Got up and went off to have breakfast. Discovered Westfield shopping centre with a whole floor with cafes and other places to eat - went to Bistro Burger. Afterwards went into Bloomingdales - never been before so just wanted to have a look - did stock up on some foundation in Clinique as is around 30% cheaper than in UK. Went on to Ross and treated myself to a new handbag and a few tops, Gaz bought a few bits too. We took the shopping back to the hotel and had a couple of beers.

We took the cable car to Bay Street as we had tickets to Alcatraz; some parts of Fishermans Wharf looked so different to when we had been here last in 1997. We walked along the sea front and onto pier 39 where we browsed some of the shops and viewed the famous sea lions sunbathing. We reached pier 33 and had a cold beer before embarking the boat to Alcatraz.

It only took around 12 minutes to get to Alcatraz and we joined our guide who walked us up the hills to the prison, here we were given an audio set and head phones for our audio tour around Alcatraz. The audio tour lasted around 40 minutes and was very good and informative. We saw the cells where the inmates would have been kept, the library and the dining room. The guards and their families had also lived on Alcatraz in apartments and we were told there were 12 ferries a day going back and forth to mainland San Francisco as all the children went to school there and the guards and their families would go there of an evening to have dinner and perhaps go to the cinema before returning to the island. I found it quite incredible that children had grown up on Alcatraz! They had opened the hospital so we paused the audio on our headsets and headed up the stairs - there were warnings not to touch anything as lead paint had originally been used to decorate the hospital. Some of the rooms we were allowed to go in I found quite eerie. As we had booked the evening tour it started to get really chilly and I was glad of my hoodie that I had taken. We went back to the ferry to take us back to the mainland.

Once back in San Francisco we walked along the seafront, which was very blowy and chilly, and decided to go to Applebee's for dinner, sadly it was not anything like the meal we had at John's Grill the night before.

Walked a couple of blocks back to the Cable Car which took us back to Union Square and we walked back to our hotel.