Day # 33 - San Francisco, CA

We had decided to spend our last day in the city checking out Golden Gate Park. It was an absolutely beautiful day! Before we headed into San Francisco, we had promised the girls that we would go to the petting zoo at the campground first. It was not quite as big as the campground we stayed at when visiting Yosemite, but the kids were still excited to play with the goats. There were 5 baby goats that were very friendly and they let the kids pick them up and hold them. Sarah was really into holding them. Abby wanted to hold a baby goat too, but found them just too wiggly for her liking. AJ of course wants to do anything his sisters do so he actually sat still long enough to hold a baby goat.

After we got washed up, we headed into the city. The kid’s voted for checking out the playground first. The park also contains an awesome carousel as well, so we decided ride the carousel first before playing on the playground. The carousel ride was a bargain at $5 for the whole family. I don’t care how old I am, I think I will always enjoy them! AJ was very excited during the ride and kept bouncing and saying “I ride a horsey” over and over. I thought he was going to fall off. We checked out the playground next. It was a lot of fun. There was a mini playground for toddlers and a much larger series of climbing equipment for the bigger kids. The coolest thing they had was a cement slide cut into the side of a hill that kids were flying down while sitting on pieces of cardboard. It looked like a lot of fun and Abby was anxious to try it out. There was a stack of extra cardboard sitting at the bottom, so Tony took her up to the top of the hill and helped her get started coming down. Sarah joined in on the fun too. Abby must have gone up and down 20 times. A large group of kids had gathered at the top of the hill and it was starting to get a little rowdy (as kids can get when too many of them do not have parental supervision). Tony had just said to me that he didn’t want Abby to go back up unless he went back up too. He was trailing her up to the top when, sure enough, she fell (Abby says a bigger kids pushed her, but Tony didn’t see it) and scraped up her forehead and nose pretty good. Tony felt awful that she fell. To make matters worse, when Tony reached the top of the slide, there was a gentleman standing there laughing. Tony whirled on him and asked him if he thought it was funny that a little girl fell and was crying and the man backed down real quick and apologized. I was glad I didn’t have to bail Tony out of the park jail for beating down a punk dad at the playground.

Needless to say that cut our trip to the park short. Fortunately, no permanent damage was done but Abby does have a nice big bruise in the middle of her forehead. We walked back to our car and headed over to the wharf for lunch and another loaf of yummy bread. The kids were campaigning hard for lunch at the “Rain Forest Café”. We compromised by letting them walk through the store to look at the fish and fake animals and then going to McDonalds. We took their lunch to go and scored an outside table at Boudin Bakery across the street and Tony and I enjoyed another bowl of clam chowder and yummy sourdough for lunch. After lunch we stopped so everyone could make one last “smash penny” in the city. Sarah was fascinated by Alcatraz and really wanted to take the boat ride out there, but with our time constraints and AJ to look after, it just didn’t happen. She was satisfied making an Alcatraz smash penny.

Before getting in our car for a closer at the Golden Gate Bridge, we stopped off at the Museo’ Mechanique. The Museum houses about 2,000 arcade games from the past century. It was amazing to see some of these old arcade games still working. The girls enjoyed making Peppy the clown dance and I liked watching the huge mechanical displays come to life for a quarter. You could also enjoy a more modern game of Pac Man or try your hand at skee-ball. After our quarters were gone, we packed it in and headed out of town. Abby still wanted to see the bridge so we stopped off at Fort Point. Of course AJ fell asleep again and we took turns checking out the scenery from the old battery that protected the inlet to the bay.
After a few pictures of the bridge we headed back to the campground to get ready to break camp for our move to Vegas, baby!

We had a bit of a scare when we returned to the campground. We had no power in the camper. Tony checked the post and reset the breakers and nothing in the camper worked. We knew the post had power because the extension cord plugged into the 15-amp outlet running our awning light worked fine but the camper plugs into a 30-amp outlet (think a plug like on an electric clothes dryer in your home) and nothing was working . We tried plugging the camper into the 30-amp outlet on the power post from the empty site next to ours and still had nothing. We were beginning to worry that there had been a brown out while we were gone and that it had fried the power converter (that Tony recently replaced) in the camper that runs all the electrical stuff in the WHOLE camper. We couldn’t imagine desert heat with no power! My handy husband grabbed the Multi-meter he picked up from Harbor Freight and decided to check the power post with the meter. Sure enough the 30 amp breaker in the post was dead and that is why the outlet had no power, it was NOT our power converter. We breathed a sigh of relief and I took the kids to the playground while Tony went to the office to see what could be done about getting the breaker replaced. The kids and I played for a while then took the nightly hayride around the campground. Upon returning back to the camper, Tony had heard from the office that there was no one who could fix the breaker for tonight and the best solution they could offer us was to move to a new site. This was not appealing since we were leaving in the morning anyway. Tony used his cheater plug to plug the campers 30-amp plug into the working 15-amp outlet to give us some power to run the lights/TV for the night so we decided to stay put (you don’t need AC at night in the Bay Area so using the cheater worked for the night). For our trouble, the night manager brought us a bottle of wine to say they were sorry. That brings our wine total to 13 bottles. I don’t think I have ever had so many bottles of wine in my possession at one time – There is nothing wrong with that. We got the kids packed up and ready for bed. We want to try to pull out early in the morning to beat rush hour traffic out of town. San Fran in rush hour pulling a camper = no fun.