Pacific Chronicles, Part 1

Foster City, CA

Monday morning we took a walk around Dorothy's lagoon. The joys of living in California is your neighborhoods are planned down to the terrain they are built on, so you can have cool things like lagoons in your back yard.

Detained

"Broadway of the prison"

Then we set out to put Ian (our car) in for an oil change. Got on the BART to head to the ferry to Azkaban, I mean Alcatraz. Now, typically when you go to a tourist attraction, you get a picture forced on you in the hopes that you will buy it at the end of your time at the attraction. Nobody likes doing this, so we tried to make it more fun. There was this older Indian woman kind of wandering around near the souvenir picture station looking somewhat lost. We could tell she wanted her picture taken in front of the fake background of Alcatraz, so we invited her into our picture. It definitely made her day, our day, and confused the photographer a lot. To top it off, the following picture is an illegal full-on copyright-infringed picture of the print that we weren't going to buy for $22, courtesy of badasses Kelly "does what she wants" McCreary and Eric "who cares lets just do it" Sorkin

"Yeah, shes our grandma or something"

We cruised across San Francisco bay, and landed upon Alcatraz Island. It was a really really cool tour, where we were able to hear about the various escape attempts and the native American self-determination movement, as well as walk about the entire prison and go into cells and shower rooms and such.

Alcatraz, surrounded by dementors.

We came back to the mainland to go eat in the city one last time, where we got In N Out Burgers one more time (Eric got a double-double), and Ghirardelli sundaes one last time. We made it back to our car with about 10 minutes until the place closed, which would have left us car-less with too much traveling to do. Luck was on our side.

That night we took off to Santa Cruz for an amazing dinner with Kelly's aunt and uncle. Her uncle distilled his own wine and had a huge wine cellar, which was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. He shared a bottle of his white wine with us, and we had a delicious home cooked Italian meal of baked chicken and risotto. We drank, ate, and talked until about 11pm.

We want to thank both Dorothy Gorman for opening her home (and shower faucet) to us for a week, and Dave and Barb Donofrio for cooking and entertaining us for a wonderful evening.