Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 17 trips to carry that many people.

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And how they pay attention to the music!

When I was growing up, we sang hymns. I liked the hymns, but there was nothing to them to make me want to dance with abandon. I should note that I don’t think that I have ever done anything with abandon, so watching the children dance wildly, with abandon, makes me very uncomfortable. It’s hard for me to take my eyes off them and concentrate on worshipping. And, yet, at is what the children are doing: worshipping.

But there are so many things I’ve observed as I’ve watched them over the past couple of years. First, it doesn’t seem to matter which children are involved in the dancing at the front of the stage. All are welcome. Two sisters dance together. Two brothers, one white and one black, bounce up and down to the music while holding hands. A small girl looks on as a circle forms, and the children open the circle to her, and they all hold hands and bounce.

Second, the children don’t seem to care that people are watching. I am watching, and I know their parents are there making sure that everyone is safe and supervised and not too wild. And, yet, the children continue on. They take the adult correction and keep going. They are focused on their dancing worship.

Third, the dancing (if that is what going round and round in a circle or bouncing up and down is) changes. Sometimes all of the children are in a large circle slowly moving around. Then they’re all bouncing. Suddenly, they’re all doing their own things individually. Then they end up all back together in a big circle. It’s fluid. And the changes don’t seem to bother them or interrupt them.

Madeleine L’Engle discusses this childlikeness in Walking On Water. As we age, we lose our ability to simply BE in the presence of God. Perhaps the reason I’m so uncomfortable is that I’ve never truly learned to BE in a corporate worship setting. I have moments on my own, but almost never in a congregation. That’s something I’ve noticed in Chaim Potok’s Asher Lev books. There are certain celebrations where the Hasidim dance with abandon with the scriptures, and there is nothing wrong with it.

I must remember what Jesus said in Matthew 19:14, when the children came to Jesus. “Leave them alone,” he said, “for the kingdom is made of such as these.”

We walked up and down streets in Chinatown, and discovered the Oldest Buddhist temple on Waverly. One of Lee’s former students, who is at school in Berklet but who’d been away camping in Colorado, had told us to look for the temple. It was pretty neat, but we didn’t hang around long. No picture taking in the temple.

In our wanderings we happened upon a tour group that was at a music shop. It was pretty cool to go in and see the various instruments, which included quite a few traditional Chinese instruments. This is Chinatown, after all. The Chinese Cultural Center, unfortunately, is closed on Mondays, so we were unable to do anything there, but we did see a lot of Chinese men (and quite a few women) in the park gambling. I didn’t feel uncomfortable except when we walked through an alley and I looked in the back door of a storefront that was crowded with Chinese women, whom I assumed were playing mah jong. I did get a dirty look from one of the women, so I kept walking.

Lee and I got snacks at a Starbuck’s. It had emptied out, but then became quite crowded, so Lee asked if I wanted to find a park to go to or if I wanted to go to the library. I’m always game for checking out the libraries of different cities. On the way to public library (where I started writing this travelogue), a black man asked Lee, just plain as day as we’re walking by, if he wanted to buy some weed. I couldn’t believe how bold he was! It wasn’t the best part of town. But there were tourists around so I figured we’d be safe enough.

Outside the public library, the SFPD has a mobile command unit. Several officers were near their vehicles, and I asked if I could get a picture. They said sure. I am pretty sure that my husband thinks I’m weird.

The library, while pretty, was very annoying. Does the phrase “You can’t get there from here” strike a chord with you? There were certain floors where I couldn’t get from one side to the other and not every floor had a restroom. We spent a couple hours at the library reading and working online and then left to find dinner and retrieve our luggage.

We planned on arriving at the airport around 9 p.m. So that we’d have plenty of time to check in and go through security. We took the Montgomery Street BART all the way to the airport. When we arrived, we learned that e incoming flight from Cincinnati was not going to arrive until after 1 a.m. due to the fog.

Lee and I took turns freshening up in the bathroom. He had a complete change of clothes; I, however, did not and washed the makeup off my face and brushed my teeth. I managed to sleep on the plane, but Lee did not. We arrived in Cincinnati with not a minute to spare. We managed to make it to our connection’s gate just as boarding began.

We arrived in Orlando around 11 a.m. The heat exiting the plane was horrible. It was just suffocating. Poor Lee was exhausted. Mom picked us up at baggage claim, having driven to Orlando all by herself. We took her to lunch at the Perkins Restaurant she likes so much, but poor Lee was just beat. We got home by 2 p.m. and dropped into bed for a 6 hour nap. Boy! Were our time schedules messed up! We spent a couple weeks getting used to our time zone.

We arrived in Mariposa around 11. At the station I talked to two Brits who were going to spend 21 days hiking to Toulumne. One of them had just been in Australia, so they were a bit tired from the time difference.

Next we took a 2 hour bus ride from Mariposa to Yosemite. The scenery was incredible. The driver on the way into Yosemite was able to tell us a bit about the rock formations between the town and the mountains and when we entered the park he was able to point our attention to spectacular views of the falls along the way. He even told us about a 2006 landslide that was still being studied and which had caused them to build a single lane bridge over the Yosemite River to get around the slide and another to back. It required a 15 minute wait while traffic cleared.

