San Francisco with a 4-Year-Old

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Bekki bought our youngest grandson, 4-year-old Jasper to Sun River and the plan was that we’d take him on a very short Grandkid trip. He gets quite wild with other kids so we thought it was best to just take him by himself. He’d decided that we would go to every ice cream shop in the world. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time for that.

We left Saturday morning and drove, in one very long day, to San Francisco. Unfortunately, RV parks in San Francisco are not plentiful. We have stayed at the RV park at Candlestick Park when it was actually the baseball park. Now the ballpark is mostly dismantled but the RV park is still there. The RV park was jam-packed with RV’s and getting into our space, in the dark, was most difficult. Fortunately, a permanent resident who pulls a trailer every day was able to back our RV into a site for us.

We planned to spend the 1^st day at the zoo. We had great memories of taking our boys there when they were young.

We found that while some things have changed, many things remain the same 35 years later. We were most disappointed with the Lion House, a large room with cages around 3 walls. When the boys were young feeding time was at 2 pm. The zookeepers would let the cats into the cages then give them fresh meat. The roars would reverberate around the room and it was both exciting and eerie. Now, probably 80% of the house is walled off. There are cages for 2 cats at the most at the front entry.

We timed our visit around the feeding time in the Lion House, visiting animals along the way. Jasper loved looking at the animals but the fun part of the Lion House was the tiger up close. A thick glass wall separated us but the tiger was very close.

The zoo has a sculpture park that is just sculptures of animals of every sort. He climbed on the giant ant and petted the others. He had to pet and talk with each one.

We were walking along and another family asked us if we could use tickets for the carousel ride. They had more tickets than they could use. We took 3 tickets and just before we left we rode on that. Jasper chose a tiger!

Day 2 we went to the Academy of Sciences. We caught the planetarium show and Jasper tried to grasp the concept of the star nursery. He really preferred the zoo with “real animals”, but loved the aquarium and the rain forest.

We started for home tired but full of good memories but not ice cream from every shop in the world.

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