He left a poop at Rotten Robbie's

Morning and a forecast of rain found us heading out to San Jose to the Tech Museum (free with our reciprocal MOS pass), and we lucked out as downtown San Jose still had Christmas Town up - tons of X-Mas trees on white felt that looked like dirty driven snow. The museum itself was nice and had a good number of decent exhibits, which says a lot after just having been to the Exploratorium. Would have been great if not for the $20 parking in downtown SJ.

After lunch, we headed out to take Kieran to see the Tales of Despereaux, which was very cute. So many different story lines, but sweet. Akira slept through most of it (amazing the number of things we've pulled of this week while the kid(s) were napping.

By the time we got out at 3:30, there were huge patches of blue sky and fabulous cloud formations, and just as we got on the highway and saw signs for Santa Cruz (also 35-40 minutes away), we both got the same idea and decided to head there for sunset. We arrived down at the shoreline on West Cliff Bvld to see a bunch of surfers taking advantage of the last waves of the day. It was amazing as we huddled together at the top of the cliffs in 45 degree weather to see the surfers hanging out in the water. I don't care how thick the wetsuit is, you've got to be crazy or young to go sit on a board and get soaking wet in January. True enough, those that came out of the water were in there late teens... The sunset was beautiful and lovely as sunsets are.

We had dinner on the Santa Cruz pier with an old CA girlfriend of mine, and then headed back into town, when Kieran suddenly announced his burning need, and with a grimace and a pre-stunk gas station restroom, he left something behind.

Holy Toledo Batman

Wow. Wow. Wow. The Exploratorium (www.exploratorium.edu) in San Fran is like the very best of every hands on museum I've ever been to, all in one place, and to a factor of 10. It has an amazing number of exhibits, and just about all of them work (sorry MOS). The place stretches on for ages, and after 2+ hours, we'd made a pretty decent stab at a lot of the exhibits, but had skipped as many. It was hard to get through because either Kieran or Kiwi (or both) would be riveted with a particular exhibit and not want to move on. My favorite moment was sitting with Kieran at a huge echo tube and singing "the grand old duke of york" together, and another was wearing a pair of headphones with "goat ears" attached which scooped the sound in interesting ways - I could hear things very clearly in whatever direction faced ... and they made both Kieran and Akira laugh when they saw me.

We headed out during naps over the Golden Gate Bridge to Muir Beach, and drove over the mountains and through windy roads to the beach and discovered that even in winter, beaches are quite popular in CA. Kieran and Brian headed down to the water where Kieran discovered that it is virtually impossible to touch the water without getting wet, especially when one is trying to outrace a wave. When I got there with Akira, Kieran asked if we could hike up the hill that overlooked the beach, so we went about 2/3rds of the way up - a goodly hike for K2. A backroad down lead near a marsh and some very interesting dried spiny weeds - made me wish I could have been collecting for one of my dried bouquets.

The drive back from the beach brought us back into a misty day. The views of the cloud shrouded and back lit hills was breathtaking, as was the thought of biking up the windy, twisty, steep roads as cars whizzed by.

We headed for home, stopping in China Town for a quick lunch ($12.50 for 2 full entrees, assorted tidbits, and delicious pot stickers and a large helping of MSG). Well, it was cheap and tasty. The streets were crowded with shoppers grabbing groceries, and in the cold as we hurried by shop after shop of strange dried oddities, all Kieran could say is, "its smells really yucky". Thank god its not summertime - even I'd be scurrying away - too many dried anchovies!