San Francisco Trip Recap, Thursday 10/19/2006

We left the house at 7am on Thursday morning to drive 2 1/2 hours to Buffalo for our 11:30 flight. This was Larsson's third time on an airplane but Nora's first. Here they are on the first leg of the journey, from Buffalo to Philadelphia. Nora was excited to sit in her own seat for a little while and click the buckle:


This is how Larsson interpreted "look excited":


After a brief layover in Philadelphia, we flew on to San Francisco. The flight was long but the kids were good travellers and we finally arrived in SF at about 5:30pm, west coast time.

We had decided not to rent a car so we took the train from the airport to downtown San Francisco. Between the infernally slow airport tram to the train station, waiting for the train, and the train trip itself, it took us about 2 hours to travel what would have been about 30 minutes in a car.

Fortunately, the train stop at Union Square is on Market Street in the bottom of a large shopping complex with a food court. Since you can't eat well on a plane, we were hungry by then and couldn't imagine trying to go out again once we checked into the hotel so, with all our luggage and two tired, hungry kids, we navigated a crowded, fancy (this is upscale shopping) food court to find some dinner. I got Thai food, Braman and the kids shared pizza and then we walked ten minutes uphill on Powell Street to our hotel. Larsson was excited to be out at night, in the dark, and to see all the bright city lights and crowds of people.

We stayed at the Chancellor Hotel. When we went to SF two years ago, we stayed here and found it to be a nice, relatively inexpensive place so we didn't hesitate to make reservations here again. We checked in, went up to our room, and all fell asleep without too much trouble after our long, busy day.