I think I am more than a month behind on this blog now, I have not finished our Independence Day road trip report and now it's already coming up to Memorial Day (which we will no longer be here for, but instead we will be back in Malaysia to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Malaysia's independence!).So let me catch up with San Francisco - we stayed at the Hyatt Embarcadero because they had an Independence Day special deal and somehow the advertising implied that we could view the fireworks directly from the hotel. So it was a bit of a letdown when I checked in and they said that we would have to go to Fisherman's Wharf to see the fireworks. The room itself was nice for the price, and the hotel is very well located just by the Ferry Building and a cable car end station. We checked in around 5pm and started going to Fisherman's Wharf at 7pm. Good as SF's public transport is, it is not baby friendly. Strollers have to be folded up and there is usually standing room only in the trams and cable cars. It was pretty stressful trying to get on and off the trams carrying Lucas in one arm and a folded up stroller plus all his gear in the other arm, trying to find the correct change and having other people push by at the same time. We made it to Pier 39 in one piece, but there was a free rock concert going on right outside the Hard Rock Cafe and the crowd was building up. We had a quick dinner at Hard Rock (went to the front of the queue with my All Access card!) and by the time we came out at 8:45pm the crowd was so packed that it was almost impossible to move. We then decided that it would not make sense to stay for the fireworks with Lucas (everyone must have thought we were out of our minds to bring a baby there!).
Walking back to the hotel was fairly smooth as everyone was already at Fisherman's Wharf. We did in the end catch the fireworks from across a large parking lot near the hotel. I think we probably saw more of it than we would have from Fisherman's Wharf, since there were no crowds at the parking lot!
The next day we took the cable car to Chinatown - it was a smooth ride as we got on at the first station and it was relatively early in the morning. San Francisco has the largest Chinatown in America, and it was great having authentic Chinese food at reasonable prices again. I took the opportunity to get a haircut with shampoo for $10 ($6 for just the haircut, even cheaper than my haircut in KL!). Lucas also had his first haircut, which he was not impressed with. After Chinatown we tried to take the cable car again but by this time we had to wait about half an hour as all the cars passing by were packed. When we got to the end of the line we saw that there was a massive queue to take the cable car going up Russian hill (the steepest part of the line with a nice view, so very popular with tourists) so we decided to just walk back from Fisherman's Wharf (again) to our hotel. We went to the Ferry Building at about 8pm to try and get a nice dinner but all the shops and most of the restaurants had already closed. So apart from a couple of cable car rides and Chinatown, we did not really do much on this day. We ended up getting a sandwich from Subway for dinner - none of the restaurants near the Ferry Building are open for dinner, I guess they cater only for the office crowd.
Our final day in SF we drove to the Presidio and walked all the way to the Golden Gate bridge. That was very pleasant although it was cold and foggy - 59 Fahrenheit (15 Celsius) at noon! No wonder Mark Twain said that the coldest winter day he ever experienced was a San Francisco July day! However Lucas was very happy - he likes being outdoors and he is more into cold weather than warm. The fog never lifted high enough for us to see the whole bridge, but what we could see of it was very impressive.
We then started on the long drive back to LA - it took us about 7 hours as there was quite a bit of traffic leaving the Bay Area. What was interesting was seeing the outside temperature climb from 59F (15C) to 110F (43C) within a distance of 50 miles! We had to make a stop at a place where it was 105F and I don't think I could last very long in that heat. Las Vegas was over 110F that entire week, hitting 116F on a couple of days so I was glad that we decided to travel to the coast instead of Vegas.
We arrived back in Pasadena at around 10pm (and a very comfortable 71F!) and that was all in all a very enjoyable trip. It gave us confidence that we could have an enjoyable extended trip with Lucas as long as we plan ahead a little and we are flexible when conditions change. So watch out for more family trip reports soon!
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