New Horizons: #AVMTour Recap Part One
I’m going to take some time in the next few posts here on the blog to recap my family’s recent trip out West, the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Tour, while my memories are fresh. You might not draw any profound lessons about fatherhood from these posts, but I hope you find them at least a little interesting. They’ll certainly be important to me in the years to come as this trip fades into the past!
The Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Tour began as most of my trips begin these days, by parking my car near Shuttle Stop 604 in the Long Term B parking lot at the Nashville airport. About a year ago, I realized that it wasn’t a very efficient use of my mental bandwidth to have to remember the different places I parked my car each time I left it at the airport. And so I started parking in the same place every time. I picked Shuttle Stop 604 because it’s near the back of Long Term B, where the parking lot is less crowded, which means I can almost always find a spot immediately adjacent to the shuttle stop. No more forgetting where I parked!
Of course, the AVM Tour really began long before that Saturday morning trip to the airport. The idea for the tour came to me a couple of years ago, when I realized there were a number of very big things I had never seen: whales, redwoods, the Grand Canyon. Before we had kids, my ex and I were fortunately enough to have the resources to visit Europe several times. We figured we should do so while we could, knowing that we could explore the United States more easily once we had kids. Now that the kids are old enough for a week-long family vacation (one that doesn’t include a trip to Grandma’s), I’m following through with that plan.
Back when I was a kid, my family went on a road trip to Niagara Falls, spending some time visiting relatives in Michigan along the way. Two impressions from that trip have stuck with me throughout my lifetime: how miserable it is to be carsick all day (this was before we discovered Dramamine), and the incredible majesty of Niagara Falls. It. Was. Huge. Seeing something so big changed me. It was so much more wonderful than anything I had ever experienced that it took away any limits I had imposed for myself on how wonderful something could be. Ever since, I’ve always felt that there’s more out there in the world than I can imagine, that there’s unlimited potential to be amazed at God’s creation.
I wanted my girls to have that kind of experience, one that opens up their horizons in ways they can’t even articulate. It’s really too early to tell, but I think our trip out West to see the largest animals that ever lived, the tallest trees that ever grew, and the biggest, well, hole in the ground–I think that trip might have just done the trick.
We flew from Nashville to San Francisco on Frontier Airlines, which is my new favorite airline. Not only did the girls get to watch the Disney Channel for free during the first half-hour of each flight (I could have paid for the whole flight, but I’m cheap), they were also fascinated by the various animals on display on the tail section of each of the Frontier airplanes. Just before we left Nashville, we picked up what turned out to be a very valuable piece of kit: a headphone splitter. This meant that both girls could listen to the DVD playing on my laptop, which made the flights go by very quickly. Frontier gives away free ear buds like candy: We managed to pick up five pairs on our flight out.
One more observation about plane travel with the girls: Being on a plane makes bathroom trips easy. I can do my business, knowing that no evildoer can run off with my children!
We landed in San Francisco and about two hours later left the airport in our rental car. (Pro tip: Never rent a car at the San Francisco airport. Pick-up takes forever.) Thanks to the Saturday afternoon traffic, we got to take our time seeing downtown San Francisco on the way to our hotel at Fisherman’s Wharf. We stayed at the Radisson, which had a great location and free Ghirardelli chocolate upon check-in, but was otherwise unremarkable. Wait, that’s not entirely true. We could see Alcatraz from our balcony, which was pretty cool. (Hannah: “I keep wanting to call it Arkham Asylum.”)
The girls wanted to hang out in the hotel room all night (I forget how novel that can be before you’ve spent a thousand nights in hotels), but I knew there was more fun to be had outside the hotel. We walked around the Fisherman’s Wharf area, which was packed with tourists. My initial impression? It was Gatlinburg-by-the-bay. The girls wanted to see the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum, but I knew there were more uniquely San Francisco options.
A few blocks away was the Musée Mécanique, a museum devoted to coin-operated arcade games and amusements. The collection spans over a hundred years, and the girls (Hannah, particularly) had a blast seeing what kinds of coin-operated machines entertained people in decades past. Remember that fortune-teller machine Tom Hanks’ character encounters in Big? The Musée Mécanique had many such fortune tellers (none with actual magical powers as far as I could tell), along with dancing marionettes, player pianos, skeeball, 1980s video games, and a couple of machines that reenacted gruesome executions in miniature. The girls took plenty of photos and videos, trying to take it all in. Meanwhile, I tried to snap a couple of photos while keeping an eye on two kids darting in and around the coin-operated machines. Not an easy task!
After a tasty, but overpriced dinner, we turned in early. We had to be at Pier 39 by 7:30 the next morning for our whale-watching expedition. More on that and our other adventures in San Francisco in my next post.