18 March to 23 March

Our trip was relatively uneventful, reminding us that travelling with slightly older kids is sooo much easier than with toddlers. 

Ellie and Jessie had 2 seats to themselves, and so disappeared into a vortex of television watching only acceptable on long haul flights. Liz, Anthony and Sienna had 4 seats between 3, so Sienna was able to stretch out, fall asleep and kick Daddy for the next 8 hours. Despite the near constant kicking, Anthony was able to sleep quite a bit. Liz half watched multiple movies and spent the rest of the time staring increasingly angrily at her sleeping family.

In 9 hours or so, we arrived in Hawaii to clear customs and change flights, still getting our heads around the fact that it was yesterday and the cursed netball final had not even taken place yet (what could we do to change the outcome?). It was not exactly the first Hawaiin experience that we had dreamed about, not a surf break, reef, volcano or Mai Tai in sight, but it served its purpose (read: $700 flights to San Francisco). 

In 3 hours, we were back on our plane with a bunch of now-sunburnt northern Californians lamenting that their winter break was over. We sat quietly, safe in the knowledge that our holiday was just beginning, looking forward to a week or so catching up with family and enjoying the beautiful weather and amazing sights that the Bay area offered. 

Unfortunately for us, we had not checked the weather forecast. 

When we landed in San Francisco it was dark. We weren’t sure what day it was, but I think we thought that the netball game might have still been in play. The night was cool but clear, exactly what we expected from northern California at the end of winter. 

We made our way to the rental car pick up where we would find our trusty ride that would take us on our 15 day road trip. Unfortunately our first 2 choices of steed were deemed too small. We could not fit all our humans and our bags in the largest ‘non truck’ available online. The lovely people at National were quick to upgrade us (we think they may have seen this before) and we cruised out of the garage in a lovely Audi Q7. Things were looking good. 

We made our way south down the Bay, passing towns like Cupertino, Mountain View and Palo Alto – places that we’d never been to which felt kind of familiar. We were in Silicon Valley and excited to get a feel for the place. But first, to make good on our second (and this time, non-consumer oriented) promise to our children – a visit to Aunty Jo and to meet Uncle Jay and Abby the chihuahua for the first time. 

It was late when we pulled into their place in San Jose on Saturday night. We were given a warm welcome from the humans but met with a fair bit more consternation from Abby who clearly did not get the memo that we were family – or was just terrified at the sight of a slightly psychotic Ellie immediately looking for cuddles. She would warm up, we were sure. 

We were promptly served the perfect meal of bacon and eggs at 1am and then it was time for bed, and the appreciation of lying horizontal that you can only get after a long haul, economy class flight. 

The next day dawned overcast but otherwise dry. 

Abby appeared highly concerned that we were still in her domain, and worried that her very satisfactory existence of being the focus of two sensible and adoring adults was at risk. The addition of 3 squealing children who wanted to be her immediate bestie seemed highly concerning to her. 

Were these little humans going to stick around? – hopefully it’s just a short visit! 

Will they keep chasing me around and trying to cuddle me – probably.

Will we have to compete for attention from Mum and Dad (read: Jo and Jay) – if so, she was ready. She had the tricks, the toys, the eyes and the tail… and after all it was her house!

Things got slightly better for Abby when the treats came out, and you could see her weighing up the pros and cons of the situation. OK – so I’m going to get chased and touched by these chaotic little people, but I’m getting more treats, and sometimes I quite like the pats. I can make the most of this, at least for a short while. 

First order of business was to explore Jo and Jay’s wonderful house. Jo and Jay are both collectors and lovers of US culture from the 50s and 60s. Jay has a passion for VW cars (Bugs in particular) and the skills to restore them. 

This means that much of the house was like a step back into the 1950s US, or a Volkswagen factory (where Betty the Bug is currently being worked on, next to Shirley (also a Bug), whilst Audrey the Carmen Ghia waits patiently outside for her turn to be restored). 

