Today the plan was to visit Alcatraz and see a bit of the city and of course the Golden Gate bridge. We mad the most of our free breakfast and managed to make up some sandwiches with the bread they supplied and fill our flask with the free coffee. We headed out of "murderville" as Rach has now named our area and caught a tram to the pier where the boat to Alcatraz left from. When you first arrive on the island you watch a short film explaining all a...

Happy Birthday Sarah! Time to move on again, today we're flying to San Francisco. Unfortunately Tom was feeling the effects of the free drinks last night! The flight was just over an hour and we landed in San Francisco airport shortly after lunch. We'd booked a hostel in Down-town San Fran and have heard varying reports about the area. Most say it's a good location in which to see the City but a few have said it's quite rough. We found out for ourselves soon en...

Somehow we'd managed to get the time differences totally wrong and as we sat for breakfast discovered we were already five minutes late for the tour. Thankfully LA must be influenced by "Fiji time" (the Fijian excuse for everything being late) and we managed to board the bus a few minutes before it left the hostel.The four hour tour took us round the "stars" houses (typically sceptical Tom doubted any actually lived there), the shopping distri...

We'd gone back in time on the flight and gained ourselves a flight and a few hours which sounded handy but wasn't good on the jet lag front.The world famous LAX was our port of call and heavy security greeted us with the rigmarole for photos and finger prints. We were welcomed back into winter for the first time in twelve months with rain in LA.Opting for the cheapest route into town we caught the bus with the locals to Santa Monica, the beach side of town. The b...