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California Road Trip 2019

In the summer of 2019 I took my daughter on another road trip from San Francisco to Carlsbad.

Day 1

The plan this year was to fly to San Francisco, stay two nights and drive back along the coast back to Carlsbad. We had to do a partial do-over this year because 1) last year we found out that there is an ice cream museum in SF; 2) we didn't have enough time to explore all of the Exploratorium and 3) the CA-1 was closed in Big Sur so we had to go around it. In addition I wanted to get some more shots around Morro Bay because I have an art show there coming up. 

When the flight attendant told us to shut down our electronics Katie asked why that is. I said that  electronic devices give off a little bit of an electric field and that it is thought that may interfere with the plane's electronics. I then added that that field is so small it probably doesn't have an effect. She asked "What if all the passengers' devices are on at the same time, would that perhaps cause a field that is strong enough?"  "OMG", I thought, "here's my little 10 year old electric engineer" and I told her I was impressed with that line of thought and will have to mention that to mommy. 

The flight was pretty short and we arrived at the SF airport a little before schedule. We caught a cab to Hotel Zephyr next to Fisherman's Wharf. What a fun quirky hotel that turned out to be! The walls are made out of ship containers and there are sculptures made from recycled materials all over the place. There is a game room with shuffle board, a pool table, ping pong and more. Outside, in The Yard there are several fire pits (one with a sculpture of old computers and monitors made out of steel), a ping pong "tube", a giant ten-by-ten foot four-in-a-row game on a wall and more.  Furthermore, our room had a dart game on the wall with magnets. The ceiling contained a large map that extended from Los Altos to the Muir Woods. 

I intended for us to walk to the Powell/Mason Cable Car turnaround on Bay St, take a cable car to Market St and from there walk to the Museum of Ice Cream, which is only a couple of blocks away. However, the line was pretty long at Bay St (at 2:30pm), so we decided to walk to the Exploratorium instead. It again was worth the entrance fees. Katie (and so do I) had a lot of fun pushing buttons, pull ropes, turning wheels, getting mesmerized by illusions, and experiencing the effects of laws of nature. This time, Katie's favorite was the rainmaker and for me it was a glass sphere with two different solutions in it. When you rotated the sphere (and suddenly stopped it or accelerated it), all kinds of patterns (eddies and currents) appeared. It was like a Jupiter simulator. 

We stayed again till the museum closed and we walked back to our hotel, where we played tube ping pong - this turned out to be Katie's most favorite activity here. 

After that we walked to Pier 39, which was so busy that I didn't dare to let go of her hand. Katie was in the mood for soup, and absolutely no hot dogs, burgers or pasta. Well, I was in a pasta mood and noticed Swiss Louis on the second floor. We would check if they had tomato soup. We were sat down at a window with a good sea lions view. Turned out that they didn't have tomato soup but Katie now felt like she was in the mood for a kid's spaghetti. 

After dinner we went back to the hotel, played some tube ping pong, and went to our room. Katie read a book on the window seating and I watched some tv. It was a good first day and I started planning our second day in San Francisco.