San Francisco

A couple of year's ago D, E, and I took a great trip to San Francisco with N, H, & Ph. We stayed at the Nikko, a terrific, swanky hotel with a gigantic indoor atrium swimming pool where the kids played keep-away with whatever other kids happened to be in the pool for hours every evening.

By day, we touristed quite a bit. Here are E, Ph, and D in front of a tasty dim sum restaurant, one of the many we visited. This one, sadly, did not feature carts. Plates were just served up from a menu. Very weird.














At this point in time, as the eldest of the 3, D has the burden and delight of being group leader and most easily disgusted by overwhelmingly wild behavior he doesn't instigate. This was probably the first time D seemed seriously older than E & Ph. D had different interests, a different pace, would grow very tired of what he viewed as embarrassing and silly behavior. That said, it was not embarrassing or silly to sit in the passion chair at the Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum to see how, like, much of a hot ticket you are. Ditto posing in front of wax fugures at the Wax Museum (Hey! These are good museums!). I'll track down some of those pictures. They're really nice. We ended up at these crazy places on a really rainy day when we had planned to go to Alcatraz but the boat wasn't running and there we were at Fisherman's Terminal in the rain. And Ghirardelli Square is a mall and obviously of no interest, all weird polished rock and driftwood shops, and faux galleries.

At the Muir Woods, we play in trees. It's one of the first time the boys are wowed by nature. Or maybe it's the gift shop that gets to them. But they are willing to walk about for hours looking at trees and clovers and whatever we happen to see.