After many months of planning, the first outing was a dinner at the Le Colonial in San Francisco on Friday April 12. This was the first time the elder Surmas met the Fingals. Ron rented an Escalade in order to allow more capacity while carrying around Ron's sister Ginny Slomba, who brought her son Jimmy Pacer and husband Frank. Many of the friends and relatives stayed at the Parc 55 hotel in San Francisco.
Early on Saturday April 13, we took a select crew on a tour of the San Francisco sights which included the Ferry Building. Laura and Dan did not go on this trip. This building was remodeled by Plant Construction some years ago. Laura worked for Plant as her second job out of Stanford. After that we took a look at a number of the mansions in Pacific Heights, such as that of Danielle Steele. The last stop was at the Walt Disney Family Museum. Laura was a construction manager for the building of this museum when she worked for Plant.
Later that day we took a much larger crew to the Press Club in San Francisco. There we had some snacks and drinks.
Before the wedding on Sunday April 14, we had a professional photographer shoot pictures near Laura's first apartment on Linden St. in San Francisco. It was fairly cold and very windy. Yes, definitely San Francisco. The wedding took place at the Foreign Cinema on the Mission St in San Francisco. The Cinema is more often used for Mediterranean brunches and art movies, but we took over the whole place for the wedding. The wedding was a bit on the non traditional side. Everyone at the wedding signed a poster acknowledging that it all had taken place. Dan and Laura broke a champagne glass, as is normally done at Jewish weddings. Dan's mother Mary did the final vows with Dan and Laura.