San Francisco Trip - February 2018

"A four-hour time difference?! Child's play!" I told myself on Thursday.  At 3:30AM this morning, however, I was feeling a wee bit less nonchalant about it, as I was wide awake, staring at the ceiling.  "It's 7:30AM back home," my brain kept telling me, "time to get up!" We simply had a wonderful day today.  As the photos show, the sky was a perfect blue, with 17C.  We left the hotel at 7:45AM, equipped with our "Muni Passes" on our phones (the transit system covering all electric buses, trams and cable cards is called "Muni"), and set out to find Mel's Diner for breakfast.  Mel's goes back to 1947, and is about as old-school "diner" as it gets.  With a great breakfast under our belts, we set out to conquer San Francisco, the city of hippies, hipsters, vagrants, flagrants, and artsy-fartsies!  And I swear, we saw them all today. Our day went something like this: (1) The Embarcadero Ferry Terminal (re...

Someone at work said to me on Wednesday, "I can't believe you're going all that way for a weekend." California isn't exactly across the street, 'tis true.  However, we live in an age where you can connect any two dots on the planet with relative simplicity.  So, California isn't really that far. We were up at 3AM, out the door at 4AM, and were through US Pre-Clearance at Halifax Airport by 5AM.  The weather was great, to boot.  By 6PM, we were sitting comfortably on our United Airlines flight to Newark.  However, the Homeland Security computers were cranky, which delayed the processing of many passengers.  It all led to a delay of close to an hour.  Upon arrival in Newark, we rushed to our connecting gate to find they had already boarded.  It all made for a tight connection, but all worked out perfectly.  Transiting in New York can often be wrought with delays and problems, but today worked like a charm. We ...