We woke up and drove about 40 min to get to San Francisco from Petaluma.  The first thing that we wanted to see was the Golden Gate Bridge. There was so much foginess that day, that we couldn’t see the whole bridge. The fog was covering half of it.  We left to go into the city, in hopes that the fog would burn off by the end of the day and that we could see the full bridge later. First stop was the Japanese Tea Garden. It was the oldest Japanese tea garden in the US. It was beautiful. A great place to relax and take pics. We stopped at their snack shop and had some snacks and teas. We sipped our jasmine tea and iced green tea while overlooking the gardens. It was really peaceful. We explored the gardens and took a ton of pics. Then we headed to Chinatown! My family is part Filipino and they love Asian food, as do I! My cousin, Jen, suggested an authentic Chinese restaurant called  R & G Lounge. We went to check it out. It was super nice upstairs, which was at street level. Once in the restaurant, we walked down the steps to be seated.  It was super authentic. We shared the avocado salmon egg rolls, a veggie fried rice, special beef, and garlic honey chicken with broccoli. It was all really good!  After we finished, we headed to the Apple Store, which was HUGE!!! It was 3 stories tall, with clear steps that you could see through…. pretty crazy! Next we walked to the Vans store, because it’s our families favorite place to shop! Cade found some new classic black and white vans for school and Some shirts. Arthur Thomas got a pair of slip on Peanuts Vans. They have all the snoopy characters on them, they are So so cute. Then we walked back to our car. Everything is hilly in San Fran and it’s a big city so you park and walk everywhere that’s within a reasonable distance. On the way back to the car we stopped a couple of shops in Chinatown to have a look.  Then we took the car to Japantown! Japantown has a mall called the Japan Center, everything in it is Japanese. The one thing that Cade really wanted to do on this trip, was to go to Chocolate Chair, a popular dessert shop that sells  Dragon Balls. I’ll post a video for you to see! We hit up a cute fragrance gift shop in Japantown and bought some incense. Then we went to Chocolate Chair.  I wasn’t that impressed with the Dragon Balls… they are slightly flavored like fruit but are the consitentcy of cheese puffs and they smoke when you bite into them. I got a salted caramel ice cream and a rose macaron to share with Arthur. Arthur Thomas got watermelon sorbet. And Cade got the 🐉 dragon balls. We took some videos of them and had our dessert, then we got in the car and drove to fishermans wharf. It was so so cute down there! Tons of shops and restaurants looking over the bay. It was wonderful and I was wishing we had hung out there more that day. We could see Alcatraz from the wharf. I would love to go there one day when the boys are older.  We walked to pier 39, where we were told we could see sea lions. One of my goals on this trip was to see sea lions in the wild and so far, this would be the second time to see them. Y’all they are so cute and chubby! They bark so loudly. I just love them! They were all gathered towards the back of the pier 39. We got a great glimpse of them this time. We could see them more closely than we did at La Jolla.  After I got my sea lion fix we went to a fabulous gift shop. I don’t know what the name of it was, but they had the best designs and best prices of any gift shop we had seen on the trip. We found some cute shirts and then went to Hard Rock cafe for a late dinner. My family loves Hard Rock. The food is always good and the music is always fun! I love to educate our kids on bands and music from all eras! Then we grabbed a Biscoff latte at Biscoff (who knew they had coffees) and hit the road to head back to Petaluma. The fog still covered the bridge, so I guess we will have to go back to see it someday! When we got back to the campground, I checked to make sure no one had taken all of our laundry that we had left out to dry all day! Everything was there still! What a great campground! Then we hit the sack for another sleep under the stars! 

​

​​​​

​​​