My San Francisco Vacation

I'm back from SF, safe and sound and ready to begin my summer. The trip started at 7:30a.m. when me and my Dad left the house. he was driving because he didn't want me to have to drive during the "going to work traffic" :P we switched off drivers about every 2 hours, and listened to Rick Riordan's new book "The Red Pyramid" all 12 of the hours there. we also had many munchies to eat on our way east. my favorite quote from the quote is this: "the five basic elements of mater are this, earth, fire, wind, water, and CHEEESSSEEE!!!!" it was very funny, comparing cheese to ether, a heavenly substance. :) I liked it a lot, it the story they even had magic books on how to harness the powers of "cheese" it was a very funny book and I recommend it to anyone who likes egyptian mythology.

once we got there (around 7:30p.m.)we were feeling to bloated on snacks to have any real food so instead we decided to see a movie. the first theater we walked into was only showing one film, 8 theaters and only one film: Sex and the City 2, we cracked several jokes about "what this world is coming to" and "the end of the world is nigh" and dumb stuff like that, then promptly walked right back out of the theater and found a different cinema. we ended up watching "Prince of Persia" which by my standards was a very clean, decent, movie. with minimal vulgarity, cleaner than shakespeare concerning innuendoes, and full of action and romance. It is a very good movie.

The next day we spent touring the wharf. Pier 39 is where we spent most of our time. There were lots of shops to browse through, and we even bought some stuff. I got a shirt, and 4 key-chains to give my brothers as souvenirs and my dad later bought a conch shell with an air plant to place inside of it. The shirt and key chains I got from a shop called Del Sol. everything they make changes color in the sunlight. it was very cool. the conch and air plant we actually bought wednesday, but we found them the day before in a shop that specialized in exotic shells. Air plants are rather unique, distant relatives of the pineapple, they don't need dirt to grow, just air and occasional water, thus they are perfect accents to be placed in a shell where the original animal would have been. it looks really cool.

next we went to the Aquarium and Wax Museum. the aquarium was rather stupid, they didn't have very many animals and the only cool ones were two nocturnal octopus, hence we didn't see them. The wax museum was somewhat better. we saw wax figures of many famous people, obama, clinton, Einstein, marilyn monroe, the crocodile hunter, king tut, the list was 200+ people long. some of the statues looked real, some didn't. there was also a "hall of horror" which I didn't actually have the courage to walk through, my Dad did though, he didn't seem impressed.

on the way back from the Wax museum we saw the street performers with some rowdy obscene music making spay-paint art. they were selling their art work for 5$ each and it was really cool how they did it. we stopped to watch and eventually ended up asking them for one. we took video of it being made which, after i've changed the music that was being played, I will post up here, it's really cool. you'd never guess it was spray painted unless you had seen it be done.

that night we watched shrek 4 then ate at a diner near the cinema. The next day we were back at the wharf, but not to browse shops, we went on a tour of Alcatraz. it was very cool...sort of. it turns out that a lot of the hype about it is from the media and hollywood playing upon the myth that it was unescapable. the truth was that it was actually more preferable a prison than others, and it was more effective at rehabilitation then others too. plus three men did escape, although no one knows if they survived or not. it was originally a military base, but was too expensive for the government to uphold so it was turned into a prison. eventually the prison was also to expensive so it was sold to the indians. the american indians wanted it because it could be used to show all those going into port at san francisco that the indians were the original inhabitants and remind them of the natives.

after Alcatraz we went down and found a museum arcade. it had lots of arcade games from history, me and my dad played the original "pong" game, among others. then we went down to the Girardeli factory, and had some ice-cream. after that we decided to go back to the hotel and rest so we would be wide awake for the main reason we had come to SF in the first place: Wicked. it was awesome. enough said. It was the best play i've ever seen. (although me and my Dad both agree that the singer of Elfeba was a little off-pitch rather frequently) we decided she was probably just having a bad day and it didn't ruin the performance at all. it cast a new light on the original story we all know so well (I won't reveal anything so that the experience can be new for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.) I had made sure to wear my Marching Band shoes to the play because that is what I had planned to do in New York as we had been on Marching Band tour then. I felt it was almost like taking the Marching Band with me...but not really.

the ride home was was much the same as the ride there, except we stopped at the jelly-belly-bean factory. we took a tour of the factory and got to taste "the jelly-bean" in each stage of production, it was very interesting. after that we waited for the cafe to open, they were serving "jelly-bean shaped Hamburgers" being a hamburger fanatic, It was worth the hour and a half wait after the tour was over. because we chose to wait for the amazing hamburgers as our lunch we arrived home around midnight. It was the best vacation ever!

I congratulate anyone who took the time to read this, GOOD JOB!! it's a lot I know, sorry :)

Thanks Dad for the amazing vacation, it was tons of fun.

Smile All-Ways!
~Steven Dawson