The moral of our weekend outings to San Francisco is that you CAN'T do it in a day. But we had lots of fun trying. Turned out that one group wanted to try the transportation theme, another opted for "just" Golden Gate Park. Sounds like we should schedule more trips to the big city to the north more often.

The excursion to Golden Gate Park started at the Academy of Sciences. It was, surprisingly, not crowded, perhaps because the weather was so nice. One of our younger participants was fascinated by the pendulum, which was just about to knock down a pin when first we arrived, so we had to return on the hour to see subsequent pins go down.

We progressed through the aquarium to the touch pools, alternately tormented and fed the birds in the courtyard, had lunch in the cafeteria, checked out the scarey spiders, played with the dinosaurs, puzzles and animals in the play rooms, and checked out the tableaus of animals long dead.

There were tears when we left, but it was a lovely day and the adults wanted to check out the plant sale at the Arboretum. We used the rest rooms at the Japanese Gardens (not clean), but the gardens are beautiful. A fun and a full day.