The remainder of the house is full of amazing collections of brooches (Jo’s), hot wheels cars (Jay’s – with a strong slant towards VWs and Bugs in particular), yard sticks (team effort) and vintage Pyrex containers (also a team effort) to name but a few. 

Apart from walls and a roof, this place was very different to ours, and let’s face it, way, way cooler (and so much more organised!) 

The other part, which was of massive interest to the kids, is more 21st century and includes VR goggles and the ‘Beat Saber’ game – which accounted for pretty much all their spare time during our time there. 

From Abby’s place, it was time to venture a bit further afield and head into San Jose and a tour of Jo’s office at Adobe. Unlike most of the big technology firms that have created their campuses outside the major centres around the Bay Area, Adobe has centralised operations in downtown San Jose, with multiple, state of the art buildings stacked side by side. 

As we approached Jo’s office we were struck by the visibility of the homeless community that lives in tents under some of the freeway overpasses, in particular the one right next to the sparkly new Adobe building. This was the first time our kids had knowingly come close to homelessness at scale, and was our first introduction (on this trip at least) to the stark contrast between those with privilege and those without across the Bay area and I guess the US more broadly. 

On one hand, the Bay area has been the global crucible for innovation over the last 20+ years. It is the home of Stanford University and is the birthplace of organisations including Apple, Google, Meta, ebay, Adobe and Salesforce that have defined the internet over this time. Each of these organisations has its base in the area, with beautiful operating campuses and expensive property to house it’s well paid teams. The start-up culture that celebrates individual brilliance, fast success and learning from failure has made this place what it is today. 

At the same time, the level of visible disadvantage is quite shocking to the outsider. Homelessness like what we saw next to the Adobe building is a common sight. Crime seems to be significant (although we haven’t done the research to make a comparison here) – and we were constantly warned to leave nothing in our cars for fear of windows being smashed. Employers such as Adobe are building beautiful campuses to allow teams to work, eat and play together in a safe, secure environment, next door to but away from these issues. 

We toured Adobe’s amazing new campus with it’s high tech facilities, wonderful co-working spaces and great restaurants and common areas. We embraced the culture of the Bay Area, and had the kids pitch us their best ideas for a start-up. ‘Jessie Co’ ultimately got the funding, to the surprise of no-one. 

On the drive home, we started discussing the causes and implications of homelessness with the kids. We had identified our first ‘educational’ topic for our trip and would spend the next couple of days researching the problem and having the kids come up with some solutions. 

A brief side note here around homelessness in this part of the world. From what we have since researched, there has been an influx of homelessness into the Bay area, driven by cheap and relatively laissez-faire attitude towards drugs and better availability of support and social housing than elsewhere in the US. ‘House First’ policies in San Francisco have been notorious for spending billions to create housing without also addressing the mental health and drug addiction side of this vicious problem – and have therefore failed. The outcome is a very visible (at least from a Sydney perspective) homeless population that was quite confronting.

That night, as we celebrated Liz and Jo’s mum Merril’s birthday, we checked the weather forecast. California had already been hit with some massive winter storms, one of which had dumped 15 feet of snow on Yosemite, causing the park to close. It had just reopened but another winter storm was on its way, with flooding rain, damaging winds and another several feet of snow forecast. 

The following morning dawned and we jumped out of bed, like kids at Christmas. Today was the highlight of the trip. Yes, we were going to Alcatraz, but that was just an amuse bouche for the main event – a night away from the kids. Auntie Jo, Uncle Jay and Abby had kindly offered/been coerced into taking the kids for the night whilst we had the night to ourselves in San Francisco. 

We battled peak hour traffic into San Francisco and made the early boat out to The Rock – the prison you go to when you misbehave in all of the other prisons around the country. It’s amazing how a prison (even one in such an interesting and strangely beautiful location, particularly when we visited it under blue skies) can become a tourist attraction – both for international tourists but especially for domestic tourism. 

