And speaking of good business partners, Mike pulled up in our driveway around 8am. I had already been up for three hours sending out the last flurry of emails, but it was time to shut things down and grab our bags. It was vacation time. We were headed to British Columbia, but we were taking the long route so we could visit some friends and family that we don't get to see enough.
Our first stop was the San Diego airport. We were connecting there for a delayed flight up to San Francisco. But as Aimee put it, this was a glass half-empty/half-full situation.
Those beers cost us half our vacation budget, but they were totally worth it.
We arrived in San Francisco around dinner time, and Danielle, one of Aimee's longtime friends, picked us up at the airport. Danielle's middle child also happens to be Aimee's goddaughter, so there was lots of catching up to do on the car ride to dinner. Like, where has Dora the Explorer been lately, and what happened to the drivers of the purple truck?
Dinner was at a great little seafood restaurant in Pier 39, a long abandoned fishing port that was renovated in the late 1970s into a waterfront entertainment district.
And thus began our donut tour of the Pacific Northwest, but more on that later.
After dinner, we made the two hour drive out to Turlock, the inland agricultural town where Danielle and her family live. Danielle's husband, Fernando, had already put their youngest to bed, and the other two had passed out three minutes into the drive home. So we all sat around their kitchen table and had some (more) dessert, as well as the first conversation of the evening that didn't involve animated characters. It was great to visit with them, and it wasn't long before even the grown-ups got heavy eye lids.
We made a surprisingly comfortable bed out of couch cushions and blankets. But by that point, we could have fallen asleep right at the table.
Not a bad first day of vacation.
