Day 12

Imagine my chagrin at looking at the web site and seeing that Woodside had porches lined on the side of the road instead of Porsches. Double sigh... We slept pretty late today and when we got up we took breakfast to go. We sat in the car and ate while we drove towards today's destination: Lick Observatory. It's pretty high up, a little over 4100 feet. It's a 19 mile drive and it takes about an hour. Here you see the outside. It has the second largest refractor telescope in the world and it was built in around 1878! Amazing what they could do back then. An interesting fact too is that James Lick brought Ghirardelli chocolates to San Francisco. It turns out Pablo Ghirardelli was Lick's friend. Lick owned a lot of land out here and brought Ghirardelli to the area.

Even though Catherine was not too keen on coming up this far she very much enjoyed the view from the top of the mountain. In fact, by the end of the day she thought the whole trip was pretty cool. I can tell you that back in 1878 the roads were not made with a Lincoln in mind. Some of the 336 curves over the 19 miles were pretty tight.

After our four hour sojurn we end up back in the DoubleTree pool. Nice and warm just as we like it. Here we see everybody underwater at the same time. We've all turned into quite the fishes.

Well... Some of us drink things other than water. Here daddy is enjoying a Vodka Tonic. I still hear about problems with United but I'm not worried yet. After the pool we went out to eat a Thai dinner. I ordered it not medium, not hot but Thai Hot!!! Holy cow, I hope it comes out a lot less spicy than it went in. All the kids loved the fried rice, Satay and spring rolls.

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