NoCal Chronicles, Day 4

There's something terribly cool about starting your mornings with a half-mile walk to the local coffee shop, with your hippie-chick daughter, just chatting. It helps a great deal when it's 55 degrees, too. Hopefully, those'll be life long memories for her. They already are for me.

Charlotte the Scar (a.k.a. My Mom) and her husband arrived a little after 10AM and got their first tour of my sister's home here in Oakland. We visited and chatted, and then were off to do some awfully touristy stuff.

And boy, did we EVER do some touristy stuff.

Started out with a drive over the Bay Bridge to Fisherman's Wharf. Horribly crowded this time of year, too. Parking goes at the rate of $6 bucks per hour...but you get one hour validated if you eat at one of the restaurants in the area. Hey, six bucks is six bucks. We ate with The Scar...and it's pretty fun to pick up the tab for your mom. Of course, I still owe her huge considering she picked up the tab for my entire life until about age 22. The parking tab was $18.

Then we strolled (or at least tried to stroll...again, it was extremely crowded. Maybe that's normal all the time there but it seemed to me that it was extreme) past the pretty cool street performers: Three card monty, palm readers (who offered a free sample, which I found a bit disconcerting that you could only 'sample' your future), a slam poet, some "live" statues, various jugglers, and one scruffy loking guy with a sign that read, "Why lie? I need a beer!" and had a tip jar. It was all pretty harmless.

The fam then filed into the Ghiradelli chocolate store and grabbed some ice cream sundaes and got a free sample. It's actually cheaper to get the chocolate at the grocery stores...which I think takes all the novelty out of going to the factory. We then got through the awful 5PM traffic, across the bridge by 6PM and got back to Jill & Shane's.

Quick change for Kelsey (I only had to put on my baseball hat) to get into her Hank Blalock jersey and we were off to her first baseball game in a "foreign" park. We'd heard Oakland fans could be rowdy so we were a bit cautious...but there really wasn't any reason to be. Sure, we got a few "Go back to Texas!" kind of yells, but nothing to really worry about--it was pretty good-natured, anyway, like they felt like that's what they should say or something. It may have helped that their pitcher threw a freaking perfect game for 7 innings (after ours threw away a sure double play ball that would've at least kept the game interesting) and we lost 6-0. We never even got a runner to 2nd base...and we wound up seeing our team only get 2 hits. That's the chance you take in going to any sporting event, I guess.

Something that didn't stink about the baseball game: We got downright chilly in the 7th inning after the sun went down. I bet Texas fans would attend way more games if we had this kind of weather.

My sister's GPS in her car has routes to the baseball game the takes game traffic patterns into account and it gave us this back way to the game. Same thing for the way home. How great is that?

Anyway, it was a fun day...tiring...but fun. Except for the cold, hard reality that I paid $32 total dollars to stinking park my sister's car twice today. Ugh.