Not wanting to arrive in a huge city at night we set off on our 6 hour drive up to San Fran pretty hasty. It wasn't long as usual before Claire was dozing and it wasn't soon after that, when Dave woke Claire up to the flashing lights of a police car that had pulled him over for speeding! He was extremely lucky and didn't even get a ticket!

We arrived at our motel but settled down for the night as we were up early to visit The Rock AKA Alcatraz. Dave being his nice and early self made us catch a 5 minute bus journey one and a half hours before our tour.

Alcatraz, which once housed Al Capone and The Birdman, greeted us by ferry a mile and a half out into San Fran bay. We took a very interesting and surprisingly not boring audio tour around the old world famous prison. It took us up and down the cell blocks narated by previous officers and even some old inmates. The tour told us all about prison life, fights, murders and the attempted excapes and the most famous of all carried out by Frank Morris and the angling brothers which was never proven to have been successful or failed as bodies were never found.

The rest of our days spent in San Francisco, we did a lot wandering up and down the ridiculously steep hills and seeing the odd site. Fishermans Wharf was really nice and the whole city had a really European atmosphere. We enjoyed all the little coffee shops and the food was great too. We spent a very good afternoon in Chinatown which is the biggest chinatown in the world (outside of China, obviously), it really brought back some of the tastes that we had enjoyed 6 months earlier.