Brent & Jen go to San Francisco

Since we became parents 8 years ago, Brent and I have not taken a vacation by ourselves. We decided this summer was the time to do it since Audrey is getting big and Covid was getting better (or at least we have our vaccines). 

I wanted to go somewhere tropical and far away and relax on the beach for a week, but since I don't have a passport, we decided to go with Brent's idea of a vacation, which is to do as much sight seeing in a city as you can pack in :) 

Thank you to our moms who watched the kids, and Brent's dad who let us stay in the Worldmark condos in California. We had so much fun! I'm looking through these pictures and wishing we could go back and do it all over again.

We started out in Eugene and drove south to Windsor, which is north of San Francisco. It was about 8 hours. We had never driven south on I-5 this way and I really didn't like it- it was difficult and twisty roads for the couple hours between our house and the California border! We stopped at the Medford temple. The air was so thick with smoke from all the forest fires and it felt like someone was having a bonfire right at the temple. 

We made it to our condo in Windsor, which is a cute smallish town in the redwoods. We went out to dinner, went to the hot tub, and watched a movie in our condo.  It was so nice to be able to relax with no kids! The next morning we got up and drove toward the coast. On the way we passed where our friend Chris used to live. We text him for his old address and drove right up to his house, which was nestled among huge redwoods:

We got to the coast and were thoroughly entertained by a wedding happening right then, right there on the rocks overlooking the ocean. 

These pink flowers were everywhere in this whole area and looked fake!

We got to Bodega, which is where Hitchcock filmed "The Birds."

I got a really yummy crab sandwich at Spud Point Crab Company. It was so good and fresh, and I even talked Brent into trying a bite. 

The church and school house from the Birds.

Then we drove to Santa Rosa, which is where Charles Shulz, the creator of Snoopy was from. We looked around the gift shop and bought a few souvenirs, but didn't go inside the museum. 

Everywhere we went, we looked up movies that were filmed in that town. The house from Pollyanna was in Santa Rosa, so we went to see it! In the movie they digitally added a third floor, so I would never have picked this house out as being from the movie, but it was still cool to see since I love that movie. While we were at this house our realtor called us and told us that we had very little activity on our house that had been for sale for a couple days, and told us to consider lowering the price. We figured that our house wasn't going to sell within the next three days, but that was OK.

This is the house from Shadow of a Doubt, another Hitchcock movie. 

There were so many vineyards in the area, so of all of them to choose from, we went to Francis Ford Coppola's winery. It was so beautiful. 

We looked through the gift shop and saw things from his movies.

His Oscars:

The desk from The Godfather.

The view out the window of the vineyard:

That evening we went to Walmart and bought steaks and cooked them on the BBQ at the condo. It was so fun and yummy!

The next morning I woke up and couldn't find Brent. Then I knew where he had to be- the hot tub! He was chatting in there with another guy. I think Brent's favorite part of sitting in a hot tub is meeting all the people.

This is what the Windsor condo looked like:

We checked out of our hotel and drove an hour or so down to San Francisco. 

We went to the Walt Disney family museum and saw so many of his personal things the family has kept. The day flew by since we wanted to read everything. Pictured below is Walt's special Oscar for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Paint that the animators used:

There were a lot of cool memorabilia and stories.

The museum is at the Presido- beautiful buildings in San Francisco!

They had a special exhibit for the Disney Studios and WWII, so we saw that too. 

After the museum we drove to San Jose and saw the Winchester Mystery House. We didn't tour inside since we thought it was way too expensive. 

The house was the inspiration for the Haunted Mansion and has about 160 rooms. So crazy!

That evening we stayed at a hotel in San Jose and went out to dinner at Red Robin. Everything was so easy to do without kids! Go out to dinner whenever we wanted!

The next day we got up and went to the Henry Cowell redwoods park. This was one of my favorite things we did. It was so inspiring and peaceful to walk among the redwoods. This tree had rings that showed it was older than 2,000 years old. Brent is pointing to the year Christ was born- one of the most inside rings.

Can you see me raising my arms?

I thought this picture was so funny because it makes Brent look like a midget.

This park had a main grove of redwoods that you could loop around, and then you could go off to different trails out of the grove. The tallest tree in the park is about 275 feet tall!

One of the trees had been hollowed out from a wild fire, over a hundred years ago. The fire will travel along the roots and then burn the inside of the trees. Apparently in the early 1900s they used the inside of this tree as a honeymoon suite, and it had a bed and a furnace inside! The lady explained to us that as the years pass, the trees heal themselves, so in about 20 more years or so, the hole to get into the tree will be sealed up. Here's Brent and I inside a redwood tree.

