San Francisco en route to China 2009

San Francisco cable car and The Buena Vista - where Irish Coffee was created. "Best in the world" per Debby Sanders.

Connie and Maria and Alcatraz

Sarah and I resting outside the San Francisco Ferry Building

The first leg of our trip to China has completed! Thursday we flew from Chicago to 'The City by the Bay" - San Francisco. Totally uneventful, plane loaded on time and actually arrived in SF 1/2 hour early. Found the BART station and got to our hotel (Villa Florence) a nice boutique space near Union Square around 2:00 in the afternoon. We then spent the next few hours seeing the sights, wandering around the city...... Did a LOT of walking, this is one hilly place, to say the least. Just woke up and decided to post something to try and remember how this works! After some breakfast this morning at Sears, "Famous for small pancakes" we'll jump back on the BART and get to the airport for our flight to Beijing this afternoon. Air China departs at 2:00 P M and is scheduled to arrive in Beijing at 5:55 P M on the 21st. Because of the international dateline we'll lose a day. The scheduled flight time is 12 hours so hopefully we'll get some sleep along the way. This should be interesting because our body's clock will think it's 2 in the morning when we get there! I think we'll transfer to our hotel and then crash! Then it's get up the next morning and hit the streets running (or at least moving). My nephew Ben should be joining us at the hotel (he lives in Shanghai) and will serve as our unofficial "tour guide" while in China. More later.........