All Good Things Must Come to an End

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Hello,

our last week was spent in sunny California. We flew into San Francisco on Saturday, before we left Auckland. We took a taxi to our hotel which was miraculously in the middle of the shopping district - Steph chose it. We spent the afternoon wandering around Union Square, Macys, Bloomingdales, Abercrombie and Fitch. We stopped for dinner at Max's - huge portions and excellent cheese cake...

The following day we went on a long walk down to the front and all the piers. From here we could see Alcatraz and the Golden Gate bridge. We went to pier 39 to see the gaudy shops and restaurants, also the resident sea-lions. We walked up the coast to Fort Mason, passing some "historic" ships on the way (including the Balclutha - as seen in Mutiny on the Bounty). After stopping in Safeway's we returned to our hotel by walking up Lombard street - the crookedest street in the World (which it isn't apparently). We had dinner next to our hotel at the World Famous Sears!

Monday was spent shopping in the morning - again! In the afternoon we had an early dinner at a Mexican restaurant. We caught the ferry to Alcatraz for a night tour which was excellent. An audio tour guided us around the cell blocks, given by ex-guards and prisoners. It is an impressive place, not somewhere I would want to stay.

Tuesday we took a couple of tours. Initially we were put on the wrong coach and nearly ended up going to Monteray for an 11 hour tour. We got off just in time. We spent the morning on a tour of the city- we went to the Golden Gate bridge which was covered in fog, we walked a little way onto the bridge but decided it was pointless as we couldn't see anything. We then went to the Twin Peaks to see over the City. We were then driven around some more sites including Nob Hill and Chinatown.

In the afternoon we went on a tour to Muir Woods, a sequioa forest. There are some very impressive big trees (Steph was not all that impressed!). We spent the afternoon in Sausolita a small town on the coast. The fog had cleared from the bridge so we could finally see it.

Our last full day was spent wandering through china town, then we went off to the Exploratorium. It was an excellent hands on science based museum, where we spent about 4 hours. We had dinner in the Cheesecake Factory.

We checked out and went to the airport on Thursday. The flight was fine if a little restless.

There are no photos with this blog, I am uploading all the good pics from our holiday to the picassa online album at;

http://picasaweb.google.com/christiana14

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