San Francisco

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During our day in San Francisco, we took a hop-on and hop-off bus tour around the city and across the Golden Gate bridge. Whilst the city was bathed in sunshine, the bridge was largely covered in fog (as you can see in the photo). We were sat on the top deck of the open top bus and to say it was windy crossing the bridge would be an understatement. Our tour guide told us that the bridge can swing 27 feet and flex 10 feet under a heavy load - I think with the wind we experienced, we must have used up much of the spare engineering capacity. It was nice to have gone over it; however it wasn't anything to write home about (so to speak).

For lunch we ate at Boudin's in the Fisherman's Wharf area. We both had the classic bread bowls filled with their famous Fisherman’s Wharf Clam Chowder (see attached photo of Nicky tucking into hers). It was awesome and so cool (those seem to be the two words most commonly used by Americans and so I thought I'd try to shoe-horn them into the blog somewhere).

We also visited the famous pier 39 (I must confess, I'd never heard of it before we arrived) and wandered around the shops and restaurants. There was a 'game' where two people each had electrodes attached to their foreheads and the object was to relax as much as possible and thus lower the brain activity. The level of brain activity was displayed on a screen and also converted into movement by using magnetism to roll a ball bearing that was placed on a table in the centre of the two participants (both people faced each other). The person who relaxed the most and who had the lowest brain activity would 'win' by causing the ball bearing to move away from them and towards their opponent. Suffice to say that I beat Nicky quite easily; however I don't know if that is something to be proud of knowing that I can relax more easily, or whether I naturally have a much lower brain activity!

Tomorrow we're going to go back on the hop-on and hop-off bus to visit the main shopping area before getting a cable car to take us back to the pier area so we can take our trip to Alcatraz.

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