San Francisco - Sunday/Monday

Sunday
We woke up early bus out to Fisherman's Wharf/ Alcatraz. It's a fairly quick ride to Alcatraz where you will be told hundreds of times that it is a National Park and to leave the birds alone.

Alcatraz is a touristy thing to do, but it is seriously awesome. The audio tour they have there totally makes it worth it. You walk around the prison listening to stories/the history from guards who worked there and prisoners who were inmates and people that lived on the island. It's like walking through a movie.

View on the way back to SF:

The dock on Alcatraz:

We got off the ferry back at the wharf and found out that we could see some of the people David taught on his mission (we tried to meet up with them on Saturday but lots of different things complicated it.) We ran to meet Sasa and Eric downtown.

We actually beat them to the meeting place by a few minutes, so we got to walk around this farmer's market with all these crazy stalls. There was a hummus one that looked good, lots of fruit and even a raw meat stall. When Sasa and Eric got here, we walked over to Japanese cherry blossom festival (which had a surprising lack of cherry blossoms!). There was a small parade with a few floats, and groups of people. One group was just lots of  people dressed up as cartoon/anime/videogame characters.

After the parade, we walked back to the downtown area and got some amazing Thai food. I think it was called King of Thai Noodle and it was right near Union Square. I got the lemongrass soup and it came in this HUGE bowl. It was so, so yummy. We had so much fun with Sasa and Eric - despite me knowing about 8 words in Chinese (except all the words to this song - go watch it; it has subtitles), we had a great time. I'm pretty sure we laughed all through lunch.

We met back with Laura and Andrew and their family at fisherman's wharf. We walked around the shops, saw the sea lions, and were the definition of tourists. Then we caught the F train back down to the financial district, and the mall where we bought our pre-dinner snack. (We take our food vacations seriously around here.) It was this HUGE piece of deep-dish pizza. One piece filled the 4 of us up.

Then we tried to walk to Chinatown to get another Quickly. We missed it again - we got there like 2 minutes after they closed. So sad. Then we saw the missionaries at the bus stop and David got to talk to them for awhile, which turned out to be better than getting a Quickly.

We walked to the bottom of Lombard St.

We went to dinner at Drabar Indian (polk and pierce). We got so much food. Lots of roti and naan and rice. It was really good food and it was really cheap. We were impressed. Everything was so good.

Monday
We got up early  to check out. When we went to return our hotel keys, we woke up the desk worker. He looked so out of it haha.  On our way back to Provo, we took a detour to Lake Tahoe.
SO incredibly gorgeous and so much bigger than I imagined. It was completely worth the hour detour.

We hopped back in the car to Reno for lunch. We ate at Grimaldi's. (In case you didn't know, it's my favorite.) Their pizzas are big. And we ate 3 of them. Every worker in the restaurant made a comment to us about how much pizza we ate. (We ordered regular, pepperoni, oven roasted red peppers. All were wonderful.)
On our way back to the freeway, we realized we were at outlet malls. So, of course we pulled back in and went to the adidas/nike stores.

Then back in the car, dinner at Mcdonalds, and home at 11:30 pm. It was a LONG day in the car.

I have a pedometer I wear with "goals" to meet each week. This past week it was 31,500 steps. After we got back from SF, I had 66,400. That's a LOT of walking.