About the worst feeling you can have when on vacation is when your burglar alarm company calls you to tell you your alarm has gone off and that they've dispatched the police. I can't tell you enough how crappy I felt when I got the call at 7am California time.
I eventually got the police on the phone and learned they cleared house, so apparently it was a false alarm. My father also went by and checked inside and out. I was relieved, but also puzzled, because that was my first ever non-self-induced false alarm. And the fact that it was a motion sensor that was tripped... strange stuff. Not that I'm complaining. False-alarm good. Real-alarm bad. Especially when on vacation, a thousand plus miles away.
After we got up and settled, I finally got broadband back. Our hosts (my children's aunt, or my ex-sister-in-law, and her husband) have DSL, so I'm finally able to catch up on posts. Most were composed or outlined offline and finished once I got connectivity back. Others may still come late as we are still quite busy.
Anyway, once we got on with the day, I took the kids to a nearby lake with a fantastic view of the mountains (I guess thus the name of the town). We had lunch at the lakeside cafe, did paddleboats for an hour, and played at the park. I (truthfully) told the kids if we lived here, we'd visit that place all the time. It also had a bike/skate trail we were unable to make use of, and in addition to renting paddleboats, you could rent actual sail boats and take lessons. Definitely a place I'd like to visit more.
But all of this was basically to occupy ourselves while our hosts, who are not on vacation, worked. We met them later in the day to pursue our real plans.
Our plans involved catching an express train into San Francisco, only that train departed the station as we watched. It's a short walk from where we were staying to the train station, but we didn't walk fast enough, so we had to catch a non-express train (MANY more stops) ten minutes later. It worked out okay, though, as we still made it to our destination just in time.
The destination was SBC Park (formerly Pacific Bell Park), home of the Giants. We watched a very good game (Giants won, having come back from behind), ate the requisite garlic fries, and experienced the real San Francisco in the form of 39,000+ screaming fans. Our seats were right among the drunk hecklers, so there are many stories to tell (oh the silly things drunk people do) that I'll save for another day. I also have some good pics that will be posted later. One thing I will say is that I got Darby in a little trouble. I sent her down to the outfield wall to bug an outfielder for a ball after he warmed up. She was told shortly thereafter by an usher that she couldn't be there. I only had her do that because earlier the outfielder threw the ball to a kid not fifteen feet from us in the stands. She didn't let me hear the end of it after that.
Stadium pics have been posted to the Picasa album.
After the game we booked to the train station and this time caught the express train back (only 7 stops, less than half). We made it back in very good time, to conclude an excellent day (considering how it started) in the bay (area).
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