San Francisco!
We decided to take advantage of our west coast location and Daddy's 3-day weekend schedule to make a trip to a city none of us have visited before. We managed to pack in a lot of fun!

Driving around town: We spent some time just driving around and taking in the city--steep hills (so exciting for the 5 and under set!), cable cars and trolleys, fancy houses, murals (especially in Haight-Ashbury), and of course, the Golden Gate Bridge. Sadly, it was a drizzly foggy weekend, so we didn't get a single good photo op of the bridge. However, it was pretty cool to drive over it and see the bridge towers just disappear into the clouds.

Exploratorium: This was an awesome, if rather crowded, science museum with hands on exhibits about magnets, electricity, light and colors, sound, weather, optical illusions, plants, cell biology, seashells--really the list is practically endless, and we had a blast dashing from one station to the next.

At left: Monkey and Goose play with magnets and a tube filled with water and iron filings.
At top: The entourage works with a little boy to turn the floating beach ball exhibit into a cannon.
(they discovered that if you tip the air stream at just the right angle it sends the ball shooting across the room)
At bottom: They loved dancing with the multi-colored shadows!

Marine's Memorial Club: This was actually the hotel we stayed in, but it proved an attraction all by itself. Both the lobby and the hotel library feature display cases full of military memorabilia--uniforms from different eras, model planes and tanks, MacArthur's corn cob pipe, etc.

Alcatraz: The girls were pretty excited about just getting to this destination since the journey involved a boat ride across the bay. We watched a short film about the island's history--it went from being a military post guarding the bay to a federal prison, then was briefly occupied by Native Americans after the prison closed. We toured the cellhouse and surrounding buildings and learned about both the prisoners and the families who lived on the island (Did you know about 60 guards brought their families with them to live on the island? The 75 kids or so took the ferry across the bay everyday to go to school.)

Left: Everybody enjoyed the boat ride to Alcatraz.
Right: Once on the island Bug studies a furnished cell.

Pier 39: Around lunchtime on Saturday, we strolled around Pier 39--lots of fun little shops and a few street performers--and stopped at one of the seafood restaurants along the pier for clam chowder and calamari.

standing under the Dragon Gate
 

Chinatown: This was probably the girls favorite destination (in fact, Monkey told me we should move to San Francisco someday, so we can go to Chinatown all the time). The girls loved poking around in all the shops full of trinkets, and Monkey and Bug each purchased an ornate little box for keeping their baby teeth in. (Bug has a marginally loose tooth, and informed me months ago that when her teeth fell out she wanted to keep them in a fancy box. We realized Chinatown was probably the ideal place to find that.) We stopped in at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory--a bit hard to find, but totally worth the search! We got to watch them filling and folding fortune cookies, grab a handful of still warm, broken ones they gave out as samples, and decided to buy a couple of bags to take with us. Yum! Of course, we had to eat dinner in Chinatown too. The highlight at dinner was probably the tanks full of live fish, crabs, and lobster. Our girls definitely have a healthy sense of where their food comes from: when I explained that the animals weren't here as pets but as future dinners, Bug leaned forward to get on eye level with a fish, pointed a finger, and grinned, "You are tasty!"

Computer History Museum: We made a detour to San Jose
to visit this fascinating museum near Google's campus. We arrived just in time to see a demonstration of the world's only working Babbage Difference Engine (a mechanical computer designed during the Victorian era). Monkey and Bug were fascinated and as expected had tons of questions: "It doesn't have a screen. How do you see what you're doing?" "How do you tell it what to do?" "What's that part do?" etc. From there we toured the main exhibit that covered 2000 years of computing history (from abacuses to Watson). Daddy helped the girls grasp the progress being made by comparing sizes throughout the exhibit; for example, vacuum tubes the size of the girls' stacked fists shrank to transistors the size of their pinkies, etc. They really enjoyed a wall display with a bunch of robots and descriptions of what they could do; then at the end we visited the gift shop and they got to play with robot bugs! There were some funny moments too--like when we had to explain to the girls that phones used to be connected to a wall with a wire and they were only for talking. This was practically incomprehensible to our little techies.

Left: Monkey and Bug with the Babbage Difference Engine (Please note: they only look unhappy because I asked them to pause their study of the machine to take a picture. I did not make this mistake again.) Center: Doesn't everyone teach their kindergartners about logic gates? Right: The girls got to climb inside a GoogleMaps car (Goose is in there too).