San Francisco

So today being Saturday, the start of the long Labour Day weekend in the US, we made our first proper trip out somewhere to San Francisco as the title kind of gives away!

We had to change the rental car this morning because Hertz where charging a $25 per day young driver excess so we picked up a new car from Enterprise in San Jose Airport and then drive in convoy to San Francisco Airport to drop off the old car, the old car being a Pontiac G6 which was pretty nice in exchange for the new Ford Fusion, although it’s nothing like the Ford Fusion on sale in the UK.

 After dropping off the Hertz car in San Francisco Airport we headed into San Francisco and made our way to Pier 39 which according to our sources was a good place to go. It’s one of loads of piers there, but this one has great views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. We spent the whole day here and really enjoyed ourselves. We had lunch in the Hard Rock Cafe there, and bought ourselves some Hard Rock San Francisco T-Shirt’s just to prove it and also a little something for someone back at home 🙂

After touring around the pier for a while we bought some tickets for the Aquarium and went around here which was really amazing. I’ve been to aquariums before but never where you are underground and the fish are swimming over your head as you walk through a glass tunnel. They had all sorts of fish there ranging from butt ugly, to really pretty and then some sharks! After the walk through the aquarium they had a touchy feely area where you can touch some of the fish. The ray’s felt really slimy like you would expect a snake to feel although past experience tells me that snakes aren’t actually slimy (Action Farm near us at home). They had some little sharks which had really rough skin and then some star fish which just felt plain odd!

  After this we got on the boat tour of the bay which took us out into the San Francisco bay, under the Golden Gate Bridge which I got some great pictures off, and then around the Alcatraz island which was really interesting too see.

After all this, we took a random drive around San Francisco for a while with the TomTom turned off, so it was just us. Was really cool to just cruise around the city, although we didn’t head into proper downtown where the skysrappers are, but this is for another weekend.

  We then drove over the Golden Gate Bridge which Nicky got some really nice pictures of and stopped at the Golden Gate Vista point where someone took a really nice picture of me and Nicky quick while the girls where asleep in the car. After this, we drove the long bay back through Oakland avoiding the Golden Gate toll and this took us over the Bay Bridge which is something by itself, and then headed back home here now.

We all had a great day and it was only our first outing into the US proper. Tomorrow we are going to head out to Santa Cruz and then maybe have a look at Santa Clara on Monday making the most of the long weekend.

As I don’t have Dreamweaver out here with me, I can’t create a gallery on the website as we go around, but I’m going to post the odd picture here and there here on the blog as I’m going to fix the code for the main Baby-Green site to stop the blog extract from cocking-up the way it displays, and I’ve created a 3D Tour off all of the places we’ve been to so far and will keep this updated using Microsoft Live Maps Virtual Earth (much better than Google :))

To see the virtual earth tour, click the link below. Nicky is also putting a lot of the pictures on Facebook so anyone who has us on Facebook will be able to see them there.

http://maps.live.com/?v=2&tour=1&encType=1&cid=97FF1CC1E797489A!133 

Love to all x