A Visit to the Bay Area (500th Post)

We just returned from a quick trip to the Bay Area. It was a nice little vacation and good to spend time with family and friends. And of course, good food.

First of all, we borrowed my dad's GPS, and I'm so glad we did. That will definitely be our next purchase. It was so helpful since we were going to a lot of different places in (somewhat) unfamiliar territory. Yeah, we missed a few turns and heard the dreaded "Recalculating..." but it saved us a lot of hassle and arguments, I'm sure.

We drove up at 5:50 a.m. on Friday morning. First stop was Porto's, a Cuban bakery in Burbank. We ordered the egg & chorizo sandwich on cuban bread, a medianoche sandwich, a mango smoothie, guava cheese pastry, chocolate croissant and raspberry mousse. We've been here a few times, and it never fails to impress. It isn't surprising that there was a line, even before 7 a.m.

We made two more stops and arrived in Fremont at 12:20 p.m. The kids were OK--not too bad, but not too great, either. I'm not complaining about 6.5 hours, though. That was pretty good.

We had lunch at Sala Thai, a Yelp find.
We ordered the pad see ew and crispy garlic fish. Very flavorful. It made D's List!

Then we checked into our hotel, the Hilton in Newark/Fremont, which we booked through Hotwire for $55/night (around $65 with taxes). Although you can see it from I-880, I couldn't hear the freeway from our room. As D noted, it served a very "eclectic" clientele. After D checked in, I was carrying n and k was walking in front of me, and one of the hotel clerks called out to me, "If you're interested, there's a Chuck E. Cheese next door!" I thought that was funny.

After unsuccessfuly trying to take a nap in our hotel room, we picked up D's cousin in Santa Clara. She is visiting from Singapore, and is the main reason we made the trip up north. It was the first time I had ever met her, although we've hung out with her brother before. We warned her we wanted to eat early and casual because of the kids, and she was game. We ate at Lawrence Plaza food court in Santa Clara, which is located in a Little Korea. I ended up ordering teriyaki chicken and japchae from BBQ Town (not very Korean, I know, but I was sharing with the kids, so I didn't want anything too spicy, alhtough it did come with kim chee), while D had bimbimbap and his cousin had spicy tofu soup from the stall next door. D's cousin had stopped in New York before coming to the Bay Area, and brought some gifts for k & n. k liked that she walked with them after dinner. It was nice hearing about all of the sightseeing she had done and plans to do and hearing about D's other relatives that we don't see too often, if at all.

There's a dessert place with funky seating. We decided to take pictures there.