10 years

Jonathan and I celebrated our 10 year anniversary on the 9th of June.  We can still remember our long engagement of 3 1/2 years back in the 90s and feeling like our wedding day couldn't come soon enough! 

This year, our anniversary fell on Patch Night and, well, neither one of us wanted to miss out on that!  We each did our respective celebrating that night...

 The awesome ladies of the 433rd.

 Group pic on the big red party bus!

...and left early the next morning for a weekend in San Francisco!  Grammy came into town to watch the girls for patch night as well as our weekend. Granka came to join a couple of days later (and got Ava's puking virus, but that's another story).

Jonathan surprised me with a limo pick up at the airport.  We were walking to baggage claim and I was people watching like I normally do and noticed a man in a tuxedo and said out loud "that paper has your name on it".  Jonathan said "why yes it does!" and we left the airport in style.

We arrived at the Palace Hotel and were escorted to our Market St. view room, and a few moments later, one of my favorites arrived at our door!

YUM!

We put on our walking shoes (well I did...Jonathan's flip flops are his walking shoes, and his yard work shoes and his snow shoes) and headed out to see the town.  We ended up walking a LOT and a few hours into it, I wasn't feeling so hot.  We were a few miles from our hotel and I wasn't going to be able to make it back on foot.  We flagged down a pedi-cab and he biked us back to our hotel.  It was the best $20 I had spent all day.  That night, I also came down with a wonderful puking bug but felt a lot better the next morning.  

Like any other SF tourist, we purchased a pass for a few days of public transportation and hopped on a trolley!

After waiting in a looong line for almost an hour, we had great seats on the trolley we wanted (they go to different destinations).

We were driven up GIGANTIC hills and saw some pretty cool buildings. 

 The buildings there are stacked right on top of each other.

 

View of Alcatraz Island from Lombard St.

Us at Lombard Street...with a lot of other SF tourists.  It was hard to get a shot of this very windy street, so here is just us.

After the trolley made it to its destination, we had to disembark and decided to give it a whirl on the F line...a bus that runs from Fisherman's Wharf (all the shops and food along the bay) back to Market St., (which is where our hotel was located).  But first we walked out onto a pier and got some more pictures of course.

 Here is Ghirardelli Square-which supplied me with my first meal of the day since being sick...a delicious peanut butter and chocolate ice cream sundae.

It was slightly windy and you can see part of the Golden Gate bridge behind us.  Some nice ladies came up and offered to take our picture when they saw us holding our big camera to take pictures of ourselves.  We always oblige people who offer, but they can never take a good photo.  They seem to always focus on the wrong thing!  We should just start saying no!  But instead, we just delete it when they walk away.

The colorful F line buses.  We found out that the public transportation there was a lot like public health care...not everyone has to pay for it but they used it anyway!

The next day we toured Alcatraz Island, which we learned was more than just a prison at one point (was used in war, inhabited by Indians for 19 months and is now a safe haven for birds and plants), but we didn't care about any of that...we wanted to hear about the criminals and their lives there.

 Showers...I can only imagine...

 Broken down staircase.

 Come on in...

 GG Bridge

 Us again...just say no to strangers!

 Old Buildings.  We found out that families of the officers that worked on Alcatraz actually lived on the island as well.  Kids were boated across the 1 1/4 mile stretch of water to attend school in the city.

 Creepy little door.

Another view of the bridge from the island.

That evening we met up with Jonathan's cousin Tony and his fiancee Gwen who live in Walnut Grove, which is east of Oakland.  We took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) under the bay and popped out at a transit station where they picked us up and we went to see their home and then off to dinner.  It was our first time on any "subway" of any kind, but we didn't take any pictures.  We felt too dorky to do that.

This town is definitely more liberal than we are used to, and there was a lot of homeless people begging for money, beer and even weed!  We smelled marijuana on numerous occasions.  We were even approached by people representing Planned Parenthood (no less than 6 times) asking if we supported them.  The ACLU was also walking around and people were picketing all sorts of things...so CVS being non union, war, etc.  There were street performers of all kinds and even at night when we would go to bed, we could hear the guy on the street playing his saxophone for money.  That was actually kind of nice to hear!