“Oh wow, you’re going to [insert hometown here] for a week? I’m so jealous!”

Don’t be. I personally love spending quality time with family, but it’s just everyday stuff that other people are most likely not interested in hearing about. However, since some people have a glamorized idea of what these trips are like, here’s the truth (trust me, it’s pretty mundane).

Let me just begin by saying that, during the week, I didn’t even leave the house AT ALL. This is roughly what each work day (as a software engineer) looked like while working remotely in CA:

Typical Weekday:

6:55am – wake up just in time for standup
7:00am – hide in bathroom/closet for standup b/c no one is awake yet
7:30am – eat breakfast
8:00am – meetings, meetings, meetings
2:00pm – track down root cause for broken tests
5:00pm – take a quick nap before people start coming home
7:00pm – everyone is home
8:00pm – dinner
9:00pm – edit family video while running tests (in the living room so that I can listen in on conversations)
12:00am – chat with Taiwan and Galway
1:00am – sleep

Technically, with the naps, I did end up getting roughly 8 hours of sleep per day, but didn’t feel like it at all.

Honestly, when we work remotely while hanging out with family, it’s much more tiring than when we’re home in Boston on a regular work day. This is because normally, once we’re home, we can just relax and do nothing. With family, there is always more to do. Of course, family trips typically last no longer than a week so it’s mostly fine short term. You can bet that when we get home, we end up taking a couple of days to relax (outside of work). For this particular trip, this is unfortunately not the case because we go from my family to my husband’s family immediately, but this is also out of the ordinary.

As for the weekend…

Saturday:

10:00am – drive to San Leandro to pick up Grandpa
11:00am – dim sum in Emeryville
1:00pm – back to my Grandpa’s to help with stuff (mostly tech related)
3:00pm – visit my granduncle at the nursing home
4:00pm – relatives headed to a friend’s place while we drove home
7:00pm – dinner
8:00pm – grocery shopping at Whole Foods
9:00pm – hang out with family

Note: This schedule is typical of any Bay Area trip regardless of whether or not we have visiting relatives from China.

Sunday:

Family decided to take a trip to Muir Woods. I’ve been there a couple of times already, but hey, who can ever get sick of taking a walk in nature? We only did the main loop that was mostly flat so that my grandpa can join us. Some considered doing an actual hike, but opted to just spend time with Grandpa instead.

I’ve actually never done an actual hike in Muir Woods… the first time we went, we meant to hike to the beach, but one of my friends did not handle the uphill very well so we abandoned that plan pretty quickly. The other times were all with family.

Anyway, when I mentioned this story, my uncle was like “there’s a beach?!” so we drove over to check it out briefly. For some reason, my mom thought it was a nude beach (I’ve heard of them in France, but definitely not the norm in the US) so when we arrived and most people were fully dressed (let’s be honest – the beaches there are too cold for bikinis), we laughed at the idea for awhile.

Afterwards, we stopped in Sausalito for some ice cream before heading home. Dinner at Sundance, a steak house in Palo Alto, known for their prime ribs.

Note: When we do not have visiting relatives, we typically hang out with friends instead. Since we visit the Bay Area fairly often, it’s fine to skip meeting up with friends once in awhile.

And that wraps up what a week in the life in the Bay Area looks like. For future visits, I will focus on specific aspects that are different from the usual.

Edit//

I imported a few old entries from my last blogging attempt. Pretty cool to look back and see what I wrote down the last time my aunt & family visited roughly a year ago. I didn’t mention this above but we ended up in the exact same airbnb! https://aliu.travel.blog/2018/02/03/a-sense-of-accomplishment/

My aunt and cousin flew over from China to spend some time in the SF Bay Area with my grandpa and also to get some stuff taken care of. Of course, I also flew over so that we could all spend time together. We all stayed in an airbnb together and we even invited my godmom’s son to stay with us since his school was nearby. I quite enjoyed being together as a strange family unit for those two weeks (not quite).

Honestly, most of what we did together is not very interesting to write about, but for me, travel is more about who I’m spending time with than what we do. We mostly drove all around the bay, running errands, visiting my granduncle, meeting people for dinner, etc. I managed to work in two museum visits into the schedule – both of which were well received, I hope. In the first week, we explored the California Academy of Sciences (Cal Academy for short). Then, in our last evening all together, we toured the Winchester Mystery House. In the one weekend we had in-between, we drove up to Tahoe (sans grandpa) and introduced skiing to everyone.

