I love that I’m 48 and still get birthday money from my generous parents. I opened the hopeful envelope and got myself right down to a posh urban trek store that carries only European-made footwear. I fell in love with several options and took these hand-knit-socks-from-happy-sheep-inspired side-zip boots, because, you know, boot laces should only be decorative. And yes, I think I just wrote an entire poncy paragraph saying that I bought cute adventure boots with money my parents slipped me because, 48 years and nine months ago, they had sex for the first, and second to last time. Possibly.
And why did I need adventure boots? Because months ago, I booked the five of us a trip down to San Francisco, on the notion that 1) it’s my 3-day birthday weekend and Mama adventures on her birthday and 2) I wanted to tiptoe back into traveling with the kids, seeing if they have recovered enough from The Big Trip so that we could adventure domestically and explore iconic American cities.
Spoiler? The answer is no.
No, we can’t. However, we did have some highlights when everyone was enjoying themselves. Friday was a trip to Alcatraz and the audio tour was really interesting, and all the kids bought wanted books on the different escape attempts from the gift shop.
I was also able to demonstrate to my kids that I can be gobsmacked by new information. I had been to Alcatraz as young adult but I had never heard of the “Red Occupation” of the island 50 years ago. It was pretty interesting.
After Alcatraz and lunch, we convinced the kids that we should walk the long way back to the apartment by way of Ghiradelli Square, which was definitely NOT a place designed solely around chocolate. As Dwayne articulated later, if we had said over lunch, let’s go wander around for 3 hours before we head back to the rental, there would have been an uprising. But meandering down Pier 39 and checking out all the street performers, shops, highly caloric food offerings, sea lions–the whole carnival atmosphere on a reasonably warm day–before getting sundaes at Ghiradelli was a fun, un-whiney way to take a very long walk back to the Wifi. It was delightful and we had mostly convinced all five of us that traveling together is something we should keep doing.
Fortunately, Saturday arrived in time to prove us idiots.
It wasn’t all bad. Dwayne and I got a few hours at the Japanese Garden in Golden Gate Park–a huge green spot on the map that needs much more exploration.
We got to meet up with some of our favorite people to climb Coit Tower and have a disappointing walk-through of Chinatown and failed trolley attempts, which I had foolishly deemed iconic and necessary for this trip. Wes held it together only because Piper fell so apart so stupendously. I don’t think we’ll be able to go to NYC this spring. Sigh.
We recovered in time to have a delightful Sunday morning before flying home. Dwayne took the girls to the small aquarium on the pier, and Wes and I did some VR exploration, zombie shooting, and an obstacle course–I like how we like to play together. Now, in 30 years, my kids can revisit SF and regret trying to adventure with their kids. And then I will buy them a drink and we will compare notes.
Needopedia 