Sonoma trip, day 1

After all the commotion of getting out of town before the blizzard, I'm feeling pretty relaxed. As the plane came in over the San Francisco bay it was pretty easy to leave everything behind, especially the weather. I already had a great sense of accomplishment because I finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance during the flight. I've been trying to finish the book since summer. Even though it was a good book, it was a long and complicated book so I took my time.

We got off the plane, grabbed our luggage and took the tram to get to our rental car. We hooked up the GPS and headed to Pier 39 for a nice seafood lunch. We passed Candlestick Park, AT&T Park, the Embarcadero, and many other cool San Francisco landmarks on the ride. Parking was a little difficult but we found a spot, put 5 bucks in the meter (yes $5) and walked from pier to pier. We stopped at Pier 39 and perused the shops along the way. We checked out a few menus posted in front of different restaurants before we chose the Pier 39 Seafood Market. It seemed like a perfect location to start our vacation. We were seated at a table by the windows and ordered Anchor Steam beer, a local brew they had on tap. It was pretty amazing looking out the windows over the water thinking about how we left blizzard conditions just a few hours earlier.

Lunch was very good and relaxing and we took our time. Since the meter was probably close to expiration after lunch we got in the car and headed to our hotel in Rohnert Park. We drove over the Golden Gate bridge on our way out of San Francisco and that was pretty cool.
We checked into our room and unpacked our luggage. Jeff read through most of our touristy, travel materials and had some ideas for things to do. Unfortunately, my camera was acting up so the first order of business was to go get a new one. I opted to head to a Wal Mart where I could get a nice compact Canon reasonably priced and if something went wrong with it, I could still return it when I got back home. So we bought a few snacky things while we were there to take with us on our rides through wine country. At the end of the day, we were pretty tired so we stopped at the In N Out burger to try one. It wasn't bad, but I doubt that I will ever go back. Check that off the to-do list.