San Francisco - Days 3,4 and 5

Day 3 - Thursday April 10th we caught the ferry over to a little town called Sausalito to meet up with James' friend Chuck. Chuck owns a little model train shop but happily closed for the day to come and show us around. The views of the Bay Bridge, Alcatraz and Golden Gate Bridge on the way over were just fantastic. Sausalito is just gorgeous and, in direct contrast with how dirty and dingy some parts of San Francisco are, Sausalito is just so clean, quiet and pretty! It's also protected from the wind due to coastal mountains, so it doesn't get anywhere near as cold as the city - today was just beautiful weather!

Thanks to a late start we hadn't managed to eat breakfast, so on arrival (about 10:40am) we found a little cafe and grabbed some breakfast. Rather yummy, but they seem to insist on burning/drying out the bacon here! I also tried my first bagel - so good! Why do we not have these in Australia?!

Chuck picked us up soon after we finished breakfast and we spent the next few hours touring around in his purple PT Cruiser - nice car! First we took a trip up to a viewing spot for the Golden Gate Bridge. There are a lot of deserted buildings there that used to be barracks for an army outpost when they thought they were going to be attacked from the sea. It was also used again during World War 2. Nowadays it is all national park. It was pretty interesting up there and the view of the bridge was pretty amazing.

Then we took off up to a little town called Tiburon (yes, like the car). It is such a gorgeous little place. There is a rail museum of sorts there, but unfortunately it wasn't open when we were there. They had really strange opening hours! Apparently they used to ship trains accross the bay from San Francisco to Tiburon and they have a model of what it used to be like. Right up James' alley!

Having eaten breakfast so late, we substituted lunch with some ice-cream then went to check out Chuck's shop. A little later we took off up towards Muir Woods (extremely windy road!) and stopped at a little place called the Pelican Inn where we grabbed a beer and some fish and chips - it's ok! I only had a tiny bit. Chuck then dropped us back to the ferry terminal, but we discovered we had missed the ferry by 4 minutes, so had to wait an hour for the next one! It gave us some time to explore the town though and we also wrote some post cards.

We caught the cable car home from the pier again (the novelty hasn't worn off yet!)and then went back to the same little Japanese place we went to the first night. They're so cheap and the food is so good...



Day 4 - Friday April 11 we dragged ourselves out of bed at 5:30 and were picked up by Incredible Tours at around 6:20. After picking up serveral other tourists from around the city, we headed out to Yosemite National Park. I was pretty tired so poor James had to put up with me sleeping on his shoulder for around 2.5 of the 3.5 hours it took us to get there. I did the same thing on the way back....

Words simply cannot describe how amazing Yosemite is, so I'm not going to try.... Here's some pictures instead!



Thankfully it was a fairly warm day so we ditched our jumpers early on and were actually cursing having worn singlets after a while. We had the most amazing time there just exploring... We had 3 hours to explore by ourselves which we thought would be heaps of time, but you really need more! We definately want to come back and spend a few days... If that's long enough!


Day 6 - Saturday April 13 and despite having slept an extra 5 hours on James shoulder yesterday, I still managed to sleep in til 9 o'clock. This honeymoon thing is agreeing with us way too well...

Today was a beautiful day - in contrast to the cool weather we have had lately, it was even warmer than it was yesterday. We eventually got ready and went down to Union Square in search of some breakfast and were wishing we hadn't worn jeans by the time we had walked about 4 blocks. After wandering for a while, we settled on Mel's Drive-In for breakfast - you may recognise the name from movies (American Graffiti etc). Sadly their pancakes didn't even live up to Denny's and their waffles had nothing on Raahib's! Still a pretty cool place though.


After doing a spot of shopping (as per usual it was James that actually found stuff he liked and I came home empty handed) we came back to the hotel, ditched the jeans for a skirt/ shorts and then went down to check out the Cherry Blossom Festival which is going on on our doorstep. We wandered around and had a look at the displays and then went and found the food. There was easily thousands of people there so we had to wait a bit for the food, but boy was it worth it! BBQ pork riblets weren't the most Japanese thing, but damn they were good! And everyone else seemed to agree too!


After a bit more wandering we managed to find SafeWay and picked up some food for our road-trip (starts tomorrow!). While we were there we picked up a 1 pint "keg" of Heineken beer. Only cost us $2.65!!! I was still in shock over the beer when we came across the Malibu - what would cost you around $32 in Australia was about $17 here!!!!!!!!!!!! Similar story with the Khalua. We came back to the hotel, drank our beer and then lazed around for the afternoon. It was nice.

Tomorrow, as mentioned, we set off on our road-trip to Las Vegas. We pick up our hire care in the morning and then head off down the coast. We are due in Vegas on Tuesday. Not sure if we will have net access til then.

Hope you're all well! Heidi and James xo