If You're Going to San Francisco, Be Sure to Wear a Jacket

San Francisco!

It's so big and gay and colourful! And it has houses with bay windows, so now I want to live there. Except that I'm scared of earthquakes and tsunamis. I don't know if they have tsunamis. But my nightmares lump them all into one category. Maybe I'll stay safely in the middle of my tectonic plate instead, and just have bay windows there.

Anyway, San Francisco!

Bri and her mom and I made a road trip there yesterday, and they let us in even though we weren't wearing flowers in our hair. We wound our way up to Twin Peaks, and with the famous San Francisco fog nowhere in evidence, we could see the whole city, famous bridge and all.

Taking flight!

Our next stop was a pirate supply store (!), an essential stop for any future pirate ship vegan bakery owner. And the shop works to fund 826 Valencia, a local writing centre for kids, so it's perfect for a socially conscious future pirate ship vegan bakery owner. I helped kids learn to read good and do other stuff good as well!

It's a parklet! One of my favourite suffixes!

After lunch, because one should never attempt science on an empty stomach, we went to the Exploratorium, which I can describe without exaggeration as THE BEST PLACE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD probably.

You know how I love pressing buttons at the London Science Museum? It's like that, but EVERYTHING is hands on, and when we were there, it wasn't full of noisy kids, which meant that all the grown ups got to press buttons and love science too. And we did.

I loved everything. After half an hour, when we'd made it 20m from the front door, Bri reminded me that we had the whole rest of the building to see and I couldn't actually try every exhibit. The whole rest of the building, you guys. Entirely full of hands-on exhibits.

I LIKE IT HERE.

Sketched by the camera.

Magic.

OMG BUBBLES. 

Aaaaa! Not again!

Making water droplets fly.

Got my science hat on.

I came away amazed at all the ways my brain tricks me with respect to light and colour and perspective. Brains are great. Science is great! The Exploratorium is great. Maybe I could handle the earthquakes if it meant I could go there all the time. Maybe they'd let me live in there. I should ask.

Or just rock up with a sleeping bag.

We left after three hours only because it was closing time, and went to be cold on the Golden Gate Bridge, which is epic. It was one of those moments when I remembered where I was and that I was having awesome adventures on the other side of the world.

Adventures are funny.

Bicycles right. Kidnappers from the 1940s left.

After dinner at Gracias Madre, a very fancy vegan Mexican restaurant (which had watermelon juice! Watermelon juice makes me happy!), we finished off the day with a drive past Defenestration, which was art, but the kind I actually like.

Art!

Pirate supply stores, parklets, button pressing, watermelon juice and defenestrated furniture. I was warned not to leave my heart in San Francisco. But I think I did, a little bit.