Monday, October 27, 2008

A few fun days ...

The past few weeks we've had incredibly great weather in San Francisco (and the bay area). Not sure who to credit/blame for this, but we are enjoying it as much as we can. We had a great outing on friday (after school) and Saturday with the kids and a few friends. Friday after school we went to Hotel Nikko swimming pool and swam for some time. I took the opportunity to use the gym and did the elliptical machine for a mile and a stationary bike for a mile. The kids then warmed up in the sauna before we continued on our adventures. We took the powell street cable car and were headed toward ghiradelli square. After China town the cable car goes via Russian Hill (Hyde and Union), which is also the location of Zarzuela, one of our favorites tapas bar. It was early enough that we decided to jump out and have an early dinner with the kids.

The meal (tortilla omelet, patatas bravas, goat cheese in tomato sauce, grilled calamari, crab bisque soup) was quite good along with some excellent sangria. Maya was quite adventurous and tried (and liked) pretty much all the dishes. PJ pushed her boundaries a bit and tried a few more things in addition to her favorite food of bread with olive oil :). It was getting late so we headed back home. The first couple of cable cars were full, we managed to get on the third car and then took the underground to castro where the car was parked.

On saturday we headed to Muir woods to take the kids on a short hike. Our friend trish had an extra credit project out there and hence the outing. The extra credit was a bit lame (she just had to take a photograph and a receipt of the visit along with a short writeup), but we did get a decent hike in. Its quite amazing that even though the place is super crowded at the entrance, most of the crowd does not venture past the second bridge. We made it close to the end of the boardwalk trail with multiple snack stops and visits to big trees along the way. On the return, Tan, Trish, Nick and I took the hillside trail back to the visitor center. Towards the end of the hike, we lost sight of Nick and Trish. Tan was a bit flustered and we split up to find them. Trish and Nick were waiting for us at the entrance and did the wise thing of staying put. Since it was quite a hot day, we decided to head to chrissy field and spent a couple of hours at the beach. I went for a short 20 minute run along the beach to give my knees/muscles some more exercise. Nick and Trish wanted to eat at Cha Cha Cha, so we had an early dinner there. We had a large group so we got a taste of most of the dishes on the menu. Most of the food at C3 is mediocre, but it does have a few excellent dishes (potatoes, cajun shrimp, jerk chicken).

We had a nice long uphill walk back home (helps to get sober from all the sangria) and had a one spoon dessert of yummy salted-malted ice cream from Bi-rite Creamery. The kids (and us) were exhausted at the end of the day. My knee was quite sore and achy which meant i was fast asleep by 8:30 pm (kinda amazing how the body reacts to various things). I've been sleeping much better the past few weeks, but still not as good as I used to. The temperature difference between the two knees is quite amazing (you can literally feel the heat from the fixed knee. this is expected behavior and should slowly disappear as the knee heals)

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