On April 6th 2005, seventeen San Francisco women traveled to Hong Kong, Macau and ShenZhen, China for a weeklong "Mom's Five Nights Out" adventure.

Eight of the seventeen women on our journey included:

Our co-hosts Carolyn Dilena and Evie Buckley (about whom I wrote last week);

Cheryl Lund and Brenda Alessandria, co-owners of San Francisco's Designer Consigner on Sacramento Street in Presidio Heights and now on Sutter, near Powell in Union Square;

Rosemarie MacGuinness, a retired attorney and mother of four boys;

Katy Polvorosa, Anne Ryan and Kathy Smythe, three real estate developers;

Anne, Elizabeth Shaw and yours truly, three "green blooded" women who married Dartmouth men.

In fact, the night I told my family about this connection they ended the call by shouting in unison, "WE LOVE YOU MOMMY. WAH-HOO-WAH."

Telling my new Big D "sisters" Anne and Elizabeth about the Dartmouth cheer I received the night before only strengthened our personal camaraderie.

On this trip, the seventeen of us identified a number of other points of connection.

One woman has created her own jewelry line. Sixteen women are now aspiring customers.

Two women are Irish.

Seven women, including the three into real estate, would call themselves entrepreneurs. Two of them have been successful in the ceramic tile import business.

Our co-host, Carolyn Dilena helps manage one of the Dilena family businesses, BlueRibbon Supply Company, which supplies detergents to Bay Area businesses and hotels around the world.

Our other co-host, Evie Buckley runs her own mortgage brokerage operation.

One woman, Diana has built a successful tile import business in the San Francisco Design center called Galleria Tile.

Eight women are stay-at-home moms.

Seventeen Savvy San Francisco Shoppers Arrive in Hong Kong

Throughout the week, as a way of managing whether all were present and accounted for, each of us called out our assigned number during our trip. I was #9. Before each daily adventure, we would meet in the lobby of our hotel. Before we left we would call out #1 - 17.

It sounds campy, but it worked.

To give you a taste of the eclectic group with whom I traveled to follow are a few of the books and magazines we brought with us for the fifteen-hour journey from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

Mercury News:

When Audrey Wells set out to adapt the bestselling memoir "Under the Tuscan Sun'' for the screen, she knew she would have one small obstacle to overcome. "There is no way to make a movie out of that book,'' says Wells, who was in San Francisco recently to discuss the film that she went ahead and wrote and directed anyway.

Despite the enormous popularity of Frances Mayes' book -- her account of the restoration of an Italian villa spent 126 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list -- it lacked even a wisp of a plot. Crammed with snippets of the history of her Italian village, the author's philosophical musings and even her favorite pasta recipes, the book rambled cheerfully through the Tuscan countryside.