Entry tags:

madonna inn, san francisco, santa barbara

New Years @ San Francisco
Dec. 29, 2007 - Saturday

At around 10 a.m., the crew managed to gather themselves at my house. We threw our luggage into the trunk of my car and set off on our journey. A little after noon, we arrived at Santa Barbara and had lunch at the pier. I had a calamari steak burger since I've never had one before-- I had to try. It was pretty good, though I think the sauce on it was a little weak. Our resident Brit-Boy decided to try fish and chips to "compare"... After we ate, we wandered around the pier a bit, looking at all the tourist trappy stuff and ate some ice cream.

This is Simon and Nancy's couple tourist shot

We wanted to go inside the museum on the pier but we had trouble finding the entrance since we were all kinda slow. When we did finally manage to spot the front door, we realized that the dinky museum was not free and decided against it.



Instead, we found a ship cruise that advertised itself as a Pirate Cruise-- ultimate tourist trap, but we went for it ($10 bucks a pop). It was a 25 minute boat ride and they took you to see some sea lions and Pelican Island. It was pretty cute.


The rest of Santa Barbara: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/santabarbara/

A little after 3 p.m., we left Santa Barbara and made our way to the Madonna Inn, which is this tacky hotel and each room has a different theme. Our room was called the Pony Room. Despite the tacky decor, the hotel was actually really nice. Our room was the size of a one-bedroom apartment and we loved it.


big beds!

After all the driving for that day, we relaxed in our hotel room and turned on the television. We watched a little bit of a Bourne movie, eating sandwiches that Nancy packed for the trip, before deciding to explore around the hotel a little. We poked around the hotel shops (all full of tacky but expensive crap) then waited to get a table at their cafe.

The wait was pretty bad and when we finally got seated... no one served us, except for the girl taking drink orders. We stared at the menu for a little bit, and after almost half an hour of waiting for a waiter to take our orders, we decided to leave. We went to little bakery in the cafe and bought two slices of their chocolate cake. We took our loot back to the Pony Room and popped in Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back into my laptop. Then it was lights out.

Madonna Inn photos: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/madonnainn/

Dec. 30, 2007 - Sunday

We woke up pretty early the next day and reluctantly left our beloved Pony Room. Giselle got on the driver's seat for the day and we made our way to the Hearst Castle via highway 1. We scheduled ourselves on one of the tours and learned what one can do with too much money...


And the rest: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/hearstcastle/

We enjoyed our tour guide a lot. I felt like he should be in a movie or something, as the awesome-old-guy. We dreamed of a day when we would be rich enough to build our Geek Castle and have parties with our own heroes like Kevin Smith and Bruce Campbell.

We left the castle after our tour and got on the 101 freeway again to get to our final destination, San Francisco. Oh yeah-- for some reason, there were a lot of dead skunks on the freeway. Go figure. It was really smelly though.

For lunch, we stopped by a small town called Greenfield and found a small Mexican restaurant. Inside, one of the locals chatted us up and all of us Southern Californians squirmed in suspicion at the small town friendliness. We got through it though and then made the rest of the way to San Francisco. I fell asleep in the car and got my picture taken, which seems to be a solid law of action when one falls asleep among good friends.

Around 5 p.m., after getting a little lost and confused with all the one way-no-left-turns streets, we pulled up on the Travelodge on Market St. Our room was disappointing in comparison to the Pony Room. First off, it smelt kinda funny. Second off, the beds were tinier and wrapped in plastic. We sucked it up and managed ourselves, then went to the Stinking Rose for dinner. After dinner, we called it a night since most things were closing and went back to our hotel room. We vegged out and popped in Clerks II for the night's entertainment.

Dec. 31st 2007 - Monday

We woke up at a good hour and investigated the public transportation, figured out a way to get ourselves to the Fisherman's Wharf. Once we were there, we found yet another cruise around the bay. Originally, we wanted to take a cruise to Alcatraz Island, but the official cruise was sold out and there didn't seem to be any other ferries that would drop us off the island. We opted for a cruise that took us under the Golden Gate Bridge and went around Alcatraz a couple of times. The ship's narrator was Captain Nemo, who claimed to be a pirate of some sort.



When they dropped us back on the mainland, we immediately went hunting for lunch-- since we were at the Wharf, we wanted clam chowder in sourdough bread, of course. The weather was cool that day, but when we were out in the water, we freezed our asses off. We settled to eat indoors in Boudin's and had a yummy lunch of clam chowder and some gourmet mac and cheese.

From where we sat in the restaurant, I spotted Museum Mecaniqee, which is an arcade, but also a museum of old penny arcades. It was really interesting and funny to see some of the old games people had.



I also decided to play some old school Tekken 3 and was kicking butt until the 7th or 8th stage. I'm out of practice.

Since we were completely doing the tourist-thang, Giselle hunted down the wooden trolleys and we rode on one to get to Union Square. When we got there, we went inside a Borders store and the kids gorged on some books and comics. I only bought one thing, the graphic novel version of Artemis Fowl. Afterwards, we hunted down the H&M store. Spent some time inside the store trying on clothes but in the end, I only found one sweater I wanted to buy. One of my fellow ex-JSP friend started texting me, knowing I would be in NorCal that day. We arranged to meet-up for some New Years Eve celebration later that night.

Nancy and I are pretty old-lady and were tired pretty quick. Shops were closing pretty early that night and so we made our way back to our hotel. We stopped by a cute cafe/bakery by our hotel to pick up some dinner. Once inside the room, we popped in 28 Weeks Later, which wasn't really a good movie to watch while eating, but we survived. After the movie, Brett and his friend arrived at our hotel room (and laughed because I had changed in my pajamas). We chilled for a little bit, talking and watching Project Runaway.

When 10 p.m. rolled around, we emerged into the streets again and walked towards the direction of the Castro district to see if anything was going on there. A block from our hotel, we discovered a comic book store (closed for the day) and laughed at the irony since the whole day, we were looking for a comic book store and found none, without realizing there was one next door to us the whole time.

Brett gave the kids a little point-and-look tour of Castro. The crowd seems to be settling inside bars, clubs and theater shows for the night, the first two we couldn't really do because we had a under-21-individual with us. Finally, we jumped into a cable car going to the Fisherman's Wharf. The ride was free for the night and we got dropped off a couple of blocks away from the Ferry Building. The road was closed off for the event.

Jan. 1, 2008 - Tuesday

The crowd was huge! And drunk! And stoned (much to Giselle's excitement)! All sorts of people were there-- from families with kids to unruly college students. When midnight struck, there were fireworks. Our view was blocked by trees, unfortunately, but we saw the ones that were higher and bigger than the trees.



The fireworks went on for about 20 minutes and we hung out for a few more minutes after it, just being silly and whatnot. I was definetely getting really tired by then but we still had to get back to our hotel somehow. Taking public transportation back was almost impossible. We began trekking up the 17 blocks to the hotel... I think we were too tired to even challenge our own crazy decision by that point.

We managed to get back somehow-- said goodbyes to Brett and his friend and promptly collapsed in bed to prep ourselves for the drive the next day. Even though we exhausted ourselves, it was a good way to celebrate the new year!

The rest of the photos: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/sanfrancisconewyearseve/