When you fly from Asia to the US via the Pacific you gain a day. So though we left on Monday morning and flew 12 1/2 hours from Hong Kong to San Francisco, we actually arrived in San Francisco at 9:30 am (which was like 12am HK time) on Monday morning. The same day lived twice in two cities.
So other than a very uneventful flight (thank you, Jesus), our first Monday on the plane had nothing remarkable about it, other than Econ Man and I had no sleep, which means our second Monday would be very, VERY long. We were stopping over in San Fran to break up our trip home. We've learned from experience not to push the kids too much. The expectations of a half-day's plane journey can't be extended to two more additional plane rides home. It ends up being about a days worth of travel with cranky, tired, whiny kids. So we stop in San Fran and deal with our initial jetlag there.
Our second Monday consisted of getting to our hotel in Union Square--the same hotel we always stay at while in San Francisco. We have a lot of family memories here. But we were so exhausted when we arrived we decided a nap was in order. Only problem was that we forgot to set an alarm. So our nap went from 11:30 to 4:30. Oops. This meant we'd have to keep the kids up to almost midnight so we'd actually sleep tonight and not wake up in the middle of the night.
But we needed to get out and walk. We needed fresh chilled San Fran air to wake us up and keep us up. So we walked from Union Square down to the Embarcadero--one of our favorite areas of town on the bay.
While we were there we saw a large fuel fire break out in the distance. Econ Man thought it was at one of the refineries in the area. It was quite the spectacle as a massive cloud of black smoke poured into the skyline around San Francisco.
We stood in a line at 5:30 waiting to get into one of our favorite restaurants at The Embarcadero--The Slanted Door. They put us at the communal table, which turned out to be great because we were back there by ourselves. We cheersed each other for a great trip together and a safe return home to The States.
Then we walked. We walked up past Chinatown towards The Fairmont where The Tonga Room resides in the hotel basement. This place is great and we thought the boys would think it's fun. It's like a kitschy trip to the South Pacific. It rains in there. There are tikis and floating ships. Kind of crazy for The Fairmont, but quite an institution. After WWII, GIs returned to The States via San Francisco from the Pacific, and The Fairmont wanted to create a place that would reflect this piece of history. The old hotel pool is in the basement and so they turned it into the Tonga Room. Anyway, we walked up a killer hill, only to arrive to a Tonga Room closed for refurbishment. We were really bummed. So then we walked back down another very steep hill towards Union Square, where we returned to our hotel.
Jetlag setting in.
We went upstairs and watched a Netflix movie on Econ Man's computer, and then finally crashed about 11:30. We wanted to keep the kids up as late as possible so we wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night from jetlag related insomnia. Keeping our fingers crossed.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Location:Hong kong and San Francisco
No comments:
Post a Comment