Lucked out!

It was Tuesday morning and we were getting married the next day and we didn't have our marriage license yet. The certified translation was supposed to arrive soon because they overnighted it from Miami. I have been through many rush request for documents and tickets and did not expect anything to show up on time. If we did not get the translation, we would not be getting married and that would put a major kink in our plans.

Patrícia told me to call down to the desk to check after we got up. I did as I was told, even though I knew the answer, and was delightfully shocked to discover I was wrong. The package was waiting for us down stairs at the desk! We could get married now! I skipped on down to the desk, signed for the package, pour myself a cup of delicious strong coffee, and returned to the room with a smile on my face.

That lasted about 30 seconds. Time enough for me to open the package and see that while they did what they said they would in sending it, what they sent was worthless. No ATA certification, only a notarized letter saying that the translation was correct. We went to the City Hall to try to convince them to accept it. We tried and tried. No go. We ate and went back to the hotel.

Don't panic. Search the internet for an ATA translator in San Francisco. It took some time but I found one and made the call. She agreed to do it that night if she did not have to retranslate anything. We took a couple buses to south SF and found her building. As we were walking up the very steep hill, we saw a woman getting into her car in front of the place we were going. When we went up the steps and rang the bell, she got out of her car and said she was the translator and had forgotten we were coming. She almost left!

We sat in nervous anticipation as she checked the translation. One typo, nothing major. Fifty bucks later and we had our ATA certification. Whew! Two buses and 45 minutes back to the hotel. A long nervous day.

Translation Problems

We had an appointment to get our marriage license at 10am on Monday in the San Francisco city hall. The only thing we needed was ID and a translation of Patrícia's divorce. The divorce had to be translated by an ATA (American Translators Assoc.) according to the SF requirements. No problem. I had it translated by a big translation company that says they have ATA translators. When I dropped it off, I asked three times if it would be ATA certified and was assured that it would be. Can you guess what happened? Of course it was not an ATA certified translator and they said no marriage license.

We made many calls to the translation company and they said they would send a certified translation from their Miami office by Fed Ex.

We could not do anything else about the documents for the rest of the day, so we went to Golden Gate Park and had another delicious picnic, bottle of wine, and a nap in the soft, flower, sprinkled grass.

After that we strolled through the Haigt Ashbury neighborhood and watched the freaks and hippies.

Biking the Bridge

We jumped on the cable car to Pier 39 with an empty picnic bag, stopped at Trader Joe's to fill it up, and then rented a tandem bike on the pier. The guy that rented us the bike told us it was easy with just a few little hills. Uh huh. Don't believe it.













A tandem bike takes a little getting used to with the wide turning radius and two people who do not always lean the same way, but it was fine. We strapped our picnic lunch to the handle bars and off we went. We almost made it up the first hill without bailing. The next one closer to the bridge--no way. We, and everyone else, gave up riding. Then the bridge itself is uphill to the middle. You get a much better idea how big the bridge is when you ride over it. It is really really big with a span of 1280 m (4200 ft). It was wonderful going down the other side and around underneath it, but then it was a big hill to get into Sausilito. When we got into Sausilito we were tired. I found out later that we went 16 kilometers (10 miles).

We looked in a couple shops and then had a picnic in the park by the bay. Nice crusty french bread, genoa salami, brie, cobb salad, parmesan crisps, wine, and the most perfect strawberries I have ever seen and tasted in my life. Really, they were stunningly pretty and incredibly delicious. It was a perfect little picnic.

We took the ferry, with 200 other bikers, back to Pier 39. There was no way we could ride back. It was a great day.