More About Friday

This post is a continuation of my previous post. I probably won't have time to finish my Friday story tonight, but I would like to write a little bit before going to bed.

So, after we got on the boat, Peter calmed down a bit. In fact, he was quite excited to be on a boat, and he dragged me by the hand to the top deck of the boat ( Ruth stayed below deck with Michael - she tends to get sea-sick on boats ). As we sat there on the to deck, we had one of those little moments that makes all the stress of parenthood worth it. We had a great view of both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge from the our seats, and we could also see a bunch of sailboats. Peter drank it all in and his little eyes lit up. He kept pointing at stuff and saying things like "I see sailboat Daddy!" and "giant red bridge Daddy!" ( That's what he calls the Golden Gate Bridge - we had seen it up close on Monday ). Now that he's finally started to talk a bit, I just love to hear his cute little voice. I need to cherish every little moment like that. He's still my baby boy, but I know he won't be a baby forever.

So, the boat trip went rather well, but things got a little bit tougher once we got on the island. It soon became clear that our options were going to be a bit limited by the boys. I was really interested in a guided tour about Alcatraz escapes ( given by a former FBI agent who once swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco ), but we had to quit that tour after about 5 minutes because Peter needed to go potty just as the tour group was leaving to head to another location. We finally decided to make our way up to the prison building to do the main tour. The boys were real troopers on that walk. We were told it was a 130 foot climb from the dock to the main prison building, but the boys made it without a problem ( I was VERY thankful I didn't have to carry Peter up the hill ). The tour was a self-guided one. You were given headphones and an audio device when you got in ( a very low-tech iPod-type thingy ). There were about 20 chapters on the audio thingy. The audio device would tell you where to go and tell a story about each each location. You could start and stop the audio recording whenever you wanted, which meant you could do the tour at your own pace. This all seemed kinda promising, because it meant we could take a break from the tour whenever the boys acted up. Unfortunately the boys acted up quite a bit. At times, it seemed like they were re-enacting a prison riot. It's not really a bad thing for boys to fight and wrestle a bit ( As Ruth's Dad told us "Don't worry about the boys fighting. You should only worry if they don't fight each other. If two brothers close in age don't fight each other, then something's wrong.". In other words, "Boys will be boys", and they were certainly being boys that day. ), but it made it tough to concentrate on the tour when the boys were constantly wrestling at my feet, chasing each other, and pulling each other down. They really weren't fighting in a malicious way. I think they were just bored by the whole tour and were looking for something more fun to do. They had spent much of the past week watching a DVD called "Scooby Doo and the Goblin King". We had brought a portable DVD player and about 20 DVDs on the trip ( to keep the boys entertained on the plane and in the evenings ), but it seemed like they only wanted to watch the Goblin King. There's a comical scene in the Goblin King where two guard fight each other, and it seemed like the boys were trying to re-enact that scene. So it was more of a giggling fight than a screaming fight, but it was still rather distracting, and I was still worried that they were going to hurt themselves ( considering that there were steel bars all over the place ). Ruth was also still feeling a bit sea-sick, so after a while she needed to sit down, and I was doing the tour all on my own with the two boys. After doing the tour with the boys for about 20 minutes I realized that I was never going to be able to take many pictures ( because I had to keep my eyes on the boys ). I knew that Ruth would be disappointed if we didn't get a a lot of good pictures, so I dropped he boys off with Ruth, and started to do the tour on my own. After a few minutes a I started to worry that Ruth might be having a hard time with the boys ( and her sea-sickness ), so I made my way quickly around the whole prison and took every picture I could. By that time I was only halfway through the audio tour, but I decided to give up and head back to Ruth and the boys. When I got back to where I had left them, I found they were no longer there. Michael had apparently needed to go potty really bad, so Ruth had left the tour location completely to go to the bathroom just outside the prison building. Eventually, I got in touch with Ruth by phone and we met in the prison gift shop.

And that was about it for our Alcatraz tour. We headed back down to get the boat back to San Fran. By the time we got on the boat it was 2:30, but it really didn't seem like we had done much. Don't get me wrong - we had a lot of fun and saw a lot of cool stuff, but we didn't do quite as much as we thought we would do. Still, all in all, it was a good time.

Well, I see it's bedtime for me again, so I'll have to continue this story later. Stay tuned for the next episode, which I'll probably call "Even More About Friday".

Rich