California Day 2: San Francisco -- California Academy of Sciences + de Young Museum

Every family vacation, the kids seem to come up with one or two annoying and never-ending games or activities. In Italy, it was rocks, paper, scissors and virtual hangman. Last year in Scotland and Ireland, they added staring contests and photo bombing. On our California trip, they chose to bombard us with random Presidential trivia questions (Kane is obsessed and brought three books with him on the trip—did you know that Calvin Coolidge had a pet raccoon named Rebecca!?) and their total inability to take a normal outdoor photo because they "could not look into the sun."

Between the latter and my continuing allergy/sinus issues (I finally got my dr. to call in a prescription for me the next morning and things cleared up quickly!), I just didn't get a lot of photos on our second day. Now had they brought sunglasses as I suggested, we could have avoided ridiculous photos like the one above. But what fun would that be?! Plus, I just might make that our holiday card because it's hysterical. Nevertheless, we managed to have a great second day.

We didn't want to do a big, sit-down breakfast so we walked to nearby Fillmore Bakeshop for great coffee and delicious quiche for the kiddos. After meeting up with Uncle Steve, we headed over to Golden Gate Park for some museum time. I somehow totally overlooked the fact that the enormous music festival Badlands was going on in the park that weekend, but we stuck close to the museums and didn't have a problem. It also meant though that we didn't get to explore a ton of the park itself (including missing out on the buffalo), but again, we'll just have to go back!

Our first stop was the fabulous California Academy of Sciences (included in our CityPASS), which is an aquarium, natural history museum, and planetarium all in one. It's all topped off by an amazing living roof too. We wandered around the aquarium first and took in a diver show for a while. The kids loved the hands-on area where they got to explore local sea life too. But, we were  all still adjusting a little bit to the time change and everyone was a little cranky and hungry. So we did a quick trip through the rainforest and decided to skip the planetarium this trip. I had a feeling some chips and guac would set everyone straight, so we took a quick walk to Nopalito for lunch. It was deeeelish. Food (plus a few margs for the adults who were not battling a sinus infection) helped immensely!

The de Young Museum was on my agenda for the afternoon and we walked back through a bit of the park to get there. Our CityPASS gave us general admission, but I really wanted to see The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll. So we shelled out a little extra for that. Street signs outside the museum set up some nice parallels between important issues of the 1960s and current times. And the kids played while we waited for Aunt Leslie to meet us.

We went straight to the special exhibit and had a hilarious time trying to explain all the psychedelic art to the kids. I finally stopped beating around the bush and explained what psychedelic drugs were and how they played a role in everything they were seeing. It was a pretty funny conversation. They didn't quite get that part of it, but they did seem to understand what people were protesting about. Sadly, while we've made great strides in some things, others haven't changed all that much.

Cam loved the fashion and was into the art. Kane was a little creeped out, I think. I was all in to see the rest of the museum, but I was losing everyone else. They wanted outside, they wanted to rest, they wanted to chill. So we parted ways for a bit and went back to the hotel. A little down time plus some showers got everyone back on track and we headed over to the Presidio Social Club for dinner with Steve and Leslie. Presidio is actually a National Park (we didn't have our National Park Passports with us and I was kicking myself! I made sure to carry them with us everywhere for the rest of the trip) and a former military post. Presidio has a bunch of hiking trails and scenic overlooks (Crissy Field has amazing views of the Golden Gate Bridge), but we were really there to eat. The Social Club was once part of the military barracks and has been converted into a super cute and delicious restaurant.

After dinner we strolled through the Marina district and through the Palace of Fine Arts, which is an amazing place to visit during the daytime but was beautiful lit up in the evening as well. Everyone was tired and we had hiking planned for the next day, so we called it a night!
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KID Museum at Davis Library

This past weekend marked the grand opening of the new KID Museum in Bethesda, an interactive "museum" for elementary and middle school-aged children. The event was well run, with stations clearly identified and lots of people to help direct various projects. But I was in a super cranky mood all weekend (exacerbated by the fact that I was parenting solo and a marathon reading of Gone Girl, which was both impossible to put down and very, very disturbing) and I was just not into being around crowds.

Keep It Local: Maryland Science Center

One of the best things about living in D.C. is all the free access to wonderful museums. It doesn't matter if we pop in for 20 minutes and one of us loses it, forcing everyone to leave. It was $free.99. Mom dislikes the pressure visiting paid museums puts on all of us. So she was a little nervous about driving all the way up to Baltimore to visit the Maryland Science Center. She showed us some of the exhibits online and made sure that we thought we'd like it ("cause we're not leaving once we're in," may have been tossed our way). Then she remembered that we joined the Franklin Institute last year and got reciprocal admission to the Science Center. Phew.

Turns out she had nothing to worry about, because we stayed at the Science Center for almost 6 hours. 6 HOURS. And even then we didn't want to leave.

We did almost everything, but our top hits included:
- the Kids Room (for kids 0 - 8) -- featuring a large waterplay area, an underwater play scene, a giant pinscreen and a whole slate of things to tinker with;

- the Dinosaur Mysteries Exhibit -- displaying over a dozen full size dinos and a working field lab and dig pits; and

- Newton's Alley -- providing hands-on demonstrations of Sir Isaac's principles.

The best thing, about all of the exhibits really, was that each of them offered lots of hands-on opportunities to explore and discover. We know this isn't technically a "kids museum," but it sure was designed with kids in mind. There were also ongoing demonstrations throughout the day and that helped break up some of the monotony that can develop from going to exhibit after exhibit (although that wasn't really a problem here in the first place).

Mom finally dragged us out around 3:30 -- worried that we'd hit traffic if we waited much longer. Then Cam decided she wanted to geocache and we set out looking for a supposed "easy find" (if there is one thing you can suck mom into doing, it's geocaching). We didn't find the cache, but we did find the carousel next door and then we just HAD to have a ride on that.

We wish it was just a bit closer, but the Science Center has still moved to the top of our favorite local museums list -- we can't wait to go back for the new Mummies of the World exhibit, opening at the end of September!

You can check out the Maryland Science Center's hours right here. Don't forget to look at all of the great programming they have as well -- we missed "Gizmos, Gadgets, and Gears: A DIY Summer" during our visit because we didn't check the schedule ahead of time. It's there only until Labor Day so go while you can!