Day 3 – Best Laid Plans…

Posted on 23. Jun, 2010 by in He-Said-She-Said

One thing about changing your vacation location at the last minute, it doesn’t give you a whole lot of time to plan.  We had however, laid out how many days we wanted to spend where – or so we thought.  Today we began by eating breakfast at The Grove.  The hotel had recommended it yesterday but we never saw it on our way to the cable car so today we asked a different person where to get some breakfast.  Same thing, up the street a block on the right.  Only this person added, “it’s next door to Peet’s Coffee.” That helped lots, because it was not actually on the street we were walking on, it was on the side street.  Also, you know how you have a preconceived image of some place in your mind based on the name, well I was thinking fruit and nut shack in the airport, not a cool restaurant with great food.  We each ordered a different omelet and then did taste tests.  The OJ was fresh squeezed and we thoroughly enjoyed the meal. (Good thing, because it turned out to be our only one today.)

Next we set off for the Palace of Fine Arts which is under renovation so we couldn’t go in. We took some pictures outside the building, while Brad complained about how late it was and how the light wasn’t good (the disadvantage to being married to a photographer).  Then we found the visitor center at the Presidio to get Sydney a national park stamp.A little after mid-day we headed across the bridge and up to Muir Woods.  Sydney learned a lot about the park doing the Junior Ranger program and got her badge.  The light coming through the Redwoods was so pretty and we got a nice little hike in.  It is amazing that these trees can be so tall.

The thing is, we were supposed to be going the other direction.  We had planned to drive down the coast and go to Monterey Bay. Well we still ended up on the coast, because after leaving Muir Woods we thought we would drive up to Point Reyes.  The road was so curvy that it took a lot longer to get there than what we thought from looking at the distance on the map. We arrived just before sunset and realized there was no way to make it to the lighthouse for sunset photographs.  So we headed back down and stopped close to Stinton Beach to take a few photographs of the setting sun.  By the time we got back to San Francisco Sydney was asleep in the back seat, so we skipped dinner and just went straight to our hotel – that we booked 15 minutes before arriving there. (Helen normally plans everything out but last summer was the first by the seat of our pants vacation that we had ever taken in our thirty years together and it turned out awesome so she was a little more relaxed about the lack of pre-planning this time.)

It wasn’t what we had planned but we had a great day!

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