It was going to be a rainy day, so the plan was to do a Big Bus tour in the morning and a museum in the afternoon. We didn’t have much to do until 10:00, so got up, got ready.  Went downstairs for breakfast and it turned out they had a whole big buffet something included in your room price.  It was a madhouse like you see in Europe, thousands of families out of control who’d never eaten before in their lives.  But we got the job done. It was a nice buffet, actually. I was a good son, fetched coffee and juice and silverware while Dad picked out his breakfast one-handed.

The start of the Big Bus route was literally around the corner.  We didn’t sit on the open second floor, just sat inside this time, because it had been raining all morning and rain was threatening still.  But did the whole two-hour-plus bus route, saw a lot of stuff, including going over the Golden Gate bridge.

One thing that was funny – we’d seen that car museum display on the Waymo self-driving cars in LA, but hadn’t actually seen any in action. But they were all over SF, couldn’t get enough of them. When I pointed one out to Dad from the bus, the tourist family across from us told us they’d actually ridden in one the day before, you just had to download an app. I kind of wanted to try it, but decided that was adding a level of difficulty to a trip which already had a high stress level.

After the Big Bus tour, we went to the older section of Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch and ate at the Old Fisherman’s Grotto, which if not an actual old timey restaurant, felt like one.  I had a shrimp panini and Dad had a crab one, with lots of fries.  We decided almost immediately to save off half a sandwich each to eat probably tomorrow.  Then a drugstore stop and back to the room.

Got ready to go to the modern art museum.  (We Uber’d.) Art museum was very crowded the day after Christmas, took a while to get tickets.  We did the exhibits on that floor (2) and then looked at the map, finding out there were a whole bunch of other floors.  We had to wait in line for the elevator – went up to the top floor, Dad realized it was an exhibit about sports stuff, and for my sake, we skipped it and took the stairs down to 6.  There was a lot of interesting stuff on 6, including an installation of an hour-long series of synched films of friends making music together in different locals.  But Dad started to fade, so we called it quits and went back to the hotel. (that was a shame, we missed a lot of the museum. But modern art can be hit or miss, so maybe we didn’t miss much.) Oddly enough he didn’t nap, but we had a relaxing afternoon.

When I asked what he wanted for dinner, he wanted ‘cioppino’, which I’d never heard of.  I did a little googling.  There was a restaurant a 10 minute walk away that had it, but he wasn’t up to the walk.  We ended up going to Betty Lou’s in the North Beach neighborhood, right near the City Lights bookstore, which we’d passed several times.  We had our only bad Uber experience – the driver couldn’t figure out to go in the driveway of the hotel (every other Uber driver had) and her car was smelly.

But Betty Lou’s was really good! After reviewing the menu and thinking that a bowl of cioppino might actually be too much food, Dad hemmed and hawed and I basically said, “look, you made the fuss, there will be cioppino ordered”. I agreed to help him with it, which I did, and I also had the lobster ravioli and we split a tiramisu. Service was great, this was a nice meal. I don’t know if I’d order cioppino just for me, it had shellfish, which I don’t like, but I selected bits of seafood I liked and it was really tasty.

Dad had also gotten in his head that he wanted to pick up some grappa to bring home, because for some reason, it’s hard to find in North Carolina. I’d noticed there was a liquor store immediately up the hill, so we went to that, but it was a sad little stand of a liquor store and they’d never heard of it. But of course now we’d left the restaurant, and it was raining and we had to summon an Uber. So I’m trying to keep Dad out of the wet, and the Uber shows up and for some reason decided to pull into the diagonal street by the liquor store, and keeps going. I’m trying to not to make Dad run, but I’m chasing the (slow-moving) Uber and finally rapped on the window. The driver got super-upset with me. “You nearly broke my car!”  “No I did not!”.  But he did drive us back and didn’t murder us or anything.

(that might have been the worst weather we ran into, and it wasn’t really too bad)

And so to bed.