Last week I had the opportunity to stay two nights at the St. Regis San Francisco courtesy of SPG American Express and the SPG Amex Stars blogger program for 2012. San Francisco was my staycation destination.

25,000 Starpoints Sweepstakes

As part of the SPG Amex Stars staycation opportunity at the St. Regis San Francisco, I have also been authorized to run a Loyalty Traveler 25,000 Starpoints sweepstakes courtesy of SPG American Express. The winning reader will receive 25,000 Starpoints to redeem for a stay at a Starwood hotel or miles or whatever you choose to do with 25,000 Starpoints.

Sweepstakes entry:

To enter the 25,000 Starpoints giveaway please leave a comment on this blog post about which Starwood Hotel you would choose for a staycation in San Francisco or anywhere else you might be.

You may enter once each calendar day from Monday, December 17 to Saturday, December 22 at 12 noon California time when the sweepstakes entry period will end.

Winner will be chosen at random from eligible entries.

While my stay specifically was at the St. Regis San Francisco, this post will share views of the city  with photos I have taken over the past few years from rooms in each of the seven Starwood Hotels in San Francisco.

Westin Market Street San Francisco, SPG category 5

View down Third Street to AT&T Ball Park on the waterfront, home of the San Francisco Giants MLB team. Moscone Convention Center and Yerba Buena Park are right foreground, San Francisco MOMA Museum of Modern Art is left foreground with W San Francisco the tall white building at left.

The Palace Hotel San Francisco, Starwood Luxury Collection

SPG category 5

The Pied Piper of Hamlin is a 1909 Maxfield Parrish painting in the Pied Piper Bar of the Palace Hotel. Most rooms at The Palace Hotel do not have much of a scenic vista view of the city outside with the historic 9-story hotel dwarfed by newer skyscrapers all around.

The charm of the Palace is its interior.

The Garden Court stained glass dome, The Palace Hotel, San Francisco.

W Hotel San Francisco, SPG category 5

San Francisco Bay and AT&T Ball Park seen from W San Francisco Hotel.

WET at the W San Francisco offers 24 hour swimming. Nightswimming is one of the pleasures I enjoy at the W.

The W Hotel and the St. Regis are located on the same city block separated by the San Francisco MOMA. The two hotels have many of the same views.

Looking west across the city at night from W San Francisco.

St. Regis San Francisco, SPG category 6

View at Sunrise from St. Regis San Francisco.

Westin St. Francis, SPG category 5

Union Square view at night during the holiday season. Westin St. Francis is another historic hotel originally opened in 1904 and restored in 1907 after the great quake with the 12 story old building and the 32 story Pacific Tower.

One of my great delights was seeing a rare peregrine falcon on the ledge outside our window during a stay in 2008.

Le Meridien San Francisco, SPG category 5

San Francisco Bay Bridge seen from Le Meridien San Francisco.

Top of Le Meridien Hotel reveals its close proximity to San Francisco’s iconic TransAmerica Pyramid skyscraper in the financial district of the city.

Sheraton San Francisco at Fisherman’s Wharf, SPG category 5

Most rooms in the four story Sheraton do not have much of a view. Iconic Coit Tower can be seen from a few locations around the hotel. This is the only Starwood Hotel in San Francisco with an outdoor pool. W Hotel, St. Regis and The Palace have indoor pools.

The real advantage of this tourist location at Fisherman’s Wharf is the room rates are typically lower on weekdays November to May than all other San Francisco Starwood Hotels. The hotel is one block away from the waterfront, yet the proximity of the hotel to the Alcatraz Island Prison cruise and tours from the Fisherman’s Wharf area is another feature of this hotel.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary

Starwood Hotels offer many choices in San Francisco.

Several people have asked me about good hotel deals over the New Year’s holiday period. In city after city the Hilton Holiday Season Sale for stays from December 14 through January 7, 2013 is by far the best hotel rate deal happening.

Full-service hotels like Hilton, Doubletree, Embassy Suites, Conrad, Waldorf-Astoria and Hilton Grand Vacations are 50% off. Other Hilton brands of Hilton Garden Inn, Hampton Inn, Homewood Suites and Home2 Suites are 30% off.

These rate discounts are not available December 31.

The discount rates are even available for high category rooms, including suites at many participating hotels.

For many hotels I checked the cancellation policy is generally day before arrival with no penalty.

http://hhonors3.hilton.com/en/offers/100040020.htm

Related Post:

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/loyaltytraveler/2012/12/10/hilton-thank-you-50-sale-is-real-deal/

I gave a teacher a hug today as I kissed my wife and she left for work this morning to teach a public school classroom of five- and six-year-old children.

