Enough Said

I have been asked many times why we chose to move back to California, but as they say, "a picture is worth 1,000 words".


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We recently celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary and I surprised Tania with a trip to San Francisco for the weekend. We live about an hour drive South so with the kids Tania hasn't been able to have many urban experiences since we left London. We woke up Saturday morning and Tania had no clue. My brother Matt is staying with us and he had (bravely for a man with no kids yet) agreed to stay with the kids for the weekend. We left at about noon and made the journey up. We were a bit worried for Matt because the whether predictions was for the hottest 2 days of the year (and some of the hottest days on record).

We arrived at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, which is on the 38-48th floors of the 3rd tallest building in San Francisco. As you can see from the pictures our room had magnificent views of the city. In fact, we could see all the way from the Golden Gate bridge on our left to the SF Bay Bridge on our right and everything in between. We also had an unobstructed view of the sublime Transamerica building, Coit Tower, Alcatraz and the entire San Francisco Bay. It is amazing that we were actually able to tear ourselves away from our hotel room and visit the city.

We took a lovely boat ride across the bay to Sausolito where we had a couple of daytime margaritas in honor of Kay as we ate lunch staring back at the skyline of San Fran. At dinner we went to a local French restaurant, Fleur de Lys. The food was spectacular but we found the service wanting. At the top restaurants in Europe you have professional waiters that look at their jobs as careers. In the SF Bay Area it seems that all you get in semi-professional "surfs up" type mentalities where everything is so casual - not the experience we are used to for doling out the kind of cash they expect in a top-notch restaurant. But the experience was good and the mood romantic.

We have to admit that we did think often of the kids at home and of Matt. Not that we were worried about his ability to watch the kids (we were not) but we felt so bad that it was a sauna in our house in Palo Alto and Matt was stuck there. We obviously owe him a big thank you.

We continued the luxurious experience Sunday morning by ordering breakfast in bed and lounging about all morning reading the New York Times and taking in the views. So we promised ourselves to do this at least once a quarter.

Non sequiter - I am typing this Sunday morning August 6th. Andy woke up at 7:00 and has been crawling around the floor playing with toys while I type. I just looked down (he is beneath my legs) and he was chewing on my computer cord. Doh! See last post - these kiddies love wires!