So where does my sense of accomplishment come from?

1. First, I must preface with this: even though I’ve had my driver’s license for about 10 years now, I have rarely driven in the past. But starting with the last visit, my aunt has been making me practice every time she comes over from China. So, in the beginning, I only drove in what I consider ideal situations: daylight, good weather, no traffic, mostly straight, wide roads with few traffic signals (aka highways).  Somehow, this time around, I managed to survive driving at night, in the rain, in traffic all at once! Furthermore, I was brave enough to drive inside SF and what I found was that the steep hills were not as scary as I believed them to be. Finally, I drove 50% of the way to Tahoe and only briefly on the way back, but it was all on a windy, narrow strip of mountain road. I still haven’t driven on snow, but at this point, I feel like I’ve tackled everything else.
2. This time last year, I was still skiing beginner runs, even though I had technically started skiing in 2015. Technique-wise, I was good enough to move up to intermediate runs long ago, but I was too scared of heights to try. On this Tahoe trip, I was so confident on the intermediates that I was able to record video at the same time! Also, after much coaxing, I attempted my first top-to-bottom advanced run (groomed) and it wasn’t bad at all! Granted, we went to Northstar, which is known as “Flatstar”, so it was an easier black compared to other resorts, but still!!
3. Okay, this has little to do with the trip itself and it was more of a timing thing, but I finally have an in-person interview somewhere! Hope everything will go swimmingly and I can go back to having a more “normal” life.

Because I have close friends and family members living in the bay area, I try to go back as often as I can. A goes at least once a quarter for work so that works out really well for me!

It turns out that I could have gone a day earlier because the meeting that was scheduled for Friday was actually cancelled (although I didn’t know that until last minute). I ended up staying an extra day though because of yet another snowstorm in Boston.

Saturday morning I had a dentist appointment (bleh) so we couldn’t meet A’s friend until lunchtime. Unfortunately for me, the right side of my mouth was numb all throughout the meal, even though the numbness was supposed to go away within one hour (yeah right). We went to this Hong Kong restaurant in Sunnyvale, a place that my mom used to frequent. I haven’t been there for years so I was worried that quality may have gone down, but it was still as good as I remembered.

Afterwards, we took A’s friend to the Caltrain station and headed over to explore the Winchester Mystery House. I’ve known about it since I was a little kid, but for some reason or another, I’ve never been. It was an interesting tour – goofy staircases, doors that lead to nowhere, etc. Mrs. Winchester was definitely a strange woman, but the house itself wasn’t spooky in any way.

We drove to SF for dinner with another one of A’s friends. A started to fall asleep while we were stuck in traffic so I took control of the steering wheel – in SF! So scary… The steakhouse we went to was unimpressive, especially in comparison to House of Prime Rib. We ordered “Italian dumplings” as an appetizer, but they were neither dumplings or Italian.

The next day, we drove back to San Francisco for lunch with my best friends. We went to the Exploratorium after because it was free that day (Groundhog’s Day). It was really crowded, of course. It’s normally around $30 so we can imagine that normally people wouldn’t have to wait to see the individual exhibits. I thought the museum was more meant for kids, but it was interesting enough for grown-ups as well.

Ate dinner with my family and then I drove home. My mom was leading the way and she is normally a fast driver, but that night, she drove so slow (too slow) for me. We were going an average of 50 mph. A had driven 100 mph going to SF earlier…

Monday was still a work day, even though I was thousands of miles away from Boston, but we still managed to cram in a little fun. I went over to Google for lunch and then A took me to their new visitor center (not open to the public though, so you would still need an employee to take you in). It was not very interesting – mostly bare. I think they made the move recently, so maybe they’ll add more to it at some point in the future? There was a ball pit in the center of the room that we went into briefly. I don’t think I’ve ever gone into a ball pit before so that was fun, at least.

At this point, I have hit up most of the tourist places in the bay area. I wonder what we could do the next time we go back (beyond visiting friends and family). If I had moved back to CA after graduating college, what would my weekends be like there?