The news coverage of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre these past 72 hours broke our hearts with the tragic details of death in a public school. Schools are typically a sanctuary of safety in every community, regardless of the community’s issues outside the school grounds.

My wife Kelley and I have been credentialed public elementary school teachers since the early 1990s. She still works on the front lines of society in the trenches of a community public school. A teacher is an educator and a social worker, a child advocate and ‘in loco parentis’ guardian of numerous children during the school day.

Schools are one of the few places where nearly all children of a community come together without the barriers of socioeconomic class, religion, and ethnicity that otherwise tend to segregate our communities.

Many of us are deeply touched by and mourning the massacre of first grade school children and teaching staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Kelley and I spent the weekend listening to media coverage and talking about what this school week will be like; not in Newtown Connecticut, but here in California.

School site trauma is rare. Friday afternoon’s media coverage revealed many journalists were even ignorant of the fact that schools practice lockdown drills in addition to fire drills. School staff are trained with school lockdown drills to handle threatening situations. We pray that training never needs to be implemented.

Kelley and I have experienced several real lockdowns at public schools. These generally occur as a precaution when police are trying to apprehend an armed suspect in the community. Fortunately we have never been involved in a school related shooting.

Thinking back over our time in schools revealed times were not necessarily better in the past. Kelley’s past includes being a 6th grade student in Monterey County at a public school classroom with her teacher mother on a weekend when a teacher working in another classroom was violently assaulted and murdered.  The past couple of weeks I pieced together how I came to be in Hawaii in fall 1977 at the age of 17, rather than in high school for my senior year. I left high school during 11th grade. Gangs, guns and too much violence drove me out of high school in my pursuit of a better and safer environment. I live about five miles from my old high school and I think our community is a far safer place now than it was 35 years ago.

The media debate this past weekend has revolved around gun control, more school security and mental health services.

Placing more guns in school in the form of security guards or arming staff is a really bad idea in my opinion.

Child safety will be better served by having more school personnel to cover recesses and lunch and assist teachers in the classroom. More adults working with children rather than guarding children is the real essential need at most school sites to provide a better and safer learning environment for children.

I heard journalists suggest metal detectors at schools. Seriously?

My wife’s class could use more pencils, paper, textbooks, and disinfectant wipes to immediately improve school conditions for children.

Access to mental health services is one of the keys to dealing with troubled children before they become troubled adults. Typically a school and children at that school are faced with months coping with the situation of a disturbed and violent child, before the child is removed from a classroom or school to a more restrictive educational setting. School districts pay a large proportion of the expense to relocate a mentally disturbed child who walks into the public school system. My wife and I have both had students who were removed from traditional classroom settings due to violent behavior and it is usually a long-term battle with the school administration and/or parents to secure social services and a more appropriate placement for a child afflicted with mental health issues.

I recommend reading a piece published by Liza Long, ‘I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother’: A Mom’s Perspective On The Mental Illness Conversation In America http://huff.to/U4LqWk via HuffPostParents.

How does Kelley as a kindergarten teacher comfort five and six year old children and assure parents and their kids that the children at her school are in a safe place?

Teachers carry on with the lessons of the day. Children learn their ABCs and math, and just as importantly as academics, children in school learn the daily social lessons of kindness, treat others nicely and fairly, share and help someone who needs assistance.

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned:

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Source: “ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN” by Robert Fulghum. See his web site at http://www.robertfulghum.com/

I stopped by my wife’s classroom last Thursday on my way to San Francisco to do a quick photography project.

One of her kindergarten students asked me a question.

“Where have you been? On vacation?”

I replied, “That’s what your teacher says.”

Elementary school teacher is a tough job. Most people who try to teach as a career give up and move on after a few years. I moved on after ten years working as a public school teacher. Now I just try to help school children when and where I can as a volunteer.

Days in San Diego, Hawaii, San Francisco and Big Sur have kept me away from my wife’s classroom much of the past month. I’ll be pitching in this week at school to help wrap up the school week before the holiday break.

Teachers and children deserve the opportunity to have a safe and fulfilling learning environment in the community. We can all help meet that goal.

And tonight when Kelley returns home from her day in the classroom, I will give her another hug.

“Yesterday’s Dream – Tomorrow’s Memory” – Lover’s Point, Pacific Grove, California