We ate at Nick's Lighthouse last night. As it turns out that is the same place that Gina and her friend Brenda ate at when she was in San Fran last time.
I started out the crab adventure looking to eat a crab all by myself, but the idea of clam chowder inside of a bread-bowl was too much for me. I ended up ordering the sourdough bread-bowl of clam chowder, Gina ordered a full crab and we split an order of fried calamari (which was EXCELLENT).
My chowder was good, the bread-bowl was really good. I also had an Anchor-Steam, a local brew that is quite popular and tasty. Gina had a Corona with her crab. I stole a couple of the smaller pieces of her crab for myself.
I am not a crab hater, but it isn't the first thing that I crave when we hit a seafood place like the Fisherman's Wharf area. But for me the trip to the Fisherman's Wharf area was more about the experience of eating down in that area (being a bit touristy) vs eating fried fish or shrimp.
Gina loved the crab and as always with crab had a great time cracking it open (with little use of the utilities they provide).
During our trip down there, Gina thought we were going to miss the wharf and had us get off the street car early. As it turned out I think we were still about 2 miles from the wharf at that point. We enjoyed the walk, but the last block or so we definitely felt it was time to sit down and eat.
We were accosted by a street salesman along the way, trying to pitch us on a weekend in Napa Valley at some swanky new $100M hotel that has the USA's first, only and largest 'wine cave'. His pitch was nice and informational at first, but then he cranked it up into the high pressure area, Gina hates sales people, particularly the high pressure kind. I sort of have an affinity for sales people, I love to see how well they do in their pitch.
I love talking with a good sales person, someone who knows their product and is a true practitioner of the craft. I HATE and have no issue being a bit rude to BAD sales people. Often BAD sales people reek of desperation or just flat out don't care about what they are doing.
Gina gave me the perfect out as she just sort of said 'OK, I am done.' and walked away. I told the guy that I had to leave as I had 'lost my wife'. He continued his hard sales push and ceased to be a good sales guy. In part, yes a sales person does need to have a level of persistence that one can call 'annoying' but a GOOD sales person knows when they have lost the (immediate) opportunity and knows when to stop, as not to damage what (little) relationship with the prospect might exist.
Anyway, the food was GREAT.
We grabbed some taffy from a store there across from restaurants.
Along the way over to the Trolley cars I saw a
'Trader Joe's'.
I have read about the store and wanted to witness what it was all about. It sort of reminds me a of a miniature Central Market.
Another one of the things I had read about was 'Two Buck Chuck', which is apparently a good wine that is only $2/bottle. However, I wasn't sure the name of the wine was actually 'Two Buck Chuck' or something else.
We wandered around the store until we found a wine that was $1.99, the name is Charles Shaw, and the nickname for Charles is Chuck.
We bought a bottle of Shiraz and Cabernet, I will let you know how those turn out.
Well, my laundry is done, so I am thinking that we should pack it in and head back to the hotel, drop off the laptops and head out for the next adventure.
I think we are going to hit up the
Timbuk2 retail store and see if we can find the ASPCA while we are here.
Laterz
Gina decided to come with me to BrainWash, seeing as I had woken her up beyond her ability to go back to sleep with the clickety-clack of the keyboard while typing my last blog post.
This meant that we would both have the fun of an adventure of going to a strange Cafe+Laundromat. The walk over from the Hotel was not too bad, as far as the distance goes, but the area we had to walk through is definitely in a revitalization stage.
Gina informed me that the Yahoo! Travel description for our hotel said not to go in the direction we were going as far as walking to get to BrainWash. When I asked the Concierge how to get to the corner of Folsom and Langston, he didn't say anything along the lines of 'Be careful you might get mugged.'
That meant that overall I wasn't too worried about the walk over to the laundromat.
However, along the way I must say that there were a couple of times where I was glad to be making the walk in broad daylight vs dusk or evening.
Gina and I split the 'Blue Collar' special, it was a tasty scramble of eggs, bacon, onions, peppers and I think some tomatoes were in there. The hash brown/home fries were excellent, Gina loved the toast and I ordered an English muffin on the side, which was honestly one of the best (if not the best) English muffin I have ever had.
Gina helped me out using the wash, as I am not accustomed to using pay washers, I am sure if left to my own devices I would have eventually found the hard to read instructions on where to put the soap.
My stuff is in the dryer right now and should be done in about 20 minutes.
The free wifi here along with the excellent food made me think about Jeremy's side project,
Grubfi.com.
After breakfast, we broke out the laptops, we definitely are a modern couple. Gina informed me that her beanatx email address (@sbcglobal.net) had been suspended. I was pretty sure I had paid the Uverse bill, since I had been on the phone with customer-service just the other day. However, it turns out that I had not.
However, the customer service agent informed me that her email address should not have been suspended by me forgetting to pay the bill on time. So I have now been on hold with customer service for about 20 minutes.
I am pretty sure that my being on the phone is annoying the gentleman next to us, he looks like he came to drink coffee and enjoy himself and not have two out of towners get on on their cell phones.
The coffee here is pretty good.
All for now about the BrainWash, next post will be about the wharf and crab last night.
Laterz
Saturday, April 26. 2008
I am not necessarily convinced yet, but pretty close to it that The Benner household (of Cedar Park) needs another set of luggage, particularly a roller-bag of medium size.
We have two HUGE roller-bags, one medium and I think a pair of small (overhead sized ones).
Then I have a couple of duffel bags, one very large blue one that I got from one of my Aunts (David's sister) the other is green, I bought it at Academy that makes a great overnight bag.
I however also happen to take the green duffel with when we go to Michigan as space is limited in the car when we drive up (because the dogs have a lot of luggage, crates, chewies, beds, etc). When I take it to Michigan I manage to pack about a week's worth of clothes into it.
That is what I did for the trip to San Francisco, I managed to pack enough clothes to make it to Saturday. However, that means that I don't have clothes for Sunday or Monday.
I didn't think it would be a big deal to find a laundromat near the hotel, and I was right.
I found,
BrainWash, it is a laundromat and a Cafe.
I had originally thought about dropping stuff off there on Friday morning, however that didn't work out. So I am going to head down there in a few minutes. Google maps says that it is only .5 miles away, so I am figuring about a 10-15 minute walk, depending upon how lost I get along the way.
Gina and I had fun yesterday, I will try to blog about that from BrainWash.
