If You're Going to San Francisco…

…be sure to wear some flowers in your hair! Every time we would travel to Northern California (which was a lot!) my daddy would sing that song to us.  I love it!

Y’all, today is already a weird day.  I FORGOT MY CAMERA and don’t have any photos to edit!!!  I feel completely naked without it, and so I thought I’d share a little about a fun trip that Nate and I took back in the summer of 2007.  We went to visit my sister when she lived in California, and ended up going into San Francisco for a day.  Our grandparents, aunt, and cousins live in the Bay Area, so all we had to do was jump on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to get to the city!  That day is still one of my favorite memories from a vacation 🙂  (p.s. this first picture is the only one you’ll see Nate because he was an amazing husband and took all the photos!)

He’s so HAWT 😉

After we road BART in we stopped at Peet’s Coffee & Tea.  Nate and I had been so excited to go there since we worked for Starbucks, and Peet’s is what helped start that whole revolution!  Sitting in coffee shops just automatically makes you pensive…

After we left Peet’s we started to walk down to Fisherman’s Wharf.  We passed through Chinatown, which was interesting to say the least.  As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, I’m 5’10”, Nate is 6’3″, and my sister is also 5’10”.  Needless to say we had a great view because we were literally an entire head taller than everyone! As we made our way towards Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39 we came upon that beacon of freshness, the symbol of all that is right in the world:  In & Out Burger!

Unfortunately we’d already eaten breakfast and wanted to experience food that we could only get in San Francisco, so In & Out was not our culinary destination of choice.  It was just really good to see one 🙂  We walked around the pier and tried on sunglasses, went through boutique shops, candy stores, and spent some time in our beloved hammock shop.  That area is SO fun!

I can’t imagine flowers more beautiful than these!  Roses are gorgeous and preserve well, but part of the beauty of these sunflowers is how fleeting they are!

Salah and I have a thing with trying on hats anywhere and everywhere we go.  This is not the best example, but I will say something I’m proud of is the fact that I look good in just about any hat!

I love this place…it reminds me of so many fabulous family vacations!  Growing up I aspired to live in San Francisco.  That is, until I found out the cost of living there, and that kind of went down the crapper.  But it’s a great place to visit!

We decided that rather than eat one meal at one restaurant we would try out a couple of restaurants and just split some appetizers between the three of us.  We did a LOT of walking that day, so I’d say we earned it!  Here’s one of the places we went:

We sampled some fish & chips (the photo was not great…) and this tiramisu:

Obviously the lunch of champions!  Fun fact:  tiramisu is one of, if not totally, my favorite desserts.  It’s bitter, sweet, creamy, soft, spongy, and perfect!  Just look at how gorgeous my baby sister is:

I think I posted this photo on her birthday, but I love it all the same.  Our mom LOVES dolphins, so we tried to get a photo of her favorite (and only) children with her favorite animal 🙂

Shortly after we started to move back towards the BART station to head back.  And that, my friends, is when things got WEIRD.  My sister and I get these little spurts of total hyperactivity from time to time.  It’s bad enough when it’s just one of us, but when we’re together, we feed off of eachother and disaster is bound to happen.  In this case, disaster meant total and complete embarrassment for Nate (I’m sorry honey)!

This is the only photo that I could find that wasn’t completely life-alteringly horrible, and trust me:  you’re probably better off not seeing the other ones!  I rarely laugh so hard that I cry, but that time was definitely an exception!  Here’s another example of our craziness:

I think she was acting like a raptor or something?  And then our parents pretended to leave us behind and we got this sweet action shot of Salah:

We were up in the Bay Area visiting my grandparents, but after a couple of days we drove back to San Luis Obispo, which is where Salah lived, and visited both Pismo Beach and Morro Bay while we were there.  I love this picture of me; for some reason I feel like it exemplifies how I feel around the ocean:

I never grew up around the ocean, but I’ve always felt a peaceful calm there.  I don’t need to be in it, but the smell of the salty air, the sand in my toes, standing near or in the water and letting it kiss my toes, floating on my back…all of it just gives me this completely relaxed calm, and I love it!  There are a LOT of pictures from that trip, but I don’t want to force you to scroll through all of them, so I’ll leave you with this:

This, dear readers, is Luke.  No, not the guy in the background, the ROCK.  The rock is Luke.  Obviously.  We found him and took pictures of him all over the beach, but this is my favorite.  Doesn’t he look thoughtful? 😉

Have you ever been to California?  Where?  What are your favorite memories from there? Since we have family there, we’ve been to California a TON of times, and all over for that matter!  It’s hard to pinpoint my favorite spots and favorite memories because they are ALL my favorite 🙂  I would totally move there in a heartbeat if it wasn’t so expensive, but for now it’s great to be able to visit and just enjoy it for what it is!