S: After a quick drive to San Francisco, and dropping our bags off at the hostel followed by the car, we headed into the city. We walked towards the piers and ended up finding a farmer's market, where we had the most amazing pork roll and roast potatoes. After that we headed towards the Alcatraz pier, I was soo excited to be going as this had been planned for months. I'm fascinated by the whole concept of the prison and the island. We bordered the boat for the night tour and off we went. They took us around the island and we got a fantastic view of the Golden Gate Bridge, including where the Indians had tried to take over the island a few years back.

J: We had a tour using personal headsets around the prison, it was wonderful walking around Alcatraz hearing the information from the guards & prisoners about the prison. It was obviously a place you didn't want to be a prisoner of. It was interesting to see the route the 3 prisoners "escaped" through and great to make up your own mind of whether they survived the break out. The cells where so basic, but then maybe that's what cells should still be like. It's was a fantastic tour and we even got to go into one of the solitary confinement cells and get locked in, it was completely dark inside which is the environment the prisoner would have had! On the boat ride, back the view of San Francisco at night was stunning.

S: We woke up to the heavens opening. By the time we walked to the Exploratorium, we were soaked through. This was a science museum for kids and adults alike. We spent hours there playing with experiments and learning about hearing and optical illusions and the Eco system. In the end, the only reason we left after 5 hours was we were both hungry. We wandered down to pier 39 and ended up at Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant right from the Forest Gump movie. It was great overlooking the bay and seeing Alcatraz. We ordered a couple of beers and a massive bucket of shrimp and crab (Talk about iconic!!) Our waitress was great and she wouldn't let us have our dinner until we answered questions about the film. It was fun and we nearly got all the answers right. After a couple of beers, we realised that we got free glasses with our beers, but in true traveller style we couldn't carry them so managed to swap them for a baseball cap.

J: The next morning we found a Vietnamese restaurant and had our favourite dish of Pho Bo. Then continued to a bike shop and rented a couple of push bikes for the day. We saw Alma Square with the Victorian houses, locally called the painted ladies, we rode through Golden Gate Park which was beautiful, we even saw a herd of Buffalo and a Dutch windmill in the park. We rode along the famous San Fran beach and even stopped at the sea and dipped our toes but it was far too cold to swim, plus the sea was the liveliest sea I've ever seen, the waves were so frequent that the entire sea was white from broken waves for maybe 100 meters!

S: This was the beginning of the bike ride, now the fun began........ Up and down hills that San Fran are notoriously famous for, they were hard work but eventually getting to the Golden Gate Bridge was great and we biked over it both ways. We still had a way to get back and James wanted to do Lombard Street which is the windiest street and world famous in San Fran. I couldn't bike up the hill to get there but James powered on and then we both rode down the road much to our delight. We finally made it back and we worked out we had biked 30 miles and I think we could safely say we both had saddle sore.

J: The west coast of the USA has been quite a pleasure and a surprise. Even though the servings are large they are of great quality. But everything was big especially the cars which would not fit on English roads. The landscape has been beautiful all the way. But the thing that added the wow factor was that some places you see in the movies and seam so iconic were real places, and visiting these places such as Alcatraz seamed extra special.