This is San Francisco by Miroslav Sasek

This is San Francisco by Miroslav Sasek

Rating: 5 stars

I know I have said it before, but I really like to provide Lorelei, Ben and Kiefer books about places we're going to visit before we actually get there.  Whether it's a baseball game or art museum, dairy farm or Washington, D.C., they like to know what they're getting themselves into.  Or, because I prefer to deny them the luxury of opinions at this young age, they like to know what I am getting them into.  Yup, that's a bit more accurate!

So it was with our recent trip to Northern California.  My husband travels there for work from time to time, so he got for the kids this classic travel book about a year ago.  They've loved it ever since--at first, only because Daddy got it for them, but then they realized the pictures were really cool.  They quickly realized that this city called San Francisco was very different from our sleepy ex-burb town in Northern Virginia.  And finally, they loved it because they knew we were going there for Spring Break.

Steep, steep hills!

This book is vintage cool--even though your kids will have no idea what you're talking about if you tell them that, you'll know it by flipping through the pages.  Sasek was born in Czechoslovakia in 1916, and worked for Radio Free Europe in the 1950s before he began working on his "This Is..." series--his first was This is Paris.  This is San Francisco was first published in 1962, and reprinted in 2003.  Like the other books in the series, it is true to its original within the main pages, but has updated information in the back of the book.

For your child, the book is like a tour of the city without leaving your lap.  Lorelei was fascinated with the crazy angle of the streets in the pictures, and was delighted to find that the streets really are that steep (even after trudging up them to check out Lombard Street).  Ben loved the Golden Gate Bridge best, and for months he'd find it on our placemat map.  He was so thrilled to see it from afar, then actually go over it last week!

Kiefer and I on steep Lombard Street...
he got a deal, I got a workout!

There are a lot of words in this book, which makes for a long read and therefore best for kids older than 4, but the pictures are so engaging that younger kids will get wrapped up in it, too.

Sasek's "This is" series is good to know about.  We've given This is Washington, D.C., to friends of ours who, like us, live near D.C.  But there are a bunch more--London, Paris, New York, Rome, Texas, and more (click here for complete list).  They make great gifts for kids who are moving or traveling to one of these areas.

Reading plus exploring (whether that's traveling a long distance or some place right down the road) is a great combination.

Maybelle the Cable Car by Virginia Lee Burton

Maybelle the Cable Car by Virginia Lee Burton

Rating: 4.5 stars

We just returned from a big ol' family trip to Northern California.  It was the first time I'd ever really  been there (does a two day stint in San Francisco in college for a conference and a ten hour layover in Los Angeles really count?) and I was blown away by the beauty and hipness of the place.  I suddenly realized how uncool I am here on the East Coast!

But rather than go on a tangent about my lack of cool, I'll try and focus on books.   Before this and any trip, I try to find a bunch of books about our destination so to provide a context for the kids.  Since they have few or no expectations and little experience to draw upon, I really think giving them picture-filled books to show them what we'll see is helpful.  Plus sights fly by their window so quickly, I like for them to...pre-steep, if you will...in the city as much as possible.

So, Maybelle the Cable Car.  This is one of my favorite books by Virginia Lee Burton--it is charming, interesting, and informative.  Can't beat that!  In this book, the city fathers are thinking about retiring the cable cars in favor of buses, which are "newer and faster and more economical."  Maybelle is one of those cable cars, and she and her sisters are immediately dismayed at the news.  While some of the people are glad for progress, others are just as sad as Maybelle.  "We'll miss them...what a pity...We'll be like any other city."

So they call a public meeting and put it to a vote!  Obviously the cable cars win, but only after Big Bill the bus, the not-so-horrible enemy in the book, tries to climb the hills in the middle of the night.  At first, he thinks there's nothing to it.  But on a damp and foggy night, he slips, slides, and gets turned around.  He suddenly has a  little more respect for those cable cars.  So he concedes like a gentleman and beeps his horn to congratulate the cable cars as they take a victory climb up the hills of San Francisco.

Lorelei's I'm-on-a-cable-car grin.

After reading this book a dozen times at home and on the plane, all of us were VERY excited to ride the cable car.  We bought our tickets (and lost one...and I might have told a little lie that Lorelei was 4 not 5 so she didn't need one), stood in line, climbed aboard and held on tight.  Lorelei and Ben even got to stand-- though I did draw the line at letting them hang on to the side (see?  I am SO uncool!)--as our cable car noisily climbed up, up, up to the top of the hill.  We got off--where else?--at the Cable Car Museum so we could learn even more about the cable cars.  (Fascinating stuff there...I was eager to learn that Andrew Smith Hallidie, the inventor of the cable car, created it because he was an animal-lover, and he was tired of seeing horses get whipped while struggling up the hills' wet cobblestones.)

Anyway, a really good book even if you're not heading to San Francisco, but required reading if you are!


P.S.  In a man-I-wish-I-had-seen-that! moment, I found a nice little list of children's books (click here) about San Francisco on the blog www.SFKids.org.  But I did find this blog post useful about kid-friendly activities and sites around the city.