Trip Report - Part 1

The roadtrip was sooo much fun! We started out on July 1st, driving to vacaville on the way to san Fran. Vacaville has outlet shopping. I went for David and Peter, but I was the one who ended up buying the most stuff. Much to David's unhappiness, I bought more dishes! I'm not going to take them to Sweden right away, but that doesn't stop me from buying them so that I'll have my dish pattern in the future! Right after we left the outlet shopping, the worst thing imaginable happened. My 'check engine' light on the car turned on. It was day 1 of our roadtrip, I was at least an hour from my grandfather's place. After a couple of phone calls to my dad and checking the obvious stuff, I drove my car to my grandfather's. Keep in mind it was 6pm on the Saturday of 4th of July weekend. I had to call like 8 different car dealerships at 9am the next morning to try and find someone who was open on Sunday. My grandfather was godsent. He drove into another city with us on Sunday morning. The boys and I got a ride to the BART station to go into San Fran for the day while he stayed with my car. The car dealership gave us a ride since where we wanted to go was only a couple of minutes drive away. My grandfather's house was a good 30-40 minutes away. He stayed at the car dealership for 5 hours or so with my car. The end result was that they think the airfilter was clogged. They also told me that my tires needed replacing. (This was the second time they've told me and my dad was still saying no.) I told my dad that my mom would let me get new tires on my car. I think he was feeling guilty, so he gave the OK. Turned out later on when I called to thank him, that my grandfather paid for everything! I have a wonderful grandfather! The boys were a bit jealous because they said my tires were nice. Dulops or something. The brand sounds like a candy.

Our time in Sanfransisco was quite nice. We went to Chinatown, Pier 39, and went up to Coit Tower. We were too cheat to go up the actual tower, but we went up to the hill that it's on. Peter was pretty sick at that point in time and the climb was hard. He got the rest of us sick later on. Evil Bad Peter! We had some of the yummiest Chinese food ever in Chinatown. We were the only English speakers in the whole restaurant. It was amazingly cheap too. Like 3 dollars each. And as usual, I bought more tourist junk than the boys did. Still fun though. We left San Fran early on the morning of July 4th to head to our next part of the trip. With a working car and a much happier attitude. (TO BE CONTINUED!)