Day 21: It's Been a Blog Time Coming - Part 4 (Conclusion)

So as you know by now San Francisco was the destination of choice for stripping the last vestiges of manhood from my being...and also where I chose to pop the question.

One Day Before
Having acquired the ring earlier in the week, gotten it sized, and paid for it, all that was left to do was to give it to her...unfortunately its never that easy. As I said yesterday the ballsier version of myself would have given it to her in a 99 cent margarita, and been hitched and the little white chapel down on Las Vegas boulevard...but that just won't fly.

My original plan was to secretly pack her bags, get them in the car, and then have her buy clothes or whatever I forgot while we were up in San Francisco, that would have kept element of surprise completely in tact; however, after scanning the closet and the seeing the shoe collection it quickly dawned on me that this was not as simple as I planned. So then I thought of the old bait and switch, tell her we're going somewhere, but then not really go there and go to San Francisco instead--and I did just that.

I told her Santa Barbara, why? Well its north of LA and right on the water so I figured when I told her to bring a coat and long sleeves because it was "cold" there it wouldn't be out of the ordinary. I told her that it was going to be highs in the 60s-70s with lows in the 50s (San Francisco's weather report), and she thought it was strange for a moment, but then me reiterating that it was indeed "right on the water" caused her to drop her protest.

That night I packed the bags, finished the laundry, and snuck the ring into my carry-on--didn't want to risk the lost luggage if I had checked it.

Judgement Day
The next morning while getting ready for the "work day" I was packing my toiletries into my suitcase when I asked, "How many ounces of liquids can we bring on the plane again?" As soon as I said it I realized that I had just let the cat out of the bag.

"Why? We're taking the train, remember?" she replied, confused.

"OH yeah thats right," I played it off like I was just too tired to think. Luckily she dropped it and the surprise wasn't spoiled.

So I then loaded the bags into the car and we were off to "IHOP" for breakfast. While driving I went over the mental checklist of things to remember, everything seemed to check out. As we were getting closer to the airport I decided to spill the beans on our secret plans. She was freaking out once she heard, and somehow couldn't understand how I didn't immediately tell her about this trip upon booking it. Apparently discretion and women is a bit like oil and water...or so I'm told.

A few hours later we arrived at our hotel and were starving, so we went off to what the internet had told me was the best greasy spoon breakfast in the city, done and done. While the breakfast was pretty amazing, it took far too long and now we were running behind schedule. We were going to have to make up the time elsewhere. After breakfast we ended up going back to the room to nap, for far too long and now we were even further behind the scheduled times.

I had arranged a fairly strict itinerary that we needed to follow in order to end up at the Golden Gate bridge to watch the sunset and the go to the nearby Palace of Fine Arts. Right now we were at least an hour behind.

We left our hotel room and headed off into Union Square area, I had alotted quite a bit of time for this area, so I figured this would be where I could make it up. We walked around, window shopped a little bit, took a look through an outdoor art show, and then Alyssa was ready to move on. So I easily made up my time here, that is until we found an art museum that she was dying to see--so naturally we went there. There were two main exhibits, one was a joint collection of Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keefe and the other was Richard Avedon photogallery. Both were pretty interesting, and worth the stop-by; however, today was just a bad day to be dilly-dallying.

After the museum we headed further north towards the Embarcadero. We made up a little time somehow doing this and ended up jumping on a trolley heading west towards Pier 34. At this point I'm sweating balls. I've been wearing these heavy jeans all day because you know its San Francisco, you assume its going to be cold. But of course it was "unseasonably warm" and I was wearing jeans, brilliant. So while we're sitting on the damn trolley I'm sweating, also I have an incredibly uncomfortable platinum ring in my pocket that is impossible to arrange in such a way that it DOESN'T nearly puncture my leg.

Anyway we finally get to the pier and we're now officially an hour ahead of schedule. Its only about 5 pm, the sun doesn't set until 7, so I had to kill at least an hour before we could head to the Palace of Fine arts. Luckily I had planned on us going to the Buena Vista Cafe to grab some food and drink some Irish Coffees. This place claims to be the originator of the Irish Coffee so being that I tend to like Jameson in my coffee upon occasion, this seemed excellent.

So as we are walking towards the restaurant, I broach the subject with Alyssa. She seems less than interested. Great...so now I had an extra hour to kill because SHE didnt want to go to drink Irish coffee....excellent. Just what I wanted. SO to kill the extra time, I decided that we're going to walk to the Palace of Fine Arts. I check my Google Maps, its only like 2 miles--not a big deal. Well as it would happen, the cliche about San Francisco being very hilly is true. Long story, long, we end up at the Palace of Fine Arts AFTER she complains and says," I'm not having any fun". Well guess what, had you wanted an Irish Coffee then we'd have cabbed it the whole way there, but NOOOO you wanted to pass.

Long story over. We got engaged, that's that.

Slacking of blogging will no longer be tolerated. Apologies for the hiatus.