Happy Birthday Spencer!

Well, Spencer turned the big 2-8 on Saturday! To celebrate, we decided to head up to San Francisco. It was a pretty great day!

Here are a few pictures from the drive in. You can see that the hills all around are totally covered with houses...all different colors, and pretty tall. We were amazed at the skyline. There are so many huge buildings there! I also included a picture of one of the many bridges here in San Francisco. I think it is the Bay Bridge. I couldn't get a good picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, because of the walls along the side of the road. You can see it was pretty overcast the day we went in. Everyone's been saying it's uncharacteristally cool right now.
When we got closer to Fisherman's Wharf, we several big groups of people touring around on Segways. That would be an awesome way to tour San Francisco! Spencer was pretty jealous.



When we got to San Francisco, we decided to head down the the Fisherman's Wharf area to explore. Here, we're visiting the National Liberty Ship Memorial. We got to see the USS Pampanito submarine, and the SS Jeremiah O'Brien up close. We could have gone onboard and looked around, but that was a little expensive, and claustrophobic for me. We also got a good look at Alcatraz Island (I keep wanting to call it Azkaban). All the tours were sold out for Memorial Day Weekend, so we're thinking of heading up there again this weekend to take the tour.




While we were at Fisherman's Wharf, we found this great little arcade area that had tons of old quarter machines. We had a fun time exploring this area, and found some pretty funny/crazy old games. I'm standing by "Laugh with Jolly Jack", and Spencer found "Laugh with..." some crazy lady. They look pretty funny.




We finally headed down to Pier 39 and had a fun time down there. We watched a magic show, and wandered through the little stores along the pier. We also sat for a long time and watched the Sea Lions. They were so entertaining! It was pretty noisy, and there was a lot of fighting going on. We took a video clip of them, but I'm not sure how to put that on here. Apparently the Sea Lions started taking over these docks in January 1990 shortly after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. We watched a guy going out with a big board on some of the docks around to scare the sea lions off the docks that were by boats. It's quite a big job, since the sea lions would just watch for him to walk away, and then jump back up on the docks.



After exploring Fisherman's Wharf for a few hours, we hopped in the car and drove along the shore line. We passed the Golden Gate Bridge, and drove down along the shore to Santa Cruz. It was a beautiful drive, with great beaches and views of the ocean. We stopped at one beach just outside San Francisco, and then stopped at the beach down in Santa Cruz to walk around.




As a side note, we got to go to our ward out here on Sunday, and everyone was really nice. The Relief Society president told me they'd be sure to take care of Spencer while I was gone. :)
On Thursday, we went out to dinner with a bunch of people from Spencer's section at work. It was his manager's birthday, so they were out celebrating. Moving around the country is helping us learn a whole new language. In Oklahoma we picked up the phrase "Big Ol'", as in "See that big ol' cow over there?" Now we're learning a new California word (Well, at least new to us). Here, everyone uses the word "hella" in place of "very". As in, "I went to a hella fun party last night", or "That house is hella big". Don't know that I'll be using that phrase, though. But I do catch Spencer saying "big ol" a lot.