree amused us--it was hung with over-large pine air fresheners. A local resident told us this was a neighborhood protest against the cooking smells (heavy, icky, fried food and super-yummy bbq smoke) issuing from several nearby restaurants.
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| Air-freshener tree. |
The tour crossed the golden gate bridge.
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| Golden Gate Bridge from the bus top. |
This utility vehicle (called a "Road Zipper") was the neatest thing! It picked-up and then replaced the road median to create two alternate-travel lanes. It was able to achieve this without interrupting traffic.
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| Road Zipper at work! |
On our last full day in the city, we went to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. It is a good natural history museum. We had lunch at a restaurant located just outside the park and Obaid and Zachary took photos at a small magic store.
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| Zachary and Obaid. The disco-y magician is funny, right? The rabbit's got some serious 'tude. |
At SFO (the San Francisco Airport), there was a display of flight attendant fashion through the years. This Pucci outfit was kinda eye-popping. Frankly, I think it's hideous and I wonder why they chose to go SO trendy?
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| Emilio Pucci uniform for Braniff International Airways. |
And now, safely back home in Seattle. Happy Holidays, everyone!
