Well, well we board our flight to come home in a few hours so this is our final blog of our travels!!

Sat 26th April

We caught our first cable car down to the wharf, going up and down the steepest streets i've ever seen - San Fran is so hilly!! You also hang onto the outside for dear life of the open air cable car (really a tram!)

We decided to hire bikes to cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge so we went on our merry way cycling past the beach which is lovely and up a steep hill onto the cycle path of the bridge. The bridge is quite a sight and the views as you cross the bridge are fantastic, you can see out to the ocean, Alcatraz and the city. At the end of the bridge we decided to carry on cycling down a steep hill to the little town of Sausalito where all the rich folk live which was verry pretty.....i had an accident and fell of my bike and foot went right through my flip flop so all i wa left with was the sole and a bruised shin!!

We had to cycled back up the hill to the bridge (not as easy as cycling down it!!) and back we went with a saddle-sore bum!!

In the evening we met Jill, Mike & Karen (our friends that we met on our trip of the Kakadu in Darwin, Australia) at the baseball to watch the Giants play Cincinatti - Mike has a season ticket so we had fab seats on the front row and he won't let us pay for them either! We had great fun watching the baseball with our wine, beer & peanuts and then took a cab to the Russian Quater at night for a Spanish Tapas meal. We had a huge carafe of Sangria and about 15 dishes between us - oysters, snails, chorizo, lamb, goats cheese, etc - fabbi meal and then our friends wouldn't let us pay for that either so we were totally spoiled!!

Sun 27th April

Karen picked us up in the morning and we went to Mike's who became our chauffeur and took us North, out of San Fran to Sonoma on the edge of Napa Valley where all the Californian wineries are for a day of wine tasting! We stopped off at a cheese factory where we sampled loads of nice cheeses and sausages and then went to 3 wineries for tasting. Our first we were allowed 4 tasters free in an old winery but pretty commercial one and then we went onto the Wine Room where localy family owned wineries come together to sell their wines and we had about 10 tasters for $5 and i bought a chocolatey tasting Port which is meant to be good over vanilla ice cream!!

We stopped at a few other wineries with snobby people and expensive tastings so we didn't stop there and went onto the last one where again it was $10 for 4 tastings but they only had 2 white wines on offer so we avoided the tastings and went to their shop where they had loads of pickes, jams, mustards etc to sample and filled up on more bread, crackers & cheese and Iain got a merlot brownie. Yummy!!

At we night we did the dreaded packing........

Mon 28th April

Today, we got up at 6:30 to go on the early morning boat to Alcatraz - the fanous Prison where Al Capone was imprisoned and where the movie "The Rock" was based. It was really interesting walking around the cell block and into the cells and hearing how people tried to escape. We have now just had our bagels and get picked up in 10 mins to go to the airport to check in.

We have a 10hr flight to London, arriving at 11am and then a short flight to Edinburgh, getting in at 3pm so this is a farewell from our travels and we have had a fab time travelling over this past year, meeting so many different people, seeing so many places and learning so many new things - we hope you have enjoyed hearing all of our stories.

We look forward to catching up with everyone when we get home.

Bye,

Charlotte & Iain