7 August 2010 - on to San Francisco

Left Sedona this morning, no more trouble with the bus so that's good news.

Linda told us a lot about the Gold Rush today, because we were travelling through gold country.

Since we were going into the state capital Sacramento, we also got to hear a little about state politics, all quite interesting actually.

Sacramento is a nice place, very small even say by comparison with Canberra. We have around 320,000 people while Sacramento has about 470,000 - but California's population is almost twice Australia's. We got to spend some time in Old Sacramento, which is a real old area of town complete with wooden sidewalks etc. And, this isn't rebuilt stuff, it's legitimate old buildings.

Then, on to San Francisco. It's Saturday but the traffic in was still really slow and once we got into San Francisco we could have walked faster. From a distance the Golden Gate bridge was fog-free, but once we got there the fog had settled in. Still got some nice pictures though.

Paul and I weren't going to go to the farewell dinner tonight, but we've changed our minds, not so much for dinner but because there's more sight-seeing later. We need to pretty much go now, so I'll add more to this later if I get a chance.

OK, continued much later. Dinner was nice but again the traffic getting there and leaving was appalling. We were supposed to go to this little shopping area after dinner - and we did, but by the time we got there almost everything was closed. However, we've each got a $10 discount voucher for the shops there, and we'll be back in that area tomorrow and the next day so I'm sure we'll get a chance to use them.

Then we went to this island out in the bay - again, appalling traffic until we got to the holdup - what we'd call an RBT station, but which Linda claims never to have seen before in Sand Francisco. Anyway, this island has a lovely view back across to the city and we got to take some night time photos.

Back at the hotel quite late, but at least we don't have to be up early to leave our bags out tomorrow!

The hotel here has a very grand lobby including a fully costumed up Beefeater standing out the front. However, the rooms are all very very small. They have one good thing - you can opt *not* to have maid service in the room, and if you do, they leave you a $10 voucher that you can spend anywhere in the hotel. Apparently it makes the breakfast prices in the restaurant almost acceptable :-)

Also, again, there's a bath! Yay! In fact, I'm off to have a bath now.....