Thursday we really wanted to go and see the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, so we bought tickets online for the last tour at 6pm and hurried right over after Jeff finished work.
This house is absolutely fascinating, as is the tortured woman who spent her massive fortune building it. I think that if I were to try and tell you all the ins and outs and ghost stories, about the intricate wood floors, stained glass windows, and cabinet work, I could spend my entire day doing it. So instead, I highly recommend you go check out the "Learn" section of the Winchester Mansion website.
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| They only allow tourists to take pictures of the outside of the house, so this is one of the few we could snag. Also, it was FREEZING!! |
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| His hair is getting too long! |
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| I love this silly man!! |
So I've started wearing more dresses, since I think they help me look a bit smaller, and they're SUPER comfortable! I'm so stoked that maxi dresses are a huge trend right now, because it makes them that much easier to find and inexpensive! So I currently own 2, but I ordered 2 more from Oldnavy.com which should be here....in a million years. I got free shipping, but the free shipping only applied to the 7-9 business day shipping, so...it'll be a little while before I see those dresses.
Back to the trip. Friday after work, we drove up to see an Oakland A's game, since we both thought that would be really fun to do. We both really like watching live baseball games at the stadium, but have only been to two together-Atlanta Braves in 2010 and the A's in 2012. The A's aren't such a great team, but the game was pretty fun. I was pretty darn cold, and constantly avoiding peeps spilling their beer all over the place, but still. Fun fun. :)
Saturday morning we packed up, left our hotel, stopped by Safeway for some breakfast (the free breakfast at the hotel consisted of bacon, eggs, hash browns, toast, pancakes and cereal, and that got old after 2 days) then left for San Francisco!
Fortunately for us, my sister was visiting San Francisco on her spring break, and was willing to take us around on a driving tour in the few hours we had before we had to return our rental car and fly out. My sister, Karren, has been to S.F. numerous times and knows the city pretty darn well. We were really lucky she was there at the same time we were!
We drove over to the Golden Gate Bridge (which, Jeff reminded me, is painted "Rawlins Red". This matters to Jeff because his hometown is Rawlins, WY. This is their only real claim to fame) and Jeff shot some pictures from the backseat of the rental car, since we couldn't find any parking to actually get out and look at the bridge.
We also hit up Lombard Street, which was alternately terrifying and fun. The hill just on the other side of the famous, curved stretch of Lombard was the steepest hill I've ever driven on. I looked it up, and the curved side has a 27 degree angle slope, which was why they curved the road in the first place (too dangerous for cars to be driving down!), so the one that we drove up to approach the curvy section probably wasn't the exact same slope, but pretty darn close to it. It was so scary to be stopped behind a few cars on that slope, waiting to be able to get past the stop sign and level out. I had to tell my sister and Jeff to keep reminding me that everything was okay because I was trying really hard not to freak out. Once we finally got past the stop sign, we drove around the traffic and ended up in front of the huge line of cars wanting to go down Lombard Street. I also had a small laughing fit to release the anxiety and tension that had built up while waiting on that steep slope. Really, it was either laugh or cry though, so I'm glad that I was able to get it out by laughing. Whew!
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| Driving down Lombard |
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| We totally beat this huge line of cars down the street! Look how many of them there are! Crazy! |
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| This is the view just downhill of the curvy road. |
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| P.S. Can ya'll tell that my hair is different? I think I'll need to get a close-up shot so you can really see the difference. |
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| ...and there's the torpedo. |
In the background you can see the Coit Tower, which is super cool (and flagrantly phallic). I've got those pictures right here:
After Coit Tower, we took Karren back to her hotel, hurried up to Chinatown to get some cheaper souvenirs for our friends (the exact same gifts cost like half as much in Chinatown), then headed out to the airport to return our rental car. We stopped in a city called South San Francisco along the way to eat some lunch, and it was really weird. It had the downtown area of a small-town-America-type city, but the ethnic diversity, cigarette smoke, and filth of a big city. Odd combo, right?
The flights back home were pretty uneventful. There were, however, tons of little kids on both flights. I've never had that many on any flight before, so having 6-8 on each flight was crazy! They were mostly cute, and two of them took a special liking to me, which was adorable. It was funny to catch a glimpse of our near future-traveling with small children. I also got to sit next to a really young CEO who was flying back from Monterey where he was overseeing a merger between his existing company and another one. It was really exciting to be able to have an intelligent conversation with him about what he does. That was only possible because Jeff tells me about what he does in his job, and I listen and ask questions to be sure that I understand. The young CEO and I also talked about children, since I'm pregnant and he and his wife have 3 kids. He sounded like a sweet dad :) He was super cool, and I got his business card to give to Jeff Beatty so he'd have a legit contact in the app-creating industry if he ever wanted to take advantage of it.
We spent our Easter up in Logan with my family, which was really nice. My parents sang "O Divine Redeemer" in their ward, which was phenomenal, and my Mom sang in the annual Easter Cantata. She has her own song every year, which she sings beautifully. The Easter Cantata is always held in the Tabernacle, though, which is crappy when Easter is warm. The Tabernacle is basically an oven when it's warm outside, so Jeff and I had to hang out outside for most of the program. The discomfort was magnified by the fact that my ankles and hands had swollen quite a bit. I'm convinced it was the mixture of pregnancy and the plane rides, since the swelling has disappeared and hasn't reappeared. So I was super uncomfortable, right? Well, as soon as my mom was done singing, we peaced right outta there. We drove back home to Provo with my brother and sister-in-law and got home at like midnight.
That's the end of our California/Logan adventure! And it only took me 3 blog posts to cover it all!
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