Pacifica California

Sunday - We all slept in till 9am - Ate another terrific breakfast. The hotel has the best of all continental breakfasts! We left around 10am to visit the heart of SF... Chinatown... Traffic was ok.... took about 45 minutes and then to find a parking space! We finally found a spot where we needed to insert money and it would spit out a ticket... a little scary because there was no one there to guard the vehicles. We were on Broadway street which wasn't the best of locations but at least we had a van there when we got back. Some of the streets were very steep. In China town it was packed with shops and people. Kids didn't like the smell of some of the food stores... and it did make you wonder what all it was. After the first store it didn't take long for us to split up into guys and gals. The gals took too long looking(what us guys thought would be a few minutes turned in to "many minutes!" for only one shop) Devin, Dustin and I took off, looking at some misc shops. We liked the gongs. We had a guy demonstrate them for us. Too expensive though. We stopped at a couple of camera places looking for a battery charger. One guy went from a marked box of $149 to $39. It was still too expensive for what I wanted but it did tell me, you can bargain with these guys. Next store, I traded my old canon camera in for a new casio 5.1 mega pixels Model EX-Z50. So us guys had fun playing with a new toy! We ate lunch at a "Ming Hing" style, but not near as good as Ming Hing! After this We headed down hill from China town... 15 minute walk... to the bay. We enjoyed the park where all the Chinese guys were playing cards with a big group around the players cheering and having a good time. We stopped at Pier #1, the large building had written on it "Port of San Francisco" a beautiful building with alot of sail boats in the bay. Also we were right next to the bay bridge . Heading back to China town to meet up with the gals, we found that they weren't done shopping yet, so we needed to kill some more time not knowing how long they would take. We went to a pet store with lot of fish where Devin was in his glory. Then we found a corner refreshment store. We enjoyed our tapioca shakes, although it was plenty for Dustin. We were just ready to jump on to the trolly when the gals showed up. They were all excited about their many buys. Delight did a bunch of "wedding stuff" buying. They had a great time and wanted more time... us guys were tired and ready to head back. We drove up around the north side by the Golden Bridge to see if we could see it better and found it to be all fogged in. We have found that fog is a common thing! We stopped by "Steiner St" and took a picture with the family. They had Steiner/ Broadway written in the cement and Delight layed down by it and we took a picture. I believe people thought we might be crazy, but I'm sure we fit in with everyone else?? Heading back to the hotel the kids were wired! We enjoyed the the hilly streets, glad we had good brakes, amazed at how the cars park with 1/2 on the street and 1/2 on the sidewalk, enjoyed the colors of the houses, the pretty flowers, and again the fog. We pretty much holed up in our hotel for the evening and watched Stuart Little 1 and 2. I've been wanting to take a picture of the sun going down, but this definitely is not a place to do this.

Great surfing with great waves. Ask Devin and Dustin on waves that can gobble you up! Top Journal Day 6 Monday 18, 2005- Dustin and Rhoda Steiner Girls Day We didn't eat breakfast until about 9:15am, which was kind of nice. Delight, Jia and I decided to go look for wedding dresses. We checked out Nordstrom, but they only had dresses on line. We then crossed the San Mateo Bay Bridge. It was pretty amazing to go 65-70 miles an hour for approximatley 7 minutes to cross the 8 mile bridge. We went to the Wedding Gown Superstore and We found one that Delight especially liked, but we weren't impressed with their prices. It was then back over the bridge and we stopped at a David's Bridal on the way home. It was kind of amazing that they only had one person to help you and we weren't allowed to try even one dress on by ourselves. We decided they didn't want our business that badly, because we also didn't want to return 4 hours later for the first appointment. So much for wedding dresses for today! We have been enjoying playing hand and foot and relaxing in our room. That's what the gals did! Guys Day After eating breakfast, the girls left to go look for wedding stuff. We just sat around and i worked on the website a little bit. We went out to look for some crabs, but the tide was to high and me and Devin did not want to get soaked again by the freezing water. Dad didn't either, so we went back in to wait for it to go down. Watching some more t.v. and eating some lunch, we were just lazy. Dad went to the post office to send some stuff since we did not have any car to go anywhere. We went out and checked again for the tide but it was higher than before. It was colder today then it had been any other of the days, because the wind off the ocean. Some of us played hand and foot for awhile, but we really did not do anything much the whole day, although it was kind of nice just sitting around and being lazy. Top Journal Day 7 Tuesday 19, 2005- Dustin Steiner Today we woke up and ate breakfast before needing to checkout of our hotel. Leaving at about 10:10, we traveled south in to go to Pebble Beach. Our flight did not leave till 11:05 and we had the whole day to waste. We got down a ways and then realized that there was two Pebble Beaches and the one we wanted was a lot farther to drive. We decided to stop in Santa Cruz and waste a few hours. We walked around and it was very pretty there. It was a nice little town which thrived on tourism. It was sunnier then our place in Pacifica so it was much warmer. We ate at a Mexican Restaurant which was good and we walked around. Jia and I went on a ride that went fairly high in the air so I could take some pictures from the air. After being in Santa Cruz for two hours, we decided to head up to San Francisco. It was about a 1 and a half hour drive both directions maybe a little more, but we were all pretty tired. We got to a mall type of place at 4 and decided to stay there for awhile. Delight, Jia, and mom went to David's Bridal to try on a dress. They got a great deal on a dress and now we have to drag it home :-( Us guys went to Best Buy and looked around for a few hours and then we all ate at Burger King. The girls then went to Joanne Fabrics and we were just bored. After that we left for the airport which was close by. We filled our rental car back up with gas and took it in. We found our way up through security and now are waiting at our gate. I will continue this when we get back... Wednesday 20, 2005 Flying out about 11:10pm in California, we arrived at Cincinatti airport about 3:00am, but jumped ahead 3 hours to 6:00am. We then waited about an hour and flew home to Akron/Canton airport. The flight was pretty much uneventful except that our gate got switched 3 times and I couldn't sleep much at all. The movie that we watched was "Guess Who?" which I thought was pretty good. I slept a little on the ride home and then when we got home at about 9:30. I slept till about 4:00 which felt pretty good. Top Top 10 List 1. Chinatown 2. Quoting "The Grinch" 3. An Australian guy running into a glass door with a cup of coffee and saying "blast" 4. Continental Breakfast 5. Getting blasted by a freezing wave(Now I can say I've swam in the Pacific:-) 6. Muir Woods 7. Getting wedding dress, gifts, and accessories 8. Spotting hundreds of seals laying out in the sun 9. Pet Store in Chinatown 10. Beach (it was to cold to be anything higher in the list) Steiner7.com Main Page Pictures