Greetings once again!

So we left Vegas and drove through some rather arid desert to a small town called Williams, which is in Arizona so we clocked up another state! We went via the Hoover Dam which was erm...well just a very large dam! But another landmark ticked off the list...

The next day we drove up into the Grand Canyon National Park and went and marvelled at the huge and slightly strange crater in the middle of the earth! It is massive, very impressive, and after taking a few happy snaps we felt we'd seen enough to tick that off the list too! Also to note from Williams was a fab little local restaurant we ate at which had the most impressive array of deserts and pies we have ever seen, huuuuge homemade pies that tasted gooood, yum!

Besides the tasty pie, Williams was a good stop as it lies on "historic" Route 66. The old road between LA and Chicago is no longer in full use, however replica signs and other tourist tat is widely available in all the spots it used to run through!

So, full of pie we left Williams, and Arizona, as we set off back into California toward our next stop of San Francisco. One thing we were most pleased with was that the weather picked up, as Arizona was cold! We actually got a bit of snow on the morning we went to the Grand Canyon which was a bit of a shock to the system, brrr. We broke up the journey with a couple of overnight stops in nothingey small towns but eventually we arrived in San Francisco, hurrah!

Neither of us really knew what to expect from this city, obviously there is the famous Golden Gate bridge and Alcatraz, but how would it stand up against LA and Vegas???

As it turns out, it's great! Hilly, but great! San Francisco is on a peninsula between the San Fran Bay and the Pacific Ocean, it's not a huge city but manages to squeeze in 49 hills, and we feel that we have climbed them all in the last few days! Our motel/hotel (not really sure of the exact difference between the two??) was on a street called Lombard Street, and a bit further up it has a section which is the 'crookedest street in the world'! It's basically where on one section of hill for some bizarre reason they have made it into 8 hairpin bends! Crazy! We walked down it and saw a few cars screeching down it which looked like fun!

The hills in SF are awesome, immediately familiar from numerous films involving car chases where after each section of hill it flattens out again and then the car flies off again on the next slope, all very Starsky and Hutch! We spent our first afternoon exploring a bit of the city, which is all split into grids, more so than any other US city we've been to so far, so it's pretty easy to navigate. We must have walked miles! To rest our weary feet we finished off with a meal at Fisherman's Wharf where Nick sampled some of the local fresh and apparently very tasty seafood.

The next day we went on a hop-on hop-off bus tour and got to see lots more of the city, including driving across the Golden Gate bridge for some rather grand views back onto the city. We were very lucky with the weather for our visit, it was very sunny and reasonably warm for the time of year, which apparently is unusual for San Francisco which is generally cold and foggy! We spent a while at the Golden Gate Park, which is absolutely huge and 100% man made, it used to be all sand dunes!

That night we went to see Wicked at one of the many theatres, which was absolutely fantastic! After seeing lots of shows in Vegas we must be in a theatre mood, but we were both very impressed with both the story and the production, it was a lot of fun and we highly recommend it! The show started in San Francisco before it went touring off elsewhere so it was nice to see it in it's hometown.

We were up in good time this morning and down at one of the many piers to catch a boat to Alcatraz! It is only just over a mile out in the bay so we were soon armed up with audio guides and ready to tour the old prison, full tourist mode. It was pretty grim, they should show it to young hoodlums to scare them off prison! The cells were tiny, and we saw the solitary cells which were unsurprisingly even worse, although apparently they weren't used too often. As Nick pointed out, the most interesting part was learning about the attempted escapes, and the ones that succeeded! Also the infamous inmates, such as Al Capone and the Birdman...and one of the ex-inmates was there signing copies of his book about his time in prison there! Apparently he makes more money from them than he ever did from robbing banks!

This afternoon we walked another zillion miles around the city, we saw the ice skating rink set up in Union Square outside a very Christmassy Macy's, and had a look at some of the tat shops in Chinatown before ending up with a look around the weird but fun 'Ripley's Believe It or Not Odditorium' - full of very strange pictures and artefacts!

San Francisco is a lovely city, and the residents here must save a fortune on gym memberships by just walking around! There are lots of distinct little areas to the city which give it a nice feel, Little Italy, Chinatown, The Tenderloin (so named after the old police who were so corrupt that they could afford steak dinners everyday with their extra earnings!) plus there is a theatre district and an actual city centre, unlike LA for example which was more of just a large sprawl with no centre or 'heart'. There are some amazing residential properties just a short walk from the centre, although they should be nice for the price, some of the most expensive property in the world is in San Francisco apparently!

We could easily spend a lot longer here as there is a lot to see and we both like it a lot, but alas it is time to move on already! Time keeps ticking on so quickly and we still have a lot of ground to cover and so much more to see!

Until next time blog fans....

Katie and Nick xxx