San Francisco, California

San Francisco is a fantastic city! This past week I was able to travel to California with my third family, the Hitchcocks. :-) We were all to arrive in Oakland on Thursday afternoon. Well, I arrived Thursday afternoon, and the remaining three arrived on Friday. The Hitchcocks were stuck in St. Louis for a night due to bad weather conditions. So, I got an evening with their friends whom I'd not met before and they were great hosts to me, a stranger.

On Saturday, we travelled to Napa Valley and did the wine country thing... it was beautiful! We toured the Sterling Vineyard, the Culinary Art Institute, Dean & Deluca, and the Castle of Amorosa. Lots of wine tasting, cheese tasting, and one interesting lemon float/dessert. That evening we took a trip to Salsalito for dinner at Angelino's, an Italian restaurant. Yum!

Sunday, we went to Bodego Bay on the coast. The waves were huge and it was extremely windy. My hair didn't hold up to well. We ate at a seafood restaurant that is on the same lot where scenes from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" was filmed.

The highlight was on Monday... shopping in downtown San Francisco! We did stop by San Francisco State University in the morning, then we headed to the Piers. We ate lunch there and proceeded downtown to shop until we dropped (almost literally). We had just enough time to grab dinner in Chinatown before heading back home.

I definitely want to go back to San Francisco!