Unfortunately, Lee got I’ll on the bus ride, so by the time we got off the bus after 2 and a half hours he was sick and hungry. We ate and the lodge and then took the easy path to view Lower Yosemite Falls. It was an incredible view, and I’m glad that we didn’t have to drive down there because it was incredibly crowded. I had thought that Muir Woods was crowded, but this was even worse.

Instead of leaving at 6, we took the bus back at 4 p.m. And transferred, for a fee, our train tickets to an earlier return, which meant that we returned to San Francisco the same way we’d left (instead of having to take a train farther inland and having a longer bus ride).

I would love to back, but I would want to be where there are fewer people. The Sierra Nevada are unlike the mountains back east.

We then went back to the Ferry Building and met up with a tour group. We went over the Golden Gate Bridge (again) and into Sausilito. Here we picked up more members of the tour and went to Muir Woods.

Muir Woods has some pretty amazing younger redwood trees. They’re still pretty big despite being young. The only problem I had was that it was so crowded. We only had 30 minutes since we were on a tour. Of we’d had more time I would have liked to have hiked some of the trails to get away from the crowd. I looked for Ewoks but didn’t find any.

Jerry was our tour guide, and he was fantastic. After Muir Woods, we went to a cliff to get a look at Muir Beach. He was so nice and took pictures for everyone. He is from San Francisco and loves his job. We went back to Sausilito and took the 5 o’clock ferry back to the city.

We had the craziest ferry operator, he came out and told the bicyclists not to lock up their bikes because no one was going to steal it, and if they did they weren’t going to jump into the bay with it. This ferry took us on the far side of Alcatraz, which we’d already seen as part of our night tour. He promised, at least twice, that the ferry had clean, public restrooms, but there wasn’t even toilet paper in the two restrooms on the second deck. Fortunately, a guy went to the bar and got me some napkins.

I had the sandwich after we set up a trip to go to Yosemite. Since we weren’t going on this day, we took the BART across the bay to Berkeley. We stayed around the UC campus. Lee discovered that UC has a botanical garden so we walked and walked and walked up a hill (mountain) to the garden. It got horribly hot. The garden did have every imaginable plant, and we did pay to be there, but it was just so hot. All I could think about was getting back to San Francisco where it was in the 50s or 60s.

We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant. The food was so incredibly fresh and delicious. It was the best quesadilla I’ve had. The food in the San Francisco area was pretty good.

We were so happy to return to the cool air of San Francisco, though.

Lee and I walked around the park a bit. Everything cost money, including the Japanese Tea Garden, and didn’t want to pay money to see flowers. Perhaps I should have because the tea garden did look pretty cool. It seemed as if we’d missed the free admission day to everything by just one day.

That night we took a night tour of Alcatraz, the island of the birds. It’s amazing that the place is still standing. The fog (and it was pretty foggy which set the perfect atmosphere for visiting the island) may not feel very salty, but it is, and it has a highly corrosive effect on everything. Alcatraz was obsolete the moment it was built. The best talk (of the two we attended) was the one on the sounds of the slammer. The cells are mechanically operated instead of electrically. Granted, it’s an island with frigid water, but one still doesn’t want prisoners to escape with an electricity failure.

I wish we’d gone during the day so that we could have seen more of the island. The audio tour was pretty awesome. Apparently, it’s won awards. It uses former prisoners and guards to narrate Alcatraz’s history. It’s one of the most informative and enlightening tours I’ve ever had.

We took the BART to Montgomery and Market Streets in San Francisco. We then walked about a mile to the Grant Plaza Hotel at the corner of Grant and Pine Streets. The hotel is just past the arch and right in Chinatown. Room 408 was small, and once we saw that it was a full size bed, we decided we’d spend as much time as possible away from the room.

That day, as I calculated later that night, we managed to walk 12.5 miles! We walked to the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge and by that point I was exhausted. We were going to go into Sausilito, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. We learned later that it was only another mile down the road, but I was so grumpy I don’t think going there would have helped.

Lee bought two tickets for the Hop On Hop Off bus tour, which were good for 24 hours. We decided to ride on top of the bus. The guide warned us that it’d be really cold and windy as we went over the bridge, and boy, was it. I got the laughs so hard as the wind picked up and everyone started ducking to get out of the wind. It was so cold and windy, but it must have been what I needed. The guide came up the stairs and was staring at me. I was in a much better mood after that, and I slept very well that nigh.

When we got near the hotel we saw a weird sight: a car crashed into a light pole. The driver was at the trunk using his cell phone. I stopped to see if he needed help, and he said he was okay. It was just weird. He must have pulled out of that office building really fast because there never seemed to be any traffic on that road.

We walked along the path partway around Oyster Point. It’s a nice walking path. We met 3 women who had their dogs out for a walk and who were socializing. One dog liked to fetch its toy and drop it for the other dog so that she could then play with it. She’d then bring the toy back to be thrown for the other dog. Another dog clearly had wolf in him. He seemed to slink around.

To Lee’s delight we also managed to hit the hot tub.