18th July - More San Francisco

We are still in San Francisco... still enjoying it though, but we have nearly been here over a week. We are trying to hire a car but we still have to wait until our new driver's licences arrive. Hopefully this wednesday now, fingers are crossed.

That is the end of the bad news, now onto the good: -

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MA! Hope your day went well and thank you for your help!

Well, we have hired some bicycles for a day to have a look around the city. We rode over the Golden Gate bridge, but even though we were on it, the fog was so bad that we could only see about 1/3 of it at one time. But it was still good, high up and windy. After that we went over some big hills and off to the Golden Gate park, which had Bison in it and some ducks. The whole journey was about 20 miles so we went to bed pretty early after that. It wasn't 20 miles of flat road, this place only has up and down hills.

Saturday was a baseball game. The San Francisco giants V Philly, philly won 14 - 6. A great game as there was a lot of runs and we got to learn about some of the more bizarre rules of the game too from some locals. The whole thing lasted 5 hours in the sun so we now have the T-Shirt tan lines we've always wanted.

The next day was Wine tasting in the Sonoma valley, which I though was part of the Napa valley, but was totally wrong as it is an entirely seperate valley next to the Napa one and they didn't like me telling them otherwise. Again we had an Eastern European tour guide, this time Roman who was German who again had Arnie inflections in his voice. We got to see the beach, the Muir woods that have really big Redwood trees that we hugged, and some wineries. Got to learn how to be a wine snob and tasted everything that we could. A great day but well hot, 100+ degrees.

(For the more observant of you, well done by the way you know who you are, I know we said it was 100+ degrees and that in the pictures we are wearing jumpers, well there is an explanation for this, see it was early in the morning when we went to hug some trees, therefore still cold, it got a lot hotter later at the wineries).

Today, we went to Alcatraz. It was pretty impressive but really falling to pieces.It was cool to see where the filming took place and all of the cells and everything. Took some pictures of us in jail too.

[Alcatraz pictures to come - it's not letting us put them on]

Other than that we have been too knackered to go out and get drunk at all. Poor I know, but we are kind of saving that up for Oz. We have visited a few though, one was an Irish bar where the barman loved snooker for some reason and had recently travelled to England just to play for 4 days. We left after that drink.

There have been a few new words we have learnt over here. Firstly, we read in a newspaper that someone had been 'burglarized' probably by a 'burglarizer'. Then we saw a sign saying 'If you want a Taxie, please ask here', we didn't ask there. We also went to the Palace of fine arts which was also called an 'Exploratorium' of all things, I just hope that if there were two side by side that would be 'Exploratoria' but that would be pushing it.

There are a lot of crazy homeless people here too. One was a robot, one did a hand stand on a bottle of beer, others just cursed. But all were pretty harmless.

Hopefully we are off to Santa Cruz soon and can get some beach action.

Laters for now

Pricey