San Francisco: Miles 5164-5700
7/17-7/23
We got up and drove to San Francisco the morning of the 17th. We drove across the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge on our way to Palo Alto. We walked around the Stanford campus for a little while before checking me into camp. Stanford is a really pretty campus; every building matches. It’s not a hodgepodge of buildings like a lot of other schools I’ve seen. Almost every building is made of white/tan stone with a clay roof. I’m not going to blog about camp, just because not much happened except field hockey playing, eating, and sleeping. Not many of you would understand anything I said about what we did at sessions anyway. I had a really great time and learned a lot. Shoutout to my awesome team: Anna, Lily, Georgia, Claire, Margaret, Jaccoa, Kiera, Ryann, Valentina, and Luvey. After I got picked up on the 20th, we walked around the Stanford campus again, showing my grandparents around. We walked through the bookstore and then went to lunch. We got lunch at Gott’s Roadside, where I got a blue cheese burger and a cookies-and-cream milkshake. It was one of the best milkshakes/ice cream we’ve gotten on this trip. We drove to the Presidio, a national something or other (park, monument, memorial, etc.), that had a great overlook of the bridge, bay, and city. We went back to our Airbnb, where Mom and Dad made beef tacos and corn salsa, an amazing regular in our house. Pampam and Grumpy went to their hotel and we went to bed.
The next morning (the 21st), after breakfast, I caught up on journalling entries and then had a Skype flute lesson with Lissie. I read out on our patio in the sun until Pampam and Grumpy showed up. We went through Oakland, looking for a place to eat. There was some festival going on or something, so we kept moving through (that’s supposedly the reason we didn’t eat there, but I think it was because the smell of marijuana was so bad). We ate at Sea Breeze Market and Deli, where I got a pulled pork sandwich. I didn’t think through the fact that we weren’t back home in the South, so it wasn’t barbeque, just pulled pork, lettuce, and mayonnaise. It was still pretty good, and the sweet potato fries with it were delicious. I also had some real ginger ale, which was really good, but kind of spicy. We drove to Berkeley/Cal, which I always thought were two different schools. We walked around, by the clock/bell tower and a bunch of other buildings. It was a real hodgepodge of buildings, with really modern and glassy ones and old mansion-looking places. Once we got back to the Airbnb, we prepared for our night out on the town with the grandparents. First, we went back to their hotel and went swimming in the ‘pool’, which was the same temperature as the hot tub, and it was a legitimate hot tub. After we showered, we went out to miniature golf, a Camp Pagrump tradition (our nickname for vacations at the grandparents’ house). We played at Golden Tee Golfland, which was one of the coolest putt-putt courses we’ve ever played at. I won, as usual. Even though Grumpy and Jackson are both much better golfers than me, Pampam and I usually do better than them. Go figure. There was a 19th hole challenge, where if you made it in a pipe from a certain distance, you won a free round of 18. Only Grumpy made it, and it was kind of useless, as we wouldn’t have time the next day and were leaving the day after. It was really fun. They stopped at McDonald’s, but I wasn’t hungry after my huge lunch. Pampam and Grumpy dropped us off at our house and we got in bed.
The next day, Dad, Jackson, and Grumpy were playing golf at Half Moon Bay, so Mom, Pampam, and I went into the city for the day. Grumpy dropped us off at the ferry landing. We took the ferry into San Francisco from Alameda, where we were staying. After arriving, we walked through the Ferry Building, which was like an indoor market. We got lunch, with cheese, fig, and lettuce sandwiches and some macarons. We took a bus to SFMoMA (the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Before going in, we ate our lunch at Yerba Buena Gardens across the street. It was really pretty, but there were pigeons everywhere and I hate when birds get close to me. The art museum was really cool: there was an Andy Warhol exhibit that we spent over an hour in. We got to see really famous pieces, like his Campbell soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. There were some other cool galleries, especially one with Alexander Calder’s mobiles in it. I got a traditional San Francisco dishes cookbook in the gift shop. We walked down to the historic cable car stop and rode that up to Chinatown. We had to hang off the sides and hold on; it was really fun, like a really mild roller coaster. Chinatown was really cool. We went into a fortune cookie factory and some souvenir shops. I wanted to get a shirt or dress, but I knew I would never wear it. I think traditional Chinese or Japanese or Indian clothes are so much prettier than Western styles. I wish I could wear stuff like that without just being seen as a white girl in Chinese clothes. Pampam got me a shawl, that was really pretty. I wore it to dinner. We took the ferry back and ate our macarons. They were really good: hazelnut, espresso, chocolate, vanilla, raspberry, pistachio, salted caramel, and oddly, rose-geranium. The salted caramel was the best, but they were all good. We got a Lift back to the house. We walked to dinner at Burmese Superstar. Mom and Dad went there with a friend of Dad’s while we were playing mini golf and said it was amazing, so much so that Mom was willing to go back with us for the second night in a row. We got a fermented tea leaf salad, platha and a chicken curry dip, and pork and pumpkin stew with jasmine and coconut rice. It was amazing. The bad thing about finding so many new and fun experiences, like restaurants or the climbing gym in Bozeman, is that I’m sad they don’t exist in Winston. We walked back to the place, got ready, and got in bed.
“There’s no straighter road to success than exceeding expectations one day at a time.”