Here's a video so you can get a sense of the park.

We hiked to a place called Cathedral Grove. This is what we saw when we looked up.

This was such a cool experience!

As we were hiking among the redwoods, I got service and our realtor called to tell us that we got an offer on our house! Our move to the new house was really going to happen!

It was really cloudy so we couldn't see Santa Cruz and the coast out there like you are supposed to from this lookout.

Beautiful forest- highly recommend! My phone showed that we walked 8.5 miles this day. 

After all of our hiking we were so hungry and went into Santa Cruz to get some Chinese food. On our way though, we were stopped at our green light by so many people on bikes. Then the people on bikes just kept coming and coming. For about 15 minutes we sat there as literally THOUSANDS of bikers went through the intersection. Apparently Santa Cruz was having an unofficial BMX bike convention. 

Once we finally got to a restaurant we had really yummy food and Brent was so happy to have Chinese.

Then Brent took me to the UC Santa Cruz campus, which is where he visited 5 years ago, when deciding where to go to graduate school. As we were touring around the campus (which is in the redwood forest) we spotted a coyote! I told him, good thing he chose Eugene, this campus was just so remote- it felt like summer camp.

We went to the beach at Santa Cruz and it was cool and rainy, but some people were still swimming!

We had the hardest time finding parking to walk along the dock because of all the thousands of bikers in town for the convention. We finally found a spot and walked along to see the sea lions. 

Bikers everywhere!

That night we drove to a small town San Juan Bautista (where the hotels had been cheaper) and checked into our Posada. It reminded me of Latin America and I loved it! 

The main thing in this town is the Mission (Catholic Church) which was built in 1812. We listened to a part of the mass from outside and the church and grounds were beautiful. 

Then we drove to Point Lobos State Natural Reserve. It was cloudy so I think the water would have looked prettier if the sun was out. Brent of course wanted to see everything, so we did the big 7 mile loop! 

They say you can explore the low tide pools and find starfish and stuff, but I think we were there at the wrong time of day. 

After our big hike, we got into our church clothes and went to church in Carmel. After that I got a delicious salmon burger which I ate while we looked at the ocean. Then we went into Carmel by the Sea and saw the cute cottages throughout the city. In the 1920s a toymaker built his wife a cottage to look like the fairytale cottage from the English countryside, and pretty soon the neighbors wanted him to do the same for them. There are 21 of these original cottages in the city, and rather than numbers for the address, the cottages have names.

Fables cottage.

Storybook cottage.

A video:

Both mine and Brent's phones died, but you get the idea- they were adorable!

After the cottages we had a couple hour drive up to Oakland. We got to the temple right at the time the sky starts getting pink, and it was gorgeous!

We spent a lot of time in the visitor center, which was a great way to end our Sunday.

On our way through Oakland and crossing over to San Francisco, we drove to the Pixar Studios. Too bad we can't go in!

Our hotel in San Francisco was right in the heart of the busyness and we had to park in a parking garage and be out of it by 9am if we didn't want to pay additional money. It was so crazy and busy in San Francisco, it kind of stressed me out! That night we walked to an Italian restaurant close by the hotel and it felt like we were in a movie like Return to Me or something. We had to show our vaccination cards in order to eat inside a restaurant in SF. We actually ended up taking our food back to our hotel to eat though. The food was so good, I keep thinking about that homemade pizza and pesto noodles, months later.

The next day we did all of the typical tourist things in San Francisco. We went to Coit Tower and looked around at the murals inside, but didn't pay to go all the way to the top (frugal people on vacation). We still had a great view of the city from where we were. 

Next we went to Lombard Street:

We went to the Golden Gate Bridge. When vacationing with Brent, this is a little snippet of what it's like. After this picture was taken, 

Jen: Wow, it's so beautiful. 

Brent: Yeah, let's walk across it now. 

Jen: What?! No! It's miles long! 

Brent: We can't come all the way to San Francisco and not walk on the Golden Gate Bridge. Let's at least walk part way across it. 

Jen: Fine, but only a short way because my legs HURT from hiking 16 miles in the last two days!

So we walked over to the bridge, which took a while in itself, and then started walking across the bridge, against the super crazy winds. I'm scared of heights, and this is pretty high above the water, so I was trying not to look down over the edge. Brent told me, we'll just get to the first tower and then turn around.

We got to the first tower and I shielded myself against the wind in this alcove. After this, Brent started continuing on the bridge and I was like, no! All done!! 

