So, How Did It Start?

We needed a getaway. That became clear as we got going on our trip. It seemed that the whole family was ready.

The drive to San Francisco got started a couple hours later than we had planned. C and I needed a bit more sleep before we felt safe to drive. We pulled away from the front of the house at about 6:15 on Saturday morning, and arrived in San Francisco at about 5pm. It was almost that uneventful.

We got some McDonald's breakfast in Cottage Grove, drove straight through almost to Sacramento before needing gas (that's a LONG haul), and made our approach on San Francisco from the north bay, so as to cross the Golden Gate into town. It all went without a hitch. C had built up a bunch of map references for us - Google Maps routes and addresses. We didn't have a AAA trip-tik for this trip and she felt out-of-the-know. What we did have was a new GPS for the car, a Garmin Nuvi 220. C was used to the less-than-helpful guidance our old GPS unit gave us. But slowly, steadily, as I used the Garmin to fill in the details she didn't have (and was stressing over), and used the Garmin's  POI add on feature (which I'd loaded with key points of interest to us) to dynamically keep us on track, she started to realize that this GPS unit  really DID make a difference.

The car managed everything just fine. This is our first official road trip in the '94 S320 Mercedes. It is abundantly clear to me that the initial owner(s) of this car pampered it to no end. That, coupled with the Mercedes tradition to over-engineer the S-class cars means that this scoot does NOT show it's age at all. We motored right along. In fact, at one point, I was doing between 75-80mph on open, straight, traffic-free interstate. C turned to me and said "This is a nice car. Rides really well. Why are you driving it slower than normal? Are you pampering it?" Of course, when I told her we were doing 80, she chuckled. We talked about how this car was designed for the autobahn, and that 80mph is hardly even stressing it. "This is a great road trip car, after all" she concluded.

We got an average mpg between 20mpg and 21mpg for the trip down. Looks like the mpg is creeping upward with every tank. We did better on the second tank than the first.

The San Francisco hotel was nice enough. On Lombard Street close in, it was a well-placed base for giving the kids a taste of the city. The GPS took us right to the driveway; now C was satisfied that we had a reliable electronic alternative. The hotel was a motel style, with room doors opening to the outside. The building was shaped like a courtyard, however, with car parking on the street level underneath the rooms. Nice and secure for inner SF. We unloaded, freshened up, and set off to see San Francisco in the afternoon.

First stop was Ghirardelli Square and Fisherman's Wharf. From there, we rode the cable car to Chinatown and had dinner. By the time we finished dinner, it was around 10 in the evening. Rather than futz with the bus home, we took a cab back to the hotel, and slept a tired, satisfied sleep.

Sunday morning turned out to be sunny and warm. We drove down the crooked part of Lombard, then doubled back to Fort Mason Center to have brunch at Greens restaurant.

The Brunch was just lovely. Greens is just as nice as it was twelve years ago. The view from our table was of the bay, and the Golden Gate bridge in the distance. Magnificent. I was a bit worried. In twelve years, did Greens improve or fall into a tailspin? Restaurants can change a lot in a decade, after all. For us, it was nice to see that they held steady over the long interval. It was like a step back in time for C and I...just as we remembered it. So that's what made it so poignant to be sitting there with our kids. Everything was the same in three dimensions, only the fourth dimension (time) had changed.

We finished with some trinket shopping in Chinatown, a banana split in Ghirardelli Square, then got out of town for Santa Cruz and Monterey.

The whole goal in stopping in Santa Cruz was to ride the Giant Dipper roller coaster. Built in 1924, of wood, on the beachfront boardwalk, it remains essentially unchanged. M was too short to ride, and C was unwilling. But R and I rode it a couple times. He said it was way different from anything else he'd ever ridden. And with that comment, I said to myself  "Well, then. Mission accomplished!"

M was struggling at Santa Cruz. She was too short for many of the rides. at 49 inches tall, she couldn't make the 50-inch cutoff for most of the thrill rides. Amazingly, though, the Double Shot ride - a reverse bungee cannon shot (like on the top of the Stratosphere in Las Vegas) had a 48 inch height requirement. M qualified. Even MORE amazingly , she wanted to go on the ride very much. Her older brother, however, refused to go. Said it was too scary. So M and I took the ride. As I got on, I called out to C "Hey, if I die, remember that the car has about a half-tank of gas. You'll need to fill up by Sacramento." She just laughed at me. As we waited in line, I turned to M and said, "You know what? With this laryngitis, when I scream like a little girl on this ride, nobody's going to know!" She thought that was a funny thing to say.

Well, the ride lived up to the anticipation. We rocketed up about 75 feet in just a couple seconds, then fell 50 feet just as fast. The launch caught M off guard and the acceleration slammed her face into the restraints. banging her nose pretty hard. The rest of the ride, she was calling out "I'm hurt, I'm hurt!" I was worried. At the end, though, she hopped off, announced that was awesome and then told me about banging her nose. R may have ridden all the roller coasters at Santa Cruz, but for the rest of the evening, M had bragging rights over her brother for doing something that he could have done but chose not to.

The drive to Monterey was at sunset. Nice. With the sunroof open and pleasant, we all felt relaxed and in harmony as a family.

More on Monterey in another post.