The internet is a funny place. While San Francisco was all about reconnecting with old friends, Seattle is about visiting and staying with newer friends made online. On our first 3 days in Seattle, we housesat our friend’s amazing loft with a view in Pioneer Square while they were out of town. We have never met them in person though. Now that we are a family of four, staying with Mark’s mom or sister gets a bit complicated since neither have the space to accommodate us. I am completely amazed by the generosity and trust of each of these 3 families who have invited us into their homes on our Washington leg of our trip (even for a second year) without having initially met us in person first. Luckily, we all get along.

And thank you, internet friends, for your thoughtful comments about Tobi. The girls keep asking whether he is still alive and we keep saying that he is not. Maybe being so far away has made this easier. Maybe not. It’s certainly a distraction, but I am really feeling right now how far away from home we are as we continue to get news after news of things happening back home. Riding out the East Coast hurricane 3000 miles away was stressful. My neighbors and family are fine even if my parents are still without power, but my mom has been in the hospital twice now since we’ve been away and today there is new concern and worry about her health. We come home on Saturday to a mountain of things to be dealt with. I am anxious.

And for those very few people who read blogs and don’t think anything of leaving hurtful, judgmental comments, remember that there is a real person with real feelings on the other side of these words you read. There is just no need.

Tobi at the beginning of his life. Tobi at the end of his life.

Ridiculously surreal to be dealing with this over the phone 3000 miles away. We were on a ferry departing the San Juan Islands when I got a phone call from our cat sitter. I made the authorization to the vet to euthanize in the car ride back to Seattle. Mia overheard the phone conversations. She was very upset. Claudine was too busy with her sticker book on the ferry and was napping in the car so she wasn’t aware of what was going on. Mark later told her when they were sitting together on a park bench in Seattle that Tobi was sick and sleeping forever when she said that she missed him (she has said that a few times over the course of the trip). She then stepped away from the bench and started crying.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow we abandoned him and that he was all alone those last hours. Our neighbor (1 of 3 people we asked to stop by and take care of our cat) sent me photos of his kids giving Tobi lots of pets and hugs yesterday. The 2 year old wanted to see the cat again so they went over a second time. This made me feel better. He had lots of company on his last day.

I suspect it won’t really hit us until we get home. I’ll likely never forget that ferry ride.

Seattle…the weather has been perfect so far and such a nice and warm change to chilly San Francisco. The first thing we did was basically hand the kids off to Mark’s mom, who picked us up at the airport, and Mark and I took a leisurely walk through Pike Place Market. The market is such a different experience when you’re not walking it with kids.
We took our time at the stalls, grabbed a crab cocktail to share, bought some wine, and went into every store we’d normally avoid if we were with the girls. Made me realize that I couldn’t remember the last time Mark and I just took a walk by ourselves, just the 2 of us. Pretty sad. So we did it again one evening a few nights later. Walked down to the waterfront as the girls were being tucked into bed and watched the sunset on the pier over cones of Huckleberry ice cream.

Oh, and one last photo of San Francisco below as we pulled away from the airport after getting up at the ungodly hour of 4am to catch our Seattle flight. Look how the fog monster hovers over the city like a blanket. Amazing.

I’m not even a big donut person, but these donuts from Dynamo Donuts were absolutely deeelicious. We had 8 different kinds. Yeah, that’s right, 8 donuts for the 4 of us. We also had a nice chat with Sara Spearin, the owner and chef of Dynamo who Mark worked under as Assistant Pastry Chef in New York. It was his first pastry position job when we first moved out there and I remember Sara saying at the time that she called him for an interview because he went to college in Olympia and had just moved from Portland (Sara is from Oregon). If you’re out in San Francisco, you really ought to make a trip to Dynamo but you need to come early because there’s usually a line (again with the lines in this city!).

Our last day in San Francisco ended up being super nice. It was warm for the first time so we took the girls to China Beach to run around in the Pacific Ocean. Couldn’t really see the Golden Gate Bridge because the smoke monster (I mean The Fog) was hovering around the bridge and East Bay. Can you see it off in the horizon? We drove a few miles towards Golden Gate Bridge and it was completely foggy and quite cool there. Literally a different climate and landscape. So fascinating that it can be sunny and warm in one location, but foggy and cool a few blocks away.

ok…so I’m kinda freaked out about the Hurricane happening in the East Coast and obviously New York. It’s weird to be all the way over here and not be able to do anything about it except watch it unfold live like some disaster movie. Thanks to our cat sitter Mark and our neighbors for bringing in all our plants and furniture off our balcony. Be safe East Coast! I’ll be glued online to see how it unfolds.

No, it smells like lavender and citrus and lucky for us, our old friend Killian works at Skywalker Ranch as one of their artists. Not exactly sure what Mia thinks Star Wars is supposed to smell like, but Claudine exclaimed that the grill cheese sandwich that she ordered for lunch at the ranch was the cheesiest sandwich ever. And it was.

