San Francisco Trip Recap, Friday 10/20/2006, Part 1

I love to buy notecards (and send the ones I can bear to part with) and San Francisco is a card-buying Mecca. Since we live in the sticks where it is not so easy to buy fancy cards, I was anxious to get out and get shopping.

But I am also a mother of two small children who had just endured a long, tedious plane flight to the other side of the country so that I could run a marathon so I put aside my own consumer urges and we spent Friday morning and part of the afternoon at the Exploratorium, a fantastic kids' science museum with lots of hands-on exhibits.

Actually, we started off the morning by having breakfast at Sears Fine Food, a restaurant well-known for breakfast and conveniently located right next door to our hotel. I must have been really tired because I can't even remember what I had but I remember that Braman and the kids shared pancakes and Larsson discovered that he doesn't like freshly-squeezed orange juice and had to order a second drink of cranberry juice instead.

After going back to the hotel and packing the backpack full of essentials like diapers and wipes, books for the kids, stickers, crayons and other entertainment, we walked down to the corner of Powell and Market so that we could take a Powell-Hyde line cable car towards the Exploratorium. (I say toward instead of to because the cable car routes are limited and we still would have had to take a bus once we got off the cable car near Ghirardelli Square.)

Taking a cable car to go to the museum seemed a little crazy to begin with since it wouldn't actually bring us to our destination but Larsson had seen them going up and down the street in front of our hotel and really wanted to take a ride on one. However, it seemed extra crazy once we got down to the stop and saw how many other tourists were waiting in line so we ended up taking the bus. (Handy Braman had purchased a municipal transit map from the bookstore next to our hotel so we knew which route to get on and where to pick up the bus.)

We finally made it to the Exploratorium, spent a few hours there and had a great time. (What made the visit even better was that we got in FREE as part of our reciprocal membership with our local kids' science museum, the Sciencenter.) The Exploratorium is housed in a huge open, industrial-looking space and the lighting is not great for taking pictures. But here are a few from the baby play area where Braman built a cage for the kids:

It started out innocuously enough where Larsson and Nora were both helping to build.


Then started to become an enclosure for Nora.


Then Larsson wanted to enclose them both completely inside.


But Nora became scared...


...and busted out.