We went to the Sutro Baths which were in Harold & Maude. Brent bought a documentary about the Baths which we watched that night in the hotel.

It was super windy here!

We went to the Painted Ladies.

I thought these vaccination advertisements were interesting. We'll always remember we traveled during the pandemic!

The house from Full House.

The house from Mrs. Doubtfire. I was reading about the history of the house, and that the current person living there is a plastic surgeon. While we were looking at the house, a fancy lady walked out of the house and got into a fancy car and drove away. All the while Brent and I pretended like we just happened to be going on a walk in the neighborhood :) The streets in the neighborhood were SO steep! Brent was saying, I hope our little car can get up this hill! Luckily our gray car was a good car.

We walked around Fisherman's Wharf but didn't buy anything since it's all so expensive! We liked watching how the chocolate is made at Ghiradelli.

We kept seeing these interesting cars that have tons of cameras spinning around. See how this car has the large spinning camera on the top? I looked up the name of the car, WAYMO, and they're self-driving cars! I read that San Francisco is one of the test cities for these. There were people in the driver seats, but I am guessing they had it on the self-driving setting.

We went to get delicious Chinese food in the China district. Right across from the restaurant Brent noticed Cafe Zoetrope, with the production company, America Zoetrope right above it. This is Francis Ford Coppola's production Company and films like Godfather II and III were edited here.

On Tuesday morning we went to Alcatraz! I wasn't sure I wanted to go since I had already gone when I was a teenager, but it was so fun! 

Brent holding a key that unlocks the cells. We listened to the tour guide share a lot of stories before we went to do the audio tour.

The prisoner cells looked pretty awful to live in!

On the boat ride back I saw a shark or dolphin in the water! It was black and had a dorsal fin and was gone in a flash, but I most definitely saw it!

I told Brent I hadn't seen hardly any gay couples in San Francisco as I thought I would. He smiled and said we're going to go to the Castro district later today. The Castro was an experience! Brent went to take my picture with the rainbow crosswalk and he got a funny look on his face as he was taking my picture. Finally after a few seconds he put down the phone and said we're going to have to wait a few seconds to take your picture. Right then a man said "I think we photobombed your picture." I turned to look at the man and he was butt naked, with the exception of the tiniest piece of fabric on his front. His companion was also butt naked. I tried to not look shocked and look up at their eyes while these friendly men chatted with Brent and I for like 5 minutes! They asked all about Oregon, etc. After they left, Brent and I got a good laugh, looking through the pictures he had taken. In the pictures, the lady in the crosswalk next to them has the funniest double take reaction, and I'm just smiling at the camera, unaware of what's going on behind me.  I chose the least graphic picture to put in here!

After the Castro we went to the Presidio and tried to get into George Lucas' studio, Industrial Light and Magic. I had read they had some cool things in their lobby to look at, but sadly we couldn't walk around because of covid. So we looked through the windows like wannabe's and settled with a picture of the Yoda fountain out front.

We also saw a statue of the father of film.

Then we went to the Palace of Fine Arts that was built as part of the World Fair in 1915. It was amazing and huge! We liked reading and learning about the World Fair.

While we were walking around we saw a girl taking quincenera pictures in the fanciest dress ever. 

We went back to Fisherman's Wharf and watched the sea lions for a long time. There was one particular sea lion that seemed to be annoying all of the others, and they all kept kicking him off their dock. Then he'd jump up to a new dock and try to squish in with the sleeping sea lions and he'd start a fight there. We were laughing so hard watching their interactions!

That evening we ate all of our leftovers that we had accumulated. This was the view out our window:

The next morning we decided to ride the trolley because someone told us that during the month of August the trolley was free. Otherwise it's $8 per person! After we got our car out of the parking garage and found new parking spot for our car (which took forever) we hopped on the trolley and went down to the wharf. 

I had read that it was free National Parks day, so we went to the Maritime National Park and got to walk on 6 old ships from the late 1800s. Our favorite was this ferryboat from 1890 that had really old cars on it. This ferry was considered part of I-5 before the Golden Gate Bridge was built. 

We took the trolley back to our car and then Brent dropped me off at the airport and headed toward Oregon. He made it back home when I was still at my layover in Las Vegas! 

What a fun trip we had! We are so grateful for our moms who watched our kids so we could do this! It was so much fun being together and being able to talk and talk. After a whole week of being constantly together we weren't sick of each other! Brent sent me a text about an hour after he dropped me off at the airport and said he already missed me. I love him!