Homer's Travels: Vacation: San Francisco - Day 1

Friday, March 21, 2008

Vacation: San Francisco - Day 1

Day one of our vacation was ... not quite what we expected. Not bad but not as good as it could have been.

We got on the road around 7:00 AM and headed north on 101. There was very little traffic. The cruise control controlled the cruise and we made pretty good time.

Our first stop was
Mission San Juan Bautista. It was closed. Yep, unfortunately, the mission is closed on Good Friday. We decided we would catch this mission on the way home and we walked through downtown San Juan Bautista.

The town has a nice downtown full of artists studios and antique shops. Every now and then a rooster would crow - probably practicing for the upcoming second annual San Juan Bautista Chicken Festival and Parade. We looked for a place to eat and ended up at
the Mariposa Restaurant, an old house that was converted into restaurant. The place reminded me of my Grandma's house. The food was delicious.

On the way back to the car, the Wife bought a complete set of hand painted mission notecards from the artist, Norm, at the Lazy H Studio.


We got back on the road and headed to
Mission Santa Cruz. We arrived, got out of our car, looked around, and wondered where the mission was. The only thing there was a reconstructed chapel, a gift shop with museum displays, and a tiny little garden. Not very impressive.

We decided to find our hotel, the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara ( we got it at a great price. Not to sound like an advertisement but Hotwire.com got us a great price on the room - $76 bucks at a great hotel). On the way we passed eBay, Intel, AMD, and many other technology Holy Places. After checking in we went down to the hot tub to soak. It felt awesome except for the little obnoxious kids who just had to talk to us. We ignored them the best we could but they were still annoying.

Then the real adventure began - the search for dinner. We really didn't have any idea of which direction to drive in so we set off in a random direction and went a searching. After driving around and around, seeing such geek drool inducing sights as Yahoo, Sun, and Oracle, and driving around some more until our gas light came on, we found an Italian restaurant. It turns out we drove close to 10 miles just to end up a few blocks from our hotel. For a second there I thought geeks here didn't eat. The restaurant turned out to be a little too fussy for me. I'm not much for fussy food. The wondering violin player irritated me a little bit as well. We left the restaurant and went looking for ice cream and ran into a several, less fussy restaurants. *sigh* We did find ice cream.

Not the greatest start of the vacation but we don't care. WE'RE ON VACATION!!! WOO WHOO! Since we really didn't see anything, I took no pictures.

3 comments:

  1. You made it without a foot cramp and you got food. It's better than a kick in the pants. ;)

    Have a great weekend.

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  2. Sounds like a good start to the trip, but I'm reading this just after the post above.

    Hopefully things will pick up well when you return to the travels.

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  3. JaG: True, my pants were definitely not kicked. It was a good first day.

    GH: We are thinking about returning over a long weekend in April. We will get to Alcatraz and Angel Island yet.

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