Jen's Account of the Day

We had a (very) early flight, but somehow everything worked out fine and we got to San Fransisco without incident. We grabbed our bag and headed to the train station. The trip into town was 30-45 minutes. Fortunately, our hotel was just down the street from the train station, so we didn't have to walk all over San Fransisco with our luggage. All of Matt's work travel is good for something at least; we were able to check in early to our hotel since he's one of Hilton's Chosen. We were hungry, so after searching the internet for something to eat we decided on a Japanese noodle restaurant a few blocks away. It was cold (at least for us) in San Fransisco, and windy that day—probably around 55 degrees, so soup sounded great. It was alright; the broth was missing something. It wasn't bad so much as not as good as it's supposed to be. We went back to the hotel and took a nap.

We woke up around 4 with enough time to look around but not really enough for a museum or something, which all closed at 6. Matt wanted to see Golden Gate Park, which is where the botanical gardens are, so off we went (after arguing about how to get there for 20 minutes. We were both wrong). Matt was too good to just buy a train ticket, so he got us reloadable transit cards to add to our collection. Our collection does not include DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) passes.

We managed to get on the correct train, but not get off at the correct stop. It was a nice long, hilly hike to the park. We got to the botanical gardens about 45 minutes before they closed. We had just enough time to get through it all. The walk back to the correct train stop was much shorter, and we didn't even have to wait.

Matt had been given food credits by the hotel, so we stopped by the bar. Cider is all the rage in California; it's nice to be able to find some good (and not so good) varieties. The cider at the hotel bar was pretty good—not too sweet or dry or weird. Matt called and confirmed our pickup with the wine tour people.

Dinner was at some gastropub (which really narrows things down, every other restaurant in SF is a "gastropub." I don't remember the name, but it wasn't particularly good, so no big loss. I had a shephard's pie that inexplicably had a poached oyster in the middle of it that had almost the exact consistency of snot. It left me with horrible indigestion, and Matt kindly went to get me some soda. It helped a little, and I was able to fall asleep eventually.

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Day 2