San Francisco, Califonia

Our hope was to get into San Francisco before dark. Well, major fail. We drove for eight hours, so it was unlikely we would get a campsite before dark. In addition we stopped at a Bass Pro Shop for about 45 minutes, then at a Barnes and Nobel for a half an hour.  When we got our campsite in Anthony Chabot Regional Park it was pitch black, so we set up the camper and passed out.

The next day was almost as thrilling. We moved campsites, and I worked on school work (happy fun time!) In the evening we went to a movie, “What Next”.

Day three we biked to San Francisco where we went to a place called the Exploratorium. It was a science centered museum mostly about light refraction, biology, and optical illusions. We learned something kind of disturbing before we even got into the museum; bikes get stolen often.  The weirdest part was that bikes parked on the right side of the museum got stolen more than bikes parked on the left, go figure. We had two six foot cable locks and found out that the museum store lent out U locks, so we got three. By the time we were done locking our bikes it looked better than most bank security systems, but it was a necessity. My mom and dad’s bikes are high-end mountain bikes, so compared to all of the other single speed bikes next to us, anyone who wanted to steal bikes would go for ours.

When we got into the museum we were advised to start at the back.  The lady at the counter where we checked in told us that a school group was coming so we should stay at the back.  She said that school groups never stayed for more than a few hours, and they almost never made it to the back.  About ten minutes after we got in, a small army of fifth graders flocked the museum. It proved wise to stay at the back of the museum. The school group was loud, obnoxious, and they took forever to look at one exhibit (no offense to you readers in school).  After the school group moved through we went to the front and checked what there was there.  There was an exhibit that looked like a geyser and was demonstrating the formula PV=NRT.  If you want to know what that means look at the bottom, it’s confusing. We saw a plant called Mimosa Pudica, or the Sensitive Plant, that curled its leafs when I touched them. There were a lot of other exhibits, but I can’t describe, (or remember) them all. There was a ten foot whirl pool, a twenty foot twister, a sandstorm, a fog generator, and an exhibit that dropped dry ice into a pool of water. Dry ice is made of frozen carbon dioxide rather than water.  When it makes contact with water it generates a fog. In this case the reaction caused the ice to speed around the tank and spin around. 

In the front of the museum there was a triangle of mirrors that reflected each other and made an infinite room. Another mirror made it appear that the room behind me was distorted and upside down, but I was in perfect focus. That one almost made me puke. Yet another mirror created an illusion that there was a spring two feet in front of me until I put hand through it.  One of my favorite exhibits involved magnetism. There were two pieces of metal that looked like elbow macaroni facing each other. All around them was black sand. Black sand is made of iron ore so it can be magnetized. When I sprinkled the sand on the pieces of metal it magnetized and made little spikes. Overall I really liked the Exploratorium. It was more interactive than a lot of museums

After the Exploratorium we biked the Golden Gate Bridge.  Since it was getting dark we couldn’t go all the way across the bridge, but that was probably a good

thing. This bridge is shown collapsing in so many movies I almost hyperventilated.  The view off the bridge was amazing, and if not for the cars and trucks going by at 40 miles an hour, it would have been very peaceful.  On the way back we saw something that I wished I had recorded. 

There was a guy on a bike with an Australian accent screaming at a group of tourists for walking on the wrong side of the path. Right after that little scene I saw something I hadn’t seen on the way up. There were about a dozen bronze plaques saying Gun Positions 1, Gun Position 2, etc… I learned that these were where the defenders would place their cannons in the case of an attack.

The next day we went to an observatory and space museum. We watched two movies and explored the museum. Near the end we went to the telescope section where there were the two observatories and a room full of old-timey telescopes. I poked my head into the observatory just to check it out, but as luck would have it there were a few astronomers in it, so I got to look through the telescope and see Jupiter.

PV=NRT is the ideal gas law. It means that pressure times volume equals the number of moles of a substance times R, the universal gas constant times T, temperature.  This means that if one thing changes something else has to change as well, (what you do to one side of the equation you must do to the other).  If there is a tub of water and the temperature increases either the volume will increase, or, if there is a top on the tub, the pressure will increase.