san francisco

ive been wanting to go up to SF for a long long time now. sadly i never seem to be able to get out of town so i was counting down the days till we left and on last friday it almost didn't even happen.
since geoff pulled an all-nighter re amping the guitars for SG's latest i wanted to drive. once we hit the grapevine we hit some bad weather and my little toasters tires aren't made for snow. at first it was just a little snowflakes, nothing to wake him up about but within a few mins you couldn't see the road except for the trails the tires made and traffic started to slow a lot. weather.com let me down and i had to wake him up to drive us out of there.
i just wanted to get out of the car and play in thw snow on the side of the road in typical southern California fashion. Ive never seen snow fall so heavy like that before. so pretty and bittersweet really. we were worried they were going to shut down the highway for the day.
luckily they didn't.


after many pee stops, waiting for an hour just to cross the bay bridge, and parking garage confusion we were finally at the hotel. thanks to orbitz for the sweet deal, we got a nice lil 12' x 12' closet sized room in union square.
it was freaking freezing out that night and there were so many homeless people and well people in general. prime place for people watching.

the next morning we were up early (and by early i mean 10am) to do the touristy thing and go to Alcatraz.


i got scared by a bum hiding behind branches in fisherman's wharf. no, i did not tip him for that but others did.

we decided not to take a taxi or a cable car around town and would walk instead. we're adventurous like that. and cheap.
looking at our first hill, it must have been at a 40 degree angle, and geoff says, "last one up gets bitched slapped" and it was on.
view from the top



then we ran into the whindiest road

my favorite part of the weekend: we had no where we had to be and just relaxed and hung out and walked anywhere we wanted.



we ran into this cathedral my dear friend mike told me about, Grace Cathedral. so beautiful. we got there during the prayer hour and they had someone playing the organ and people were about to start their wedding ceremory on the side.


i love stained glass

they had labrythiths in the church too

couldnt go past the curtain. i found that odd.






something that i was also looking so forward to was going to the california academy of science new museum. i watched how they built it during the summer on tv and it looked amazing and i had to go see it. apparently thousands of other people had the same idea that Sunday morning. luckily we bought our tickets online so we skipped that line but the line to get in was wrapped around the whole building! and i hate crowds. more than hating crowds i hate crowds of KIDS. within 15mins of the museum opening all the tickets to the shows they had were taken and they had to close the doors because they were over capacity. luckily we cut in line and walked right in but its was a zoo in there.
this was as close as we got to the aquarium

the rain forest pod i didn't get to walk thru

the planetarium i didnt get to go in

but we did get on the roof

yeah, that's a roof.

that museum was a bummer but the whole trip was so much fun that it didn't even matter.
haven't laughed as much as i did on the ride home in a long time and my left leg and arm are freckled with bruises from playing "outta-state" for 6hrs.