Alcatraz holds an interesting place in the American psyche. It is on a rocky outcrop in San Francisco Bay, which operated as a prison from the early 1900s, and the US’s highest security prison from 1934 – 1963. It is close enough to the city that inmates could hear the parties going on in the nearby yacht club, but surrounded by dangerous currents and ill-tempered white sharks that make any swim crossing hazardous at best. It is not without beauty – and the inmates grew flowers in the gardens and fed the many birds that also called it home.  

It is the place where some of the most infamous criminals in the country (eg Al Capone) were locked up; it is the place where you landed if you misbehaved in other federal prisons across the country; it is also the place you went if you declined to be conscripted into the US army during the First World War. 

It is a place where the inmates ate well, read voraciously and played baseball and bridge, but could also be put into pitch black, solitary confinement for up to 14 days at a time. 

No one is thought to have escaped (except perhaps Sean Connery) but there are a number of famous attempts, including the Anglin Brothers and Frank Morris who dug through their cell walls with tea spoons. 

All of these stories are shown and highlighted to the boatloads of tourists that visit each day, all seeking to measure the US against Nelson Mandela’s famous quote ‘A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but it’s lowest ones’. It is an amazing location in which to ponder this question, and beautifully maintained for this purpose – there’s no wonder that it keeps attracting this many visitors. 

Our girls were fascinated by the place. Sena was concerned that we were going to leave her in a cell. Ellie in particular was really engaged by the concepts of crime, mitigations, deterrents, punishment, incarceration and rehabilitation … and the economic and social costs to society of running large penal centres. These are not conversations we typically have in Ryde. 

From The Rock we made our way back to Fisherman’s Wharf to watch Ellie and Jessie consume their body weights in soup served in massive sourdough bowls before wandering over to commune with the wonderful sealions that call this area home. 

When we visited, there was probably around 100 sealions lounging around on the 10 or so platforms that have been constructed for their lounging pleasure. You could definitely smell them before you saw them. For some reason, there were two platforms with most of the sea lions on them – meaning that they were literally sitting on top of each other and actively showing their displeasure when someone sat on their fin, or their head (which happened constantly). There was one platform where 6 sea lions lay comfortably, and each time someone else tried to jump on they were swatted away. This was clearly where the cool kids hung out, and you needed a secret password or fin shake to get on there. Sea lion politics was clearly something we needed to learn more about as well! 

After that we left the kids with Aunty Jo and ran as quickly as possible in the other direction to start our night away. This was so good it deserved a separate blog post, so we’ll skip over it here, and pick up again once we’d returned from San Francisco, where the new winter storm had arrived. This had dumped another several feet of snow onto Yosemite and had drenched the rest of the Bay area (including us). Yosemite and all the redwood forests had been closed, and the coastal road to LA was shut due to landslides. We decided to spend our last day in the Bay Area in Monterey, before heading south for bluer skies. 

Monterey is stunning. It is a beautiful, ocean facing bay which combines surf beaches (some breaking up to 50 ft in the right conditions), amazing coastal scenery (it is the home of the famous Pebble Beach course) and the stunning Monterey Bay aquarium (made famous by Finding Dory), nestled next to the kelp forests of the area which sea otters and seals call home. We love an aquarium and were excited to visit, and it did not disappoint. 

Some of the highlights were the enormous ‘open ocean’ tank which included turtles, hammerhead sharks and the most incredible school of mackerel that we’ve ever seen; the awesome sea otters (Anthony’s favourite), jelly fish, octopus and the ‘bad fish’ tank – which is where the rays that have misbehaved are taking for punishment. It is a shallow tank where kids are able to touch and pat the rays – slightly dubious from an animal welfare perspective but a massive win from Sena’s perspective. 

After the aquarium we drove the famous 17 mile drive from Monterey around Pebble Beach and some stunning coastline on the way back to our final night in San Jose with Aunty Jo, Uncle Jay and Abby.

As always it would be hard to leave family, but we were excited to be heading south and out of the weather.