Let's go to San Francisco!

As I am writing this, we are sat in Jon and Ellen's apartment overlooking the Bay and Alcatraz. If you stand on the balcony and look to the left, you can see the 'crookedest street', which goes up one of the many hills on Lombard. San Francisco and California has been really great.

We were a little excited as we landed at LAX, because we were certain we'd see loads of famous people instantly. Turns out most people in LA are pretty normal!! Once we'd got over our disappointment, we picked up our upgraded hire car and went cruising around LA. After getting a bit lost and confusing the left and right lanes a little, we finally managed to get to Hollywood. We drove down Santa Monica, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards and past Rodeo Drive (very exciting). We even managed to see the walk of fame and the Hollywood sign.

We headed up to Santa Barbara that evening and watched the sun go down while eating clam chowder in a bread bowl. Tasty. We were pretty tired after the flight, so made sure we got an early night before our long drive up to San Francisco. We decided to take the scenic route up the coast, the Big Sur.

We'd been looking forward to getting to San Francisco, not only because we've been staying with Jon and Ellen, friends from Hoddesdon who moved here a year ago, but also because Kate's Mum and Dad (Chris and Jean) were in town on holiday. We had a great few days sightseeing with them around the city - and some great evenings out too! The best was probably cocktails at 'Top of the Mark', a fancy hotel bar with panoramic views of the city.

Kate and Jean's favourite were the sealions on Fisherman's Wharf (we went to see them three times). Chris and I were much more impressed by the Golden Gate Bridge which was just as cool as I'd hoped. Ellen provided us with some excellent itineraries for a tour of the city and helped us use every type of city transport - cable cars, street cars and a few buses with insane/entertaining drivers.

Alcatraz was pretty interesting to visit, with a cracking audio tour (we really are geeky tourists). Although bumping into the Beckhams was the highlight... don't think they fully appreciated the prison - they weren't using the audio tour.

Last weekend we went up to the Russian River for a day's kayaking. It was all downstream, but there were a few tricky rapids - Jon and I were much better than Kate and Ellen... although it was also us who ached the most for the next two days! Kate claims it's better technique... we say she didn't work hard enough. We relaxed a little the next day, with a tour of the coast which included visiting a winery for champagne tasting.

If that wasn't enough, we've just got back from a couple of days in Yosemite National Park. It's an amazing place with spectacular scenery. The local bears have been known to rip doors off tourists cars while looking for food, so to visit the park you have to sign a declaration that you are "Bear Aware"! We were, but didn't see any. More appropriate would have been "Squirrel Aware" - the pesky blighters team up to steal your pickernick basket. We took a day hike up the valley to a couple of stunning waterfalls and, as usual, took far too many photos!

Yesterday was dedicated to shopping, and spending the last of our budget on shoes and clothes - no, not presents. Ellen cooked us a great Mexican meal last night, and Jon introduced us to Guitar Hero on the Wii... we rock!

San Francisco has been great. It's the first place we've been where we feel we could live (don't worry mum!) - however, that may be down to Jon and Ellen making us feel so comfortable!

It's been a great finale to our vacation(!) - just time for one more trip to the sealions before our flight this afternoon. Quite looking forward to coming home... the weather better be good.

Cook Islands Time

The Cook Islands were great! Pretty much what you'd expect a South Pacific island paradise to be like, only a bit wetter and windier.


We arrived in Rarotonga airport, and were greeted by a guy playing a ukulele. Everyone staying in the fancy resorts were given a flower ei (necklace) - we didn't, but got some cheap rum in the duty free shop instead. The first guesthouse we stayed in was completely empty except for us, and was a little run down. The family who owned it was very friendly: invited us to church and to join them for Sunday dinner. We declined, as we'd only just arrived and were shattered, but they left us some food in the fridge.

We moved on to another guesthouse after a couple of days, which was great. Much busier - although we did have to share our rum! Our first week in Rarotonga was pretty dull and rainy, but we managed to do loads of snorkeling, which was great. We saw trigger fish, butterfly fish, puffer fish and big blue star fish. We managed to get to an Island Night too, where there was drum music and ladies wearing grass skirts and coconuts and wiggling their hips! Most importantly I spent a good few hours reading on a hammock.

We hired a kayak for a day, figured that since the lagoon was so sheltered from the waves it'd be easy... well, it was easy one way - but the current was so strong coming back that we couldn't move forward! The water was only knee deep, so had to get out and drag the kayak (with Kate in it) back to calmer water. Oh, and we got stuck in the middle of a sailing race too... oops!

After a week in there, we took a flight to Aitutaki (another island within the Cooks). Aitutaki is really beautiful and is surrounded by a huge lagoon dotted with tiny uninhabited islands. We managed to get a beachfront bungalow here, which had stunning views of the lagoon. It was so stunning that we barely left the beach and balcony and chilled out for most of the week eating coconuts and paw paws.

I did a couple of cool dives and saw some huge white tipped reef sharks and a massive moray eel. I didn't see any turtles though, but we did spot them on a lagoon cruise that took us to some amazing sand banks in the lagoon.

We'd planned to do the cross island walk when we got back to Rarotonga before flying to LA, but the hammock was much more inviting than a 4 hour hike. Then it was back to the airport, to see the guy playing the ukulele while we waited for our flight to LA.

We've been so chilled, we're getting behind in our blogs. We're in San Francisco now, having a great time sightseeing, shopping, eating and celebrity spotting... more on that later!