Sunday, October 4, 2009

From Honolulu to San Francisco

Friday dawned, sunny and gorgeous again. We had to pack up and get ready to leave finally. We had enough time to get a few last minute goodies to take home, take a few more shots of the beach. But then it was time to pack up and go to the airport.

We hate red-eye flights, so we didn't plan to go all the way back to Boston. It's basically impossible to do that from Hawaii in one day without either an overnight layover, or a red-eye flight. So we had decided to just fly as far as San Francisco, and spend a couple nights there. Give us a chance to start getting the jet lag over, and its always fun to spend a day in San Francisco, there's always something to do.

Our flight left Honolulu around noontime. It's a 5 hour flight, with a 3 hour time change, so we get into SFO sometime around 8-8:30PM. No rental car this time, we head out to the taxi stand to get a ride into the city. The first couple of taxis in the line are all regular sedans. Now we have a LOT of luggage, and there's no way it will all fit in a regular sedan trunk. So after waiting a minute, a van pulls up and the driver waves us up. He can fit all our bags, no problem. He then proceeded to try and set a new land speed record, getting us to our hotel. I believe we broke the sound barrier when we passed by Candlestick Park (or whatever the 49ers stadium is called these days). It got even more exciting once we were in traffic, and he's threading the needle between parked cars, and moving cars whose drivers are talking on cell phones.

Fortunately we got to the hotel in one piece.

I had decided for this trip I wanted to stay in the Embarcadero. It would be a change from the usual Union Square location. And since we'd be there on a Saturday, we'd be able to visit the ferry market in the morning. So I chose the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero. When I was planning, I was thrilled to get a good price on an "Embarcadero Suite". Well, I was even more thrilled when we got to the room. We were up on the 12th floor, at the end of the hotel closest to the bay. The room is quite large, with a king size bed, dresser, and bedside tables on one side of the entrance hall, and a sitting area with 2 loveseats, a large coffee table, a desk and a large flatscreen tv on the other side. And stretched across the full length of the room are sliders. There's no balcony, but the doors do open, and there is a concrete railing to keep one from falling out. And outside the windows is a glorious view of the Ferry building, the city, and the Bay Bridge all lit up.




I know its crazy to be in San Francisco and NOT go out for a fabulous meal. But we were beat, it was late, And the room was really cool, with the view and all, so we just ordered up room service. And the Hyatt does a decent job with food, it was really quite tasty.

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