Who doesn’t love a lightsaber?
A perky Adventures by Disney guide, dressed as a Jedi with a humming lightsaber from Star Wars, strikes a dramatic pose in front of a fountain with a Yoda statue. It’s a warm summer afternoon and the kids clustering around her for this photo op are eager to enter Lucasfilm’s San Francisco campus. The sky-lit foyer beckons with life-sized figures of Darth Vader and Boba Fett and vintage movie posters owned by founder George Lucas.
Founded in 2005, Adventures by Disney offers guided group vacations for families worldwide. The iconic film company that gave us Mickey Mouse has owned the Star Wars franchise since 2012, and VIP, behind-the-scenes access to Lucasfilm is just one of the perks of taking this four-day tour of what’s known as the City by the Bay.
Let’s rewind a little. After a hearty breakfast, the day kicks off with a coach ride around California’s most diverse city. We pass through North America’s largest Chinatown, where 30,000 people in a five-block span. As we ascend the famous, steep Nob Hill amid traffic, our local guide notes, “I don’t think you can say you’ve been to San Francisco without riding a cable car!”
Fun facts (and not strictly “family-friendly” offerings) constantly pop up. A sculpture outside the Bank of America is officially called Transcendence, but locals refer to it as “Banker’s Heart” because it’s cold, hard, and black. We also learn that to speed up the oxidization of the copper on his Flatiron-style Sentinel Building, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) applied 40 gallons of horse urine. And Twitter, Yahoo and Adobe are just a few of the tech companies headquartered in the Bay Area.
A guided waterfront bike ride provides a fun, low-tech change of pace. The route, starting near Aquatic Park at the Hyde Street Pier, takes us past Ghirardelli Square, famous for its gourmet chocolates. Passing the 1915-built Palace of Fine Arts with its monumental dome, we come to the Golden Gate Bridge at noon. At 2.7-kilometres long, it was the world’s longest suspension bridge when it was completed in 1937, and the international-orange structure remains San Francisco’s symbol. To mark the occasion, everyone gets a commemorative Mickey pin with the bridge in the background.
Each day, the itinerary encompasses all manner of food and drink, from feasting on executive chef Tony Wu’s bang-bang chicken skewers and honey-glazed walnut shrimp at M.Y. China to sipping cabernet sauvignon and merlot at Silverado Vineyards.
North of San Francisco in the Napa Valley, the Spanish mission-style winery was founded in 1981, by Diane Disney Miller, Walt Disney’s oldest daughter. Kids (or Junior Adventurers, as Disney dubs them) play around with olive oil and make art with wine corks in the kitchen, while adults learn the finer points of wine blending. Lunch at Silverado might include organic chicken breast, pasta salad, and chocolate cupcakes.
To burn off the calories, a relaxing, refreshing hike through Muir Woods hits the spot. This popular national park is a short drive from Silverado via curving roads through Mill Valley.
Giant redwoods, reminiscent of the Ewok forest in Return of the Jedi, leave everyone awed. When the United Nations was founded in 1945 in San Francisco, this was the site of a memorial service for U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Another American icon takes centre stage at the Walt Disney Family Museum, located in Presidio, a former military base converted into a San Francisco waterfront park. About 240 of Disney’s 900 awards are on display, including his 1938 Academy Award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which incorporates seven cute dwarf Oscars.
From Disney’s original Victorian-style furnishings from the Disneyland Apartments in Anaheim to his organizational work on the 1960 Squaw Valley Winter Olympics, the diverse collection reveals many little-known sides of this creative genius’s character.
The Lucasfilm campus is just a 10-minute walk away. Inside George Lucas’s private, 300-seat theatre adorned with golden art-deco light fixtures, Industrial Light & Magic public relations director Greg Grusby meets the Adventures by Disney group. ILM, originally founded to produce revolutionary special effects for Star Wars: A New Hope, celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2015.
“We’re not at the point yet where digital actors can completely replace humans,” admits Grusby.
But when the lights go down, a stupefying highlight reel of effects for recent blockbusters, including Jurassic World and Avengers: Age of Ultron shows how far movie-making technology has come. And likewise, the San Francisco experience for families has been taken to a new level with Adventures by Disney. Visit adventuresbydisney.com for future tour dates and pricing.
lucasaykroyd@yahoo.com
Lucas Aykroyd was a guest of Adventures by Disney.
