Alcatraz was brilliant. I usually think audio tours are a bit naff and end up fast forwarding whole sections but the self-guided tour at Alcatraz is really interesting. It takes you round the old prison cells and shows you the exact cell where guards were held hostage in a foiled escape attempt; the pock marks where grenades fired by the USA military scarred the floor; the kitchen where the outlines of the knives are still drawn onto the wall so that you could immediately see if any were missing (which they inevitably were) - and tonnes more. It's freezing on the island though, partly because it's so exposed to the wind! You could see why it would be a punishment to be banished there.

We spent our last day in San Francisco poking around the shops in Union Square before having a meal at an Italian restaurant and stocking up on fudge (me) and taffy candy (Jak) for the next day's bus journey.

Thankfully our Greyhound bus was on time and didn't break down so we made it into San Luis Obispo at a decent hour. Our hotel is cheap and in a good location but our toilet seems to leak as whenever we go into the bathroom there's water all over the floor! Thank god for flip flops.

San Luis Obispo (or 'SLO' as the locals call it, enabling such witty slogans as 'try the SLO pace of life' etc) is a fairly small town surrounded by hills and volcanic peaks. There's a university here so there's quite a young, modern feel about the place with lots of veggie restaurants, boutique clothing stores and bars. There's even an English-style pub with the Union Jack flag waving proudly out the front. They wouldn't accept our UK driving licenses as ID though so they obviously aren't that enamoured with all things British! The irony seemed lost on the bouncer so we swiftly moved on to another bar.

Today we wandered through town and may or may not have seen the 'Moon Tree', a large sequoia grown from a seed that journeyed on board Apollo 14. It's supposedly located in Mission Plaza but it wasn't actually clear which tree it was so we just picked the one we liked the look of and decided that was it. Jak used the restroom (bear with me) at a crazily decorated hotel called the Madonna Inn - where the urinal in the men's room is a big waterfall(!!) with mercifully minimal but nonetheless still present splashback. Apparently he is doomed to always have wet feet in SLO bathrooms. We ended up chilling by Laguna Lake where we found an empty swing park and got to play at being 10 again. I like this travelling malarkey :-)