San Francisco

I need to remind myself that this is just a stopover, an opportunity to see somewhere for a few days, so it doesn't matter that we didn't see it all in the 3 days we had.

After the epic flight to Los Angeles, a night in a hotel, an epic breakfast and a bus journey in the rain, we had a short flight to San Francisco, then a taxi to the hotel.

We wandered down the waterfront and ended up at pier 39, where sea lions stink up the place, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. There are nice views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge from there too.



Then it started raining, so we hid in a cafe with a glass of wine until it went away, then went back to the hotel, via the Lombard street zig zag hill.

On Saturday morning we were up early for parkrun, the last parkrun of the day (being the most westerly of them all). It's a fairly small one (Americans don't know what's good for them clearly) but it has stunning views of the Bridge. We ran together, although lisa thought I was trying to overtake her at the end and sped up accordingly, when I was actually only trying to catch her up, so it would look like we were running together on the results.

A coffee and a lemon and huckleberry donut later (and then showers) and we then walked back to the waterfront and hopped on the boat to Alcatraz. Dave had done the tour before, but that was 20 years ago, and my memory sucks so I didn't have to pretend to look surprised.

The cable cars are broken, so we walked to the city centre, and then it started raining (are you seeing a pattern yet?) so we got the bus back, and got take out pizza to eat in our room.

Today we decided not to do the planned race, as it would have been a $50 round trip to get there, so after watching some football (the time difference meant we could watch the Arsenal match first thing this morning) we ran up to the Golden Gate Bridge and discovered how far our respective feat of heights would get us. (Not that far, nearly to the point that the cables start going up, but it was quite windy and terrifying).

In the afternoon it started raining, so we took the bus to Mission (a hippy district, with interesting street art, drug dealers, NO2 canisters littering the streets, amazing manhole covers), ate a burrito the weight of our Niece, and took the bus back. The weather has stymied a few plans this weekend, but we were able to watch the majority of a Back to the Future marathon on the TV.

It's now 9pm, and we forced ourselves to go out for some food, as we were still not hungry following the 5 year old sized burritos. Now enjoying TV and planning for Fiji.