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24 Hours in San Francisco

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I’d never been so happy to stroll the aisles of Target with a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte in my hand.  It was a truly authentic American experience, and I was loving every minute of it.

Allow me to back up a bit.  Several months ago we booked flights to New Zealand using frequent flyer miles.  Since there are no direct flights from Central America to New Zealand, the best option we found was to make our way from Belize City (connecting through El Salvador) to San Francisco, and then fly out to Auckland the following evening.  The itinerary had us passing through four countries in as many days, and left us with a 24 hour window in California between our flights.  We celebrated saving so much money by using miles and figured we would find a way to occupy our time during the layover.  (On a side note, I love miles.  But that’s a story for another time.)

For such a quick trip, John and I would have been content to stay at a hotel for the night and wander on our own in San Francisco.  But as it turns out, just as we discovered in Miami, we have amazing, over-the-top-fantastic friends.

I’ll start with Ran.  We met Ran at the wedding we attended in Mexico this past July, and he and John made fast friends.  At some point during discussion of our upcoming travels, John mentioned our quick layover on the way to Auckland.  As it turned out, Ran was moving from LA to Santa Clara the following week, and offered to host us.

Santa Clara is about an hour from the San Francisco airport, but an amazingly kind Ran drove up to pick us up from our 6 hour flight anyway. The three of us enjoyed a nice sushi dinner together in San Francisco, and then drove down to stay at Ran’s place in Santa Clara for the night.  He and John stayed up until the wee hours discussing nerdy computer programmer stuff, we did a much needed load of laundry, and in the morning Ran dropped us off in time to take the train back to San Francisco and meet up with another awesome friend, Anna.

John met Anna when they both lived in Argentina, and she has since relocated to San Francisco.  She met us at the train station and guided us to the newly built City Target for a little shopping excursion.  It was there that I purchased my long coveted pumpkin spice latte, and wandered the aisles to power up our supply of shampoos and soaps before flying to New Zealand (where we heard toiletries were out of this world expensive.)  Anna was so sweet to wander the store with us, tolerating John’s giddy excitement at the aisles full of consumer goods and displays of food stuffs we hadn’t seen in a few months.  She then took us to an amazing restaurant for brunch (best eggs benedict ever), wandered with us through Golden Gate Park and Height Ashbury, and set us up on public transit to the airport in time for our flight.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: people are amazing.

I’m so grateful to our friends for not only providing us with rides, beds, and directions during our stay, but for showing us around the city and once again making our absurd layover seem like a planned visit to good friends.  I wish we’d had a bit more time (and energy) to hang out with both Ran and Anna, but I’m overly thankful they made space in their Thursday/Friday for us.

And thus, we boarded our 13 hour flight restocked with toiletries and peanut butter, spirits buoyed by friendly visits, and ready to tackle a completely new part of the world.  Photos and stories from New Zealand to come.


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