Rob's Shopping Trip To San Francisco With His Wife Janell
December 16th, 2008

My wife Janell and I have made it a holiday tradition to head to San Francisco every December and attempt to shop till we drop. While there, we make sure to enjoy some fine dining and continue our never0ending quest to find a San Francisco hotel near Union Square that is somewhat close to our standards. It is stunning to find such mediocre SFO hotels and the Ritz Carlton and Sir Francis Drake (two recent hotels we have stayed at) in such a cosmopolitan city.

We begin with my wife’s festive nails, which she changes every year.

LOOK! It’s a mistle-toe. Get it? Mistle-TOE? Get it?

Here we are in our latest attempt at finding an acceptable luxury hotel in San Francisco near Union Square, the Westin St Francis. This is their idea of a Junior Suite (which was all that was available when we booked the room last month). We like the two separate rooms aspect, but most of the rest of the room is very pedestrian.

How cozy, a fireplace!

Never mind.

The chandelier above the bed was rather cool…

The cracks throughout the ceiling were not.

We thought it fitting that right outside of our 7th story room was a giant tequila billboard.

Meanwhile, across the way we were able to watch a dentist torture his patients. No screams were heard.

One more skyline view out of window.

Friday night took us to Michael Mina, the five star restaurant inside of the Westin named after the world renowned celebrity chef who made his name here. No one eats for less than $100 per plate…

And it was worth every damned penny. No doubt this was one of the greatest dinners we have ever had, topped off here with my root beer float and hot, fresh cookies for dessert.

Bright and early Saturday morning we hit Union Square and began shopping, fully prepared to spend a ton of money on ourselves.

Things started off with a bang at Niketown, where my wife and I found $800 worth of sweats for me and yoga clothes for her. All of it 40% off, by the way…

After returning our giant bags from Niketown to our room, we headed to the far corner of Union Square and walked into Lucky Jeans…the first thing we saw were these horrible pants which reminded me of those awful things Dawn wears now and then which are equally as hideous…

To keep ourselves replenished without wasting time on a full lunch, we grabbed some hot dogs from a street vendor and took a break in our room.

After 6 full hours of shopping, walking, looking and wanting to buy, in the end we never found anything worth a damn. There were great sales, but really lame choices at every store we went to from Prada to Gucci to Dior to Louis Vuitton to Nieman Marcus…same story. So we only got the Nike crap.

My wife, meanwhile got a couple of giant blisters on her toes as a Christmas present from an Francisco.

We rounded out the trip Saturday night with our regular trip to one of our favorite restaurants in the world, the famous North Beach Italian Restaurant.

The trip ended Sunday morning as we drove to pick up our doggies from their weekend at their favorite place in the world, DogWoods resort in Garden Valley.

On the way to dogwoods there is a sheep farm where this giant sheepdog is always on guard. I laugh every time because he looks exactly like the giant sheep dog that would always kick the crap out of Wile. E Coyote after they both clocked in for the day. Hysterical.

We have arrived at Dogwoods…

and corralled Shep and Nellie into my truck.

The trip home is always the same thing; Shep and Nellie pout and ignore us because they’re mad that we’re taking them away from Dogwoods, which is a dog’s heaven on earth. (See Shep’s page for details on their vacation resort and how to contact Dogwoods)

Theresa and Helen, who run DogWoods, gave Shep and Nellie Christmas Presents this year! They got their very own, hand made with love, doggy pillows.

I had joked that we might put them under my office desk because Shep and Nellie love to lay at my feet as I work. The minute they went down, Nellie crawled in. Apparently, that’s where they’re staying. Doesn’t Nellie look drunk in this photo?

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