Wham Bam, Thank You San Fran. Part 4 in a series of 4. Thankfully.

I’m back! Yes I thought I’d finish off our San Fran tales before passing the ‘blog’ baton back to Marc. It’s taken a long time to get to this stage so thanks for sticking with us!

Sunday morning came and I awoke tummy ache free – well it seemed to have gone and I could actually walk around so it was a step in the right direction. The question then is what were our plans today to be? We decided to kickstart the action with a trip down memory lane, for us Furnesses anyway. I have thus far neglected to tell you that I have been to San Francisco once before, back on a family holiday about 15 years or so ago. It was during this vacation that we experienced the best breakfast buffet ever. As a family we have often reminisced about this breakfast and we’ve spoken about it so much that even Marc knew of it and the esteem it was held in within the Furness clan. Could it live up to its memory? Whilst the rest of us were reticent to risk tarnishing our memories, Mum wanted to put it to the test so off we went to the famed “The Palace Sunday Jazz Brunch”. The buffet is served in this huge glass atrium garden room which actually featured in the movie “the Game” where Michael Douglas crashes through it at the end – I don’t think he did actually fall through this as it would have cost millions to replace so I think there was some camera trickery involved there.

We were shown to our table and Marc’s eyes widened with wonder. As we sipped on our champagne (limitless I hasten to add) we took in the array of food on offer. It was incredible and I’d go so far as to say it was even better than we’d remembered. We’d only ever experienced their breakfast buffet before but as this was Brunch it was so much more. My favourite thing was the tiny, melt in the mouth pancakes with maple syrup. This was closely followed by the perfectly cooked poached eggs with hollandaise sauce and smoked salmon, or perhaps it was the miniature pastries? Oh and this was only the breakfast offerings. There was still a carvery, a cheese table, a seafood bar, a crepe station, sushi, dim sum and to finish off an amazing dessert table to sample. We all tried to pace ourselves and sample as much as we could humanly manage. At least we knew we wouldn’t need to eat again for a week.

We managed to roll ourselves out of there after a few hours and decided to take a ride on one of the famous trams down to Pier 33. Or is it Pier 31. I can’t remember. Anyways, we hopped aboard a tram and whilst my Mum and I took the seat option, Dad, Felicity and Marc decided to live dangerously and hang off the side. It was a lovely way to travel across the city and I much prefer that to London’s smelly tube. Bring back the trams to London. I might start a campaign. We decided to take a stroll through the park and head towards the Golden Gate Bridge. Marc was very keen to walk across the bridge, whereas the rest of us were happy to admire it from afar. Luckily after walking for a couple of hours (we all needed it to burn off our massive brunch) we soon realized the bridge hadn’t got much closer and it’d take us a good 5 hours to actually reach it so that plan was thwarted. We persuaded Marc that we’d go to the Science museum instead, and that seemed to appease him. The museum was ace. We were able to create our own tornado, make giant bubbles and look in to a mirror that showed you what you actually looked like, not a mirror reflection. That one was really freaky. You go through your whole life thinking you know what you look like and then you’re suddenly shown what other people see. It was really disturbing as you look really different. Sounds odd but it’s true.

After this we were all quite exhausted from all the walking and the museum so we decided we’d catch the tram back up to Union Square and freshen up before heading out for dinner. We reached the tram stop to discover an almighty queue and no trams. It seemed the tram network had broken down. We were all a little bit grumpy and grouchy by now and didn’t face walking all the way back to the hotel and so we tried to find a couple of taxi’s. A guy saw us trying to hail a cab and said he could take us all back to our hotel and quoted us a price. It seemed fair to us so we agreed and the next thing we knew he was opening up the door to a stretch limo for us to get inside! Obviously he could see we were used to the finer things in life, so off we went through the streets of San Fran in our limousine. However it wasn’t quite the relaxing drive we imagined it would be as he drove like a maniac and obviously thought he was driving a bumper car. By luck more than skill, we arrived back at our hotel safely without causing any traffic accidents.
Sadly this was our last night in San Francisco. Marc, myself and Felicity were due to fly back to LA on the 6am flight the next morning. Mum and Dad were going to head further up the coast for a few days and would join us back in LA at the end of the week. Felicity was going to hang out with Marc and me in Santa Monica before returning to the UK at the weekend.

After enjoying a lovely meal in Union Square we had to have an early night as our cab was picking us up at 4.45am the next morning to take us to the airport. I kid you not. I felt like I’d only just fallen asleep when our wakeup call awoke me from my slumber. We hurriedly got ready and with Felicity Furness in tow we hopped in the cab. This driver had obviously been taught how to driver by our limo driver as despite being told by the hotel it’d take half an hour to get to the airport at this time of the morning, he did it in about 10 minutes. We were therefore pretty much the first people to check in and then had to wait half an hour for security to even open. Marc has the ability to be extremely chirpy at this hour of the morning, so he was irritatingly chatty at this ungodly hour. Luckily the flight was right on time so after boarding the plane (which still had the neon lights and club music blaring at 6am) we settled in to our seats and before we knew it we were back at LAX.

Marc and I had to head straight in to work, so after picking up the car and making a quick detour to our little house to drop off Felicity and our bags, we were back in the office and at our desks by 9.03am. Not bad for a mornings work.

This has turned in to a mightily long entry again so I hope some of you are still reading this. You will be happy to hear that normal service will resume for the next entry with Marc back in the helm. Make sure you tune in to read about Marc almost being arrested by the LA cops and Mr and Mrs Spoons visit.

Em x

P.S. Vic & Gary - obviously the Brunch in San Fran wasn’t as good as last time as you weren’t there with us!