“Last” Trip

This weekend Andrew and I went to San Francisco for our “last” weekend away before the baby comes. Now that my due date is less than three weeks away, we’ve decided we should probably keep our radius from the hospital to about, oh, five miles. So we wanted to have one “final” trip before we hunker down close to home.

I’m compelled to use quotation marks for words like “last” and “final” because I’m confident we will still take weekend trips once the baby arrives. Not right away, of course, but eventually, especially when she’s still small enough to be more or less easily portable. But this weekend did have the feeling of some kind of closure, ending, a final trip—without quotation marks—of the kind we know. It surely won’t be the last trip we take that’s just the two of us, but it was the last one where we won’t be arranging for caretaking before setting out—and worrying about the baby once we’re gone. In her pre-born state, she’s both with us and not with us, and as long as I can feel her moving (which she did, constantly, the entire weekend), we don’t have to worry at all.

We left Saturday morning and drove first to Japantown. A day of trekking around the city simply wasn’t realistic in my large state, so we just took it easy. We had a delicious lunch at a restaurant in the Japan Center then browsed in some shops, reminiscing about our amazing trip to Japan as we strolled (slowly). We were excited at a new discovery—a Daiso store has opened in the Japan Center. Daiso was one of the most popular 100-yen stores in Japan, though here it has the somewhat less melodious hook of “Everything $1.50!” The store was much smaller than the ones we’d gone to in Tokyo, but it still carried a stunning variety of cuteness. We came away with a selection of things including a small cat charm that, according to its tag, “is the good-luck charm for keeping evil spilits away and bringing up babies. It believed to offer protection for a safe birth and good luck for babies.” We can definitely use all of that.

Eventually we checked into our room at the Hotel Huntington on Nob Hill, our favorite San Francisco hotel, so I could get ready for my pregnancy massage at the Nob Hill Spa—a little pregnancy indulgence. We go to the spa to swim in the pool every time we stay at this hotel, but I’d never had any treatments there, and now I wonder why. The massage was fabulous; the masseuse found the tiny, quarter-sized spot on the middle-right-side of my back that tends to ache constantly and did her best to bring it back to normal. Afterwards, she said, “Your body still needs work.” What I think it really needs is to not be pregnant anymore.



We finished our day at the Nob Hill Café, where I allowed myself a larger portion of carbs than usual (delicious bread, baked eggplant and penne). Then we relaxed in our lovely room and just enjoyed being together in the city.

Sunday we went to church at Grace Cathedral, right across the street from the hotel. It’s a beautiful Episcopal church, and we’d been inside many times to admire the stained glass windows and the marble labyrinth in the floor (I once even took a yoga class on the labyrinth); we wanted to see what a service was like. The church was celebrating a collaboration it had been undergoing with some Tibetan monks, who processed in with their bright robes. Apparently K.D. Lang was also there, part of the collaboration as well. We’re also pretty sure the woman behind us was drinking a beer.

We returned to the Nob Hill Café for brunch afterwards—if we lived on Nob Hill we’d be there all the time—and then took a taxi to AT&T Park for a Giants game. They won against the Cubs; alas, we did not win one of the Vespas being given away for Fan Appreciation Day. We imagined that the next baseball game we go to might very well be in the company of our baby, who we will dress in some of her extensive Red Sox clothing selections.

And then we headed home. Almost. We were almost to the Bay Bridge when I got a call from my credit card company—a man had called them to report that we’d left the card on the clipboard at the parking garage payment booth when Andrew signed the slip. We returned to retrieve the card; disaster averted. Good karma for the booth attendant; we were impressed that he managed to track us down. And then we headed home. Slowly. Insane traffic leaving the city. But we made it eventually, and fortunately I did not go into labor while stuck in gridlock.

It was a lovely “final” weekend trip, the perfect way to begin our temporary weekend-traveling hiatus. It’s a real countdown now.