Have you ever stood around with your old friends and surveyed the kids you’ve produced and thought, “gee, we made these. We have kids. OMG, we’re adults”. This happened quite a bit on our San Francisco trip as we reconnected with some old friends we haven’t seen in at least 10 years. We met our old college friend Jeremiah and his family at the Exploratorium and geeked out in the monochromatic room (a room where there is no color unless you shine a white light on things. Trippy) and tried to keep track of 4 kids under 8 years old. An impromptu dinner invitation at their house in the Mission resulted in Mark ending up cooking the meal because he’s just so much faster at chopping up vegetables than any one of us.

The next evening we managed to have dinner at Chez Panisse without the kids thanks to an invitation for reservations AND babysitting from one of Mark’s old co-workers who used to work the line with him at a restaurant in Soho back in the late 90s when they were both starting out in the business. Melissa and her husband both worked at Chez Panisse for a number of years. And lastly our last morning in San Francisco was spent at Dynamo Donuts, the *excellent* donut shop that Mark’s old Pastry Chef boss back in NY opened up a few years ago (more photos on that later).

We’re actually in Seattle now but have more San Francisco photos to share. That trip was all about connecting with people we’ve known for a long time, some for nearly 20 years. Quite a trip.

We spent the morning by the wharf on Sunday morning and yeah…we were one of those tourists who keep the San Francisco fleece business afloat and healthy because Claudine was freezing and we had to run in and buy her something warm. And people were swimming in this water! At 58 degrees!

Apparently the gang all had a grand time and played old school pinball and other things while I went to my photoshoot in a nearby neighborhood. A seagull snatched Mia’s corndog right out of her hand (not the first time this has happened either – Claudine lost a hotdog to a seagull in similar fashion on Long Island). The view and the water, however, was worth all the shivering. I’m sort of fascinated by the fog. It hovers over the city waiting to roll in like a smoke monster. It always looks a bit ominous far away on the horizon.

A nearly 40 degree drop from where we were just a few days ago. I could feel the cold through the car window as we drove closer to the bay. When we got up in the morning at our friends’ Killian and Catherine’s apartment in Berkeley, it felt like a crisp NY day in October. Our friends, who we’ve known since our Portland (and later Brooklyn) days, had a hearty spread of a breakfast ready for us. We then headed out to the Ferry Terminal Market and made our way through Chinatown. And what’s with the lines out the door to get ice cream in this city? We waited for 30 minutes at Ici on College Avenue in Berkeley the first night and on another line at Humphry Slocombe in the Mission the next. AND we were standing among people dressed in NorthFace down jackets and flip flops.

Ok, so…I like traveling with the kids, I really do. But it’s nearly impossible to take a leisurely browse through the market. There were a dozen stands and shops that I would have loved to shop in…but it didn’t happen. I suppose it’s better for my wallet.

The landscape around Yosemite and the drive towards San Francisco is so foreign and different especially because we’re mostly used to Northeast and Northwest landscapes and terrains. I’ve driven it before, but not in a while. And really, there’s not too much to see except parched yellow grass, cows and some trees, but when the sun begins to go down the ride turns into something else all together. The sunset lingers across the entire stretch of the horizon with glowing edges at the ends of the earth. At this hour, the landscape takes on a dramatic turn when the windmills come into view. Silhouetted by the sunset, the rotation of the turbines mesmerize and I’m glad to be able to burn this image into memory once again.

Yeah, not such a fan of airplanes, particularly the little commuter jet that we had to get on from Vegas to Fresno. It’s sort of exciting to board a plane out on the tarmac, but then when you get on and you can reach both sides of the plane with arms outstretched, you’re just “oh”, particularly because you know Mark gets motion sickness easily. Yes, that’s right. Hawaii helicopter tours, Alaskan whale watching cruises, drives up windy mountain roads – all ruined because of extreme nausea. The girls thought the tiny plane was “cute” and laughed every time the plane did a little drop because it gave them butterflies in their stomach. They were in hysterics the whole ride. Mark and I weren’t so amused. We felt like old people.

The next day, my brother drove us to Yosemite with a little help from anti-nausea medicine. The girls were complaining of car sickness but everyone did fine. Yosemite is…ah, you know, here are some photos, which you can’t even get a sense of the place through pictures or even one day there, really. It’s like the time we went to the Grand Canyon, on a stop during a cross country road trip. It was so surreal that it looked like we were staring at a movie set. But the real fun started on the descent down from Yosemite. Winding, steep roads for the better part of 2 hours. Seriously, it wouldn’t end. Claudine threw up cheddar bunnies and ice cream and freaked out because she’s not normally a pukey kid and she didn’t know what was happening. We had inadequate supplies to clean her up with. Good times.

Oh, and it’s nearly impossible to take a good family photo. The girls aren’t having it. This is the best we can do. I look forward to many more years of awkward families photos in front of monuments and landmarks.