Golden Gate Break-in

  We traveled to San Francisco on Tuesday, July 17th. The Alcatraz tours have all been long sold out. So, we decided to stop off at the Jelly Belly Factory tour in Fairfield, CA on our way to San Fran. The tour was quite interesting. The variety of flavors are astounding: Baby wipes, Barf, Booger, Dog Food,  as well as their three best sellers: Berry Cherry, Licorice and popcorn and everything in between. I didn't know Jelly Belly made candy corn but they indeed do and is quite yummy. The Jelly Belly store sucked us in with Dale and Luke getting Flip Flops and Timmy a very cool beanie helicopter hat. Instead of stopping for lunch, we went straight to San Francisco in hopes of beating rush hour traffic. We did. We stopped at the Golden Gate park on recommendation.
  The park is huge! It has a flower conservatory, a playground, the famous carousel, plenty of hiking trails among many other things to do. We roamed the flowers as evidence of pictures. We also took to the trails, where Luke was Tarzan. We missed out on the Carousel by 5 minutes, so we took Luke to the Koret Children's Quarter where he had a blast. It was time to get something to eat. I took out my trusty phone and opened up my gluten free restaurant finder and we ended up at the pacific catch. We walked there through the numerous trails I mentioned before. The food was good and definitely most different. We all had some type of fish except Luke who had his standby trustworthy chicken strips. My body went into shock (not really) as it couldn't remember the last time I had eaten this foreign substance.
  Time to head back to the car. We were one of a handful cars left, a stark contrast from the tens of cars when we parked 4 hours earlier. I looked down to see glass at my feet. When I looked up, it was from my passenger side window. We had been broken into. They took my laptop, which had 50% of our pictures as I had been dumping them from my phone and camera to save room. They took my wife's kindle, my son's i-Pod touch, our GPS navigation system, our bag of maps and tour books (I guess their planning their own trip) and most damaging, my wifes' purse. She had our checkbooks as well as all her credit cards, social security cards and what not. It wouldn't have been so bad had I not tried to be so smart. We share all the same credit cards but one. However, in attempt to be prepared, I wrote all my card numbers down on a piece of paper and put it in her bag in case I lost my wallet.
  So, I called the San Francisco Police department. They told me they couldn't take a statement over the phone until I had made sure their was no fraud on my credit cards. So, I began the long process of cancelling all of our cards. I canceled all our cards. All we had left for cash on us was $30. We were 6 hours from my family in Burbank and had half a tank.
  After filing a claim with my insurance company for the window, I went to the SPD to file a report. We then decided we would make the 6 hour drive to Burbank even though it was 10 at night.We really weren't feeling comfortable staying at a hotel with a busted window being so far from home. It was freezing on I-580. Yeah, 62 degrees isn't bad but the wind was still chilly. We stopped at a rest area and tied a blanket over the window to minimize the chill and put the heat on our feet. Now, we lost out navigation system as well as our maps. Thank goodness I had my phone. It successfully navigated us to our family at 4:30AM. So, once we got the kids settled in bed, we called our banks and stopped our checks and our debit card, pursued setting up the claim to have the window fixed, as well as start the process of getting all my wife's health/dental cards as well as social security and driver license replaced.
  I was able to take a 4 hour siesta as my wife finalized the arrangements for the guys to come to our family's house to change the window out.
  We were unable to cross the Golden Gate Bridge (that was on our agenda after dinner) but I did get a picture, My cousins were great as they loaned us the deductible for the window and then took the kids on a sight-seeing tour so Dale and I could get some sleep.
  We wait now for the window to be fixed, a CC over-nighted and pay day on Friday to have some cash. I can't thank everyone enough for all their generous donations, offers and kind words during this little inconvenience because in reality that's all it was. All my family was safe and unharmed. We had a place to stay and things are slowly getting put into order.
  We ended our night by going to the Counter for dinner. Thank you Aunt Ruthie for treating us and allowing Timothy to polish off a 1 pound Hamburger, Look at the size of this thing!!

 Some camp fire family time in the backyard made a rather unfortunate event much easier. I mean we could have been days away from family... so if it had to happen, this was probably one of the best scenario's.
  Oh, and one of the total upsides, is all our souvenir baseballs from our trip have been untouched.

  Update: Window is fixed. However, the card was sent out today instead of yesterday, so we'll have to wait until Friday to resume our adventure on the road. In the mean time, we will be taking to the beach for some much needed down time. Again, good to have family in this area!

 Also, there was some levity to all this. At the time of cancelling all my cards at the scene, Luke looks at me with his hands over his head, whimpering says, "Daddy, money all gone."
 "It will be okay," I replied. Then in the morning my cousin said, "The car looks uneven with one window punched out, so I punched the other one out too."