During the last week of August, we took a short 4-day/3-night staycation up in San Francisco. We were so busy over the summer — we didn’t get our annual camping trip in and we had no plans to go anywhere else (aside from Los Angeles, of course!) — a local get-away was all we could muster!
We rented an absolutely wonderful 2-bedroom house with Heather, Assaf and Taliana near Haight/Ashbury and Golden Gate Park (and Rudolph Valentino’s ‘jewel box’ home!) up in the hills of SF.
We visited the zoo, walked to Golden Gate Park via Buena Vista Park and Haight/Ashbury, visited Chinatown, and ended the weekend with a birthday dinner at Millennium! It was all fantastic, but the playground day at Golden Gate Park was definitely a highlight!
Here are a few more photo highlights:
If there’s a train, of course, Dylan will be on it. This train was built in 1905 and now costs $4 per person (or something like that!) to ride. Once he saw the train, Dylan had more interest in riding it and being around it than he did with any of the zoo animals (forget about seeing the polar bear!). In fact, once their train ride was done, he wanted to ride it again so much that he chucked his flattened souvenir penny to the ground and claimed it was lost just so we could return to the train station to “get another one.”
We explained to him that a) if he tosses his stuff like that to intentionally lose it, it doesn’t mean we’re going to replace it, it just means he’s lost it; and b) we were not going back for another train ride.
Luckily, Taliana found it for him (and, of course, now it’s lost again…somewhere in our house!
Cameron loved the zoo, too. We stopped for lunch at the tables near the playground. Once she was on the ground, we couldn’t keep her near us! She is definitely an explorer…and she definitely loves flowers!
Here’s the group photo with the boys and HAT. Tom is making monkey noises!
Here’s the other group photo with Cameron and me.
She still fits in the Ergo! And, this reminds me: we saw a mama kangaroo with a joey in her pocket!!! There was also a new baby gorilla being raised by its adoptive mother.
Completely unrelated to baby animals, we also learned a few animal facts: giraffes have 18″ tongues that are purple; polar bears have purple tongues, too; anteaters flick their tongues an extraordinary number of times per minute; seals can stay under water for 4 minutes…and so much more I cannot remember.
We rode the carousel in Golden Gate Park (and saw a Yuba Mundo and a box bike!)….
Cameron rode, too. She likes riding more than Dylan does!
The kids made it to a late-ish dinner at Millennium! They had fried potatoes, thyme-roasted carrots, and brown rice and we all sampled some pretty amazing desserts…a fitting end to a great weekend!
And, finally, here is a view from the balcony. To the other side, is Ocean Beach, but I didn’t get a good shot of it (too hazy)!
