Sunday August 12th

Breakfast was IKEA sweet rolls, and we also stopped at a Trader Joes we’d discovered next to IKEA in Emeryville, a newer Atlantic Station-type development between Oakland and Berkeley.

In SF I found a parking place on the street, a block away from the downtown cable car turnaround, at Market and Powell streets near Union Square. The wait was about an hour, so Ceil checked out the Gap, and we chatted with the older couple from Dallas in line with us. We discovered all the cable car drivers each had unique personalities…they didn’t take kindly to line-cutters or double parked delivery vans blocking the tracks.

We rode uphill and got off at Chinatown, where we checked out groceries, gift shops, and restaurants (with dead chicken fryers for sale, with heads still attached). Many people were coming and going from small Chinatown churches.

We got back on a cable car and rode past the crooked block of Lombard Street, down to the other end of the line near Fisherman’s Wharf. Matthew was now deep into collecting “smashed pennies”, and we toured the old ships that were part of the National Maritime Park. Matthew and Anna did a few Junior Ranger activities, and Ceil had the same chowder/sourdough bread lunch.

Then we hopped an antique cable car on the F line, taking us south past all the other piers and back downtown. We got off downtown near Union Station and walked uphill several blocks, past the long line waiting to board the cable cars. There we hopped on a cablecar without waiting. We rode it up the hill to California Avenue, where we hopped off the north / south line. Then we caught the next cablecar headed west down California to the end of that line (where we didn’t see the nearby Whole Foods Market next to the trendy thrift store aptly named “Out of the Closet”). We stayed on the cablecar as it journeyed all the way back to the eastern endpoint. There we caught another antique cable car on the F line back to Fisherman’s Wharf, where we went inside the National Park’s Maritime Museum to collect the Junior Ranger badges.

The crowded F line quickly carried us back to our car, and we drove west through Haight-Ashbury (no hippies) to the massive Golden Gate Park and sun-drenched Pacific Ocean…a route further south than we’d previously ventured . For several days Anna had wanted to see the “Full House houses” and I finally looked it up…they were on Steiner Street. On the way out to Haight-Ashbury we crossed Steiner, and I was able to quickly locate the quaint row houses, across the street from a grassy park.

Worn out, we rode back across the Bay Bridge and cruised University Avenue, the main drag in Berkeley. We all enjoyed dinner across the street from our hotel at Chevy’s, a Mexican Restaurant similar to Rio Bravo. Fives days on our vacation, and things had gone smoothly and fun the entire time.

But our vacation was six days long!