My parents came for a visit last week and I thought I would share some of the activities we did. We do have a guest photographer for this post: they were all taken by my dad.
Since my parents had never really been outside of San Francisco on their previous visits, we spent a day in Santana Row in San Jose. While this isn’t typical of San Jose, it does have all the activities you want to take a visitor to: wine tasting, restaurants, and shopping. Our first stop was wine tasting at the Vintage Wine Bar. They have an outdoor seating area near a fountain, which was a really nice place to enjoy a glass of wine.
Afterwards, we got some dim sum for lunch, again at an outdoor table, and looked in a few shops. The highlight of the day was getting to do all of this outside. There aren’t very many places with outdoor shopping in Indiana and there are too many bugs this time of year to make outdoor eating particularly popular. It made for a nice change for my parents.
The next day we went to San Francisco and wandered around several areas: Potrero, the Mission, the Haight, and the Castro. We didn’t stop anywhere in Potrero, but I did give a tour of several of the places we used to frequent when we lived in San Francisco. The first actual stop was Southern Pacific Brewing for lunch with Lloyd. This was also a place Lloyd and I frequented and I think my parents were a bit dismayed when we said everything on the food menu was good, but we all enjoyed the meal.

There is a lot of walking when Lloyd and I tour people around the city. I think the footwear says it all.
When Lloyd went back to work, the rest of us wandered over to the Haight since my parents had never been there. This isn’t an area of the city I usually visit, but it is one of the places visitors think of when they think of San Francisco. On the way back, we decided to see if they had bar seats available at Magnolia, a very popular brewery in the city, and got the last three. I’d only been there once before and was excited that they had a small beer (low alcohol percentage, not the size of the glass) since I was more thirsty than anything else, and was happy to find that the beer was as good as I remembered.
Afterwards, we wandered over to Kasa in the Castro for dinner. I first heard about this place, weirdly, at a knitting store down the street. The people who worked there were always talking about going there for lunch and how good it was. One day, we decided to check it out, armed only with the knowledge that it was an Indian restaurant somewhere nearby. We followed our noses and now go there pretty much every time we’re in the area. Definitely a favorite and a great way to end a visit to the Bay Area.