MLK Day....Having fun with no plan except to eat the best tacos in town

My honey loves to restaurant shop. He loves the thrill of finding something extra special. They usually all come highly recommended in some way. Best pizza, best Thai, best burgers...you get the idea. He searches newspapers, internet and word of mouth, you name it but they have to have the reputation of being completely delish. Other times we will simply get a bee in our bonnet and try and find the bay area's best something ourselves. For example, best oatmeal cookie (Draeger's) or best yogurt (tutti frutti) or best ice cream Bi Rite). We will literally drive all around in search of our personal favorite. In the bay area this can be quite a process but we are up for the challenge. Sometimes we hit the jackpot and find a place for life and other times well we don't.

My honey while searching for the bay areas best burger found a spot in Hayward called Val's Diner. He has wanted to try this place for awhile but alas burgers are not my area of expertise. So with his brothers they gave Val's a try. By the way the verdict was good but not great. I had to wonder if it was because a 1 lb. burger is just too disgustingly large to be great. So anyhoo while at supposedly the best burger joint, my Tom met a Mexican man that said that he knew where the best taco's in town were. Now we use town loosely here and by town we mean the bay area. These best taco's happened to be in the town of Oakland in a taco truck. Taco's take on a whole new meaning of best. Anything Mexican will be on our quest until we die. That is because Mexican is the ultimate. The ultimate food group. We have decided that if we had to choose one type of food to eat for the rest of our life it would be Mexican. We take Mexican very, very seriously. We will travel to the ends of the earth for good tacos. This includes a very dicey area of Oakland and yes we will even order them from a truck. Now there was a safety issue to think about and after some research we concluded it would be safe for us and our children to head to Oakland and have ourselves some lunch. No agenda for the day except our tacos and then we would just let the kidlets dictate what was next. Oh the possibilities.

Our taco truck
was wildly entertaining and it was the cheapest trip to Mexico you could ever hope for. As for the tacos they were a hit! The boys loved the carnitas and Tom loved the al pastor. As for myself the meat seriously frightened me so I opted for the shrimp ceviche tostada. As for it being the best taco shop in town... that will take a life time of research.
You must check out the man/women dead center in this shot. Women body, hair and clothes yet painfully long beard. Good lesson for the kiddos not to stare. We all failed miserably.

While at the taco shop the conversation went like this:
Nicholas: I've never been to downtown Oakland.
Tom: Then we need to drive there right now.
That is how we ended up at Lake Merritt next. It's that simple.

How we ended up here was almost as simple.
Nicholas: I like San Francisco better than Oakland
Tom: Me too, let's go there.

How we ended up at this chocolate shop in San Fran is a little more embarrassing. We were driving in a great little neighborhood called Hayes Valley. Tom saw an open parking spot and we squeezed right in. As we were all wandering down a darling street with lots of stunning boutiques my boys disappeared. They caught up to us with cheeks full of chocolate. They apparently took a few too many samples from the high end chocolate shop called " Christopher Elbow." We decided that the only polite thing to do, since they had both eaten about $10.00 worth of samples, was buy from the shop. It was a great decision because the chocolate there was fantastic. Maybe I should start looking for the best chocolate shop. Hum-mm that sounds like a brilliant plan.

All little girls need pink cowboy boots and that just happens to be a fact. It is as much a fact as 2+2=4. So in a perfect little San Francisco shop I picked Ella's up. They were just sitting there waiting for me and happened to be on sale. Now I will scratch that off my list of to-dos.

We ended up at our very favorite ice cream spot on the planet because that is what we do. We know this because we have researched and tried 100 other ice cream shops. We just got in our car and we drove there. We all knew that if we were in the city without any particular plan that we would end up at Bi Rite and that is just what happened.

The only glitch was the line. It's always there but this time it was even longer. It gave Nicholas a great idea and a new system was born. Walk up to the counter and buy 1 quart of salted caramel to share. That wasn't quite enough, even though it should of been, and so we added 1 more quart of salted caramel. That's right 2 quarts of salted caramel. We all were seriously sick at that point but laughing hysterically at how great of an idea this is.

These next few pictures is what aimlessly wandering around San Francisco looks like.

This day is hard to beat. No where to go, nothing to do and just letting the kids dictate our next move. Sometimes just flying by the seat of your pants you find exactly what you wanted to do all along.