Thanksgiving with the folks

Holly and I went to hang out with my parents and sister for thanksgiving. We spent pretty much all break (4 days) touring San Francisco (70%), eating (20%) and playing board games (10%).

On the first day, we went to Santa Cruz to see The Mystery Spot, a gravity-hill type of forced-perspective optical illusion. Wikipedia explains this further. I’ve been to one of these before in Kenya where you shift your gear to neutral and your car runs up the hill and I’d read about the phenomenon since then and understood that it was optical distortion from forced perspectives, but it was still really hard to accept it when we were actually at the place.

The next day, we took a tour of San Francisco on a double-decker bus. I’d never been on one of these before (neither the tour nor the bus) so thanks to my super-awesome^(TM) sister, I got to see San Francisco in a new light, and in fact even discover why the 49ers are called that. We were done with this by around 1pm or so even after our long and tiring trip into Chinatown, so we headed next to the wax museum. Nothing special. Probably about as cool as any other wax museum. Pretty cool, but not exactly a “I’m definitely going to that again!” thing. Found out while buying that tickets that my dad gets a senior citizen discount. Then we drove up to the top of Lombard Street and drove down. Holy crap. Holy crap.

The third day was the obligatory Golden Gate bridge tour followed by looking at the WWII-era torpedoes and all that. After that was a detour to one of a hundred Starbucks around the area to fix our sugar cravings. We rounded off the day by visiting the Palace of Fine Arts and staring at Sea Gulls staring at us and trying to use Jedi mind tricks to get us to give them our food. To round off the day, we went to Target and bought Monopoly Here & Now the Electronic version (this is frustrating as crap; don’t get it), Catchphrase and UNO-attack and came back home.

And that was my thanksgiving break. Very tiring, but very enjoyable. Next time, I’m going to do either a vineyard tour or an eat-your-way-through-san-francisco tour.