Gold Country

After a few days exploring the San Francisco area, we headed east to Gold Country to continue our pursuit of treasure. Parker was super excited to go "gemstone mining" at the many caverns in the area--he literally was thrilled, saying he had the best day ever after finding all of these gems in his bag of sand. It was quite the highlight of the trip for him! He would shout to anyone walking by--"Look at how many gems I found!!" And he's not usually one to solicit the attention of strange passersby.

Fisherman's Wharf

For months now, Parker has been obsessed with going to San Francisco so he could get a pearl at a store on Fisherman's Wharf; I remembered going there when I was eight years old on my school trip to Northern California, and told him about it when he started getting really into "treasure." I think that he's been intrigued by all of the treasures in the Lego sets that he has--it seems like in almost every set, "good guys" and "bad guys" are fighting each other over some kind of treasure. There's also a lot of treasure to be found in pirate stories and toys. So, I promised him a long time ago that if we ever went to San Francisco, I'd take him to Fisherman's Wharf and he could choose an oyster and discover a pearl inside. Well, you'd think that this was the only reason we went on vacation for him! Every day, he'd ask when we were going to get his pearl. So, on our first full day, we took the ferry over to the city from Sausalito and headed right for the Pearl Factory. He was pretty amazed and excited by the whole thing--which you could tell by his dead serious face--and was really happy to get a "silverish blue" colored pearl in the oyster he chose. He keeps it in a special little pouch, and, amazingly, he hasn't even lost it yet.