Blog ALL the Things!

With limited internet these first few days (Mandy didn't have the password to the wifi at her aunt/uncle's house in Walnut Creek), I wrote things as they happened and am just now posting them, so if you're confused by tenses and verbage, I'm sorry, but I'm also lazy and write quickly and edit poorly when I'm focused on having fun and you should have very low expectations of this blog by now anyways.

DAY ONE IN SAN FRANCISCO was really a day in Walnut Creek, CA. Mandy's aunt and uncle live there and Mandy spent most of the months leading up to our tour there and we were dog sitting. Mandy modeled the brand new Aladdin t-shirt that I brought her and the dynamic duo was back in action.

Walnut Creek has some pretty geotags... I'm still really confused about how geotags work because sometimes they're there and sometimes they aren't, even if you're standing in exactly the same place as you were before but now you can design and upload your own, so I might have to do that someday. Along with their pretty geotags, they had one that took some decoding. Please not "DubC" in the upper left-hand corner of my photo collage; Mandy admitted to me that she didn't know what it stood for when I asked and it took me a while to figure it out but I did. Walnut started with W or "dub" and Creek starts with C. Yay logic!

We went to a vegan restaurant for lunch. It's so nice to be in veggie friendly territory with another vegetarian. Mandy wants me to mention again that she didn't force me to become a vegetarian, but I'm glad I did because I'm having lots of fun trying all of these new things. I also saw the pet store that inspired Mandy's switch to vegetarianism, which is what inspired my switch. I'm not sure I've ever told the story, so here it is:

When asked why she became a vegetarian, Mandy's response is always "It started with a snake..." As I said before, Mandy lived with her aunt and uncle for the months leading up to our tour but I didn't mention her two young cousins or that one of them has a pet snake. Mandy had to take her cousin to Petco to buy mice to feed the snake and as she was standing there, she thought about how inhumane it was that these little mice were just being picked up to be fed to the snake and how they didn't have a chance and then she had an epiphany that she was doing the same by eating meat so she said goodbye to steak and chicken. I have now seen those mice -- actually, I probably didn't see the same mice, those mice are definitely dead by now, but I did stand in an important spot in Amanda Belscamper history.

After lunch, we went back to her aunt and uncle's and made some banana bread (a new favorite that Mandy got me into in the spring) and watched TV. We were marathoning UnReal, which I had already seen but I thought Mandy would like (I was right). As we were hanging out with two hours to go before we left for an evening in the city proper, Mandy said "I think I have time for another half of an episode" and I said "I think you have time for a whole episode, how long does it take you..." And then I remembered who I was talking to.

We had a good night out. We collected more geotags and just looked cute in general. We met up with a couple of Mandy's friends and had a lot of fun.

DAY TWO was also a day in Walnut Creek. I woke up early -- Mandy did not... I caught up on some TV and then rewatched some Teen Wolf until she was up. When Mandy did eventually get up, I tried to explain five seasons of Teen Wolf to her in just ten minutes, which wasn't a real success.

After that, we went to "The Reservoir." I'm not really sure what that means, but apparently that's all you have to say and people know exactly what you're talking about. Typically people go earlier in the day to avoid the heat but Sleeping Beauty changed our plans.

Reservoir

After that, we went back  in town in Walnut Creek to an ice cream place from the list called Cream. I was disappointed quite frankly. Their specialty is custom ice cream sandwiches and everything looked great but they warmed up the cookies before they made the sandwiches! I know that sounds like a weird complaint but it meant that half of the ice cream had melted by the time I had paid. They also wrapped it up in a wax paper envelope so it was hard to get a grip on it. I don't feel like I even got to taste it because I was trying to shove it all into my mouth before it dripped all over my face, hands and front. We got some lunch at California Pizza Kitchen after that and then we went back to the house for more UnReal binging. We went to yoga in the evening and it was really great except that the studio was carpeted, which was new to me and I had a hard time balancing because the floor felt so squishy. We finished UnReal after yoga and after making ourselves a pretty awesome dinner of hodgepodge items we'd bought at Trader Joe's, we went to sleep.

DAY THREE started with a bang. Or should I say a shake? Actually, I should say a quake, because we experienced an earthquake in the wee hours of the morn. Ok, we for Mandy, pretty typical for myself. The quake even made the national news because when we turned on Good Morning America (which we consider news), they were talking about it.

We went to the Exploratorium in the early afternoon. It's a museum that seems to be about everything and anything. We had a really good time there, running around, acting like big kids and sometimes having to fight off little kids to do what we wanted!

After that, we hunted for some grub at Fisherman's Wharf and after lunch, stumbled upon Musee Mecanique, which is a penny arcade/museum. It was full of vintage, working penny arcade games but the first thing Mandy and I found was a photo booth. And I mean, how could we not?! We decided we would walk around to see everything and save the photo booth for last and while we were walking, I had the revelation that maybe this is the arcade where Anne Hathaway took Julie Andrews to play with the arm wrestling machine in San Francisco. Mandy seriously doubted this, but hey, when we came back around to the photo booth, we noticed a familiar face -- the face of the weird guy on the arm wrestling machine. We both took posed photos with it and while I was taking mine, some small child photobombed me and then told me "You know it's a game, right?" Sorry I didn't waste a quarter to reenact my childhood, small person.

After that, we returned to Mandy's apartment in Berkeley and then to the Saturn Cafe for dinner. The Saturn Cafe is on The list but Mandy had gone there without even knowing that, so when I told her I wanted to go, she was all for it!

The photo of Mandy in the lower left hand corner is a joke because when we told our waitress that we were both going to have water, she only brought us one glass and was surprised when we wanted a second one.

I got the fajita bowl with vegetarian chicken. Technically, I think all chickens are vegetarians, but this chicken was fake chicken for vegetarians. It was good fake meat! I thought it was all good.

After that, we returned to Mandy's apartment again. We'd wanted to find a Redbox earlier in the day but seriously could not, so we ended up watching a documentary on high schoolers at a performing arts school.

Now that I've managed to catch you up on three whole days in one post, it is time to take on Day #4.