West to San Francisco

Left Yosemite and drove westwards across rolling fields and vineyards to San Francisco, the other of California's great cities. Drive wasn't too bad, fairly boring interstate roads for most of it.

Our first stop was down south at Cupertino to have a quick look at the Apple Headquarters - they have a newly-built ring-shaped building that's very impressive, though obviously you can't see that much of it. They did have a cool visitor's centre that we enjoyed checking out though.

Decided not to bother looking at any other tech company headquarters, and drove north into the city itself, to an area known as the Painted Ladies. This is a group of nicely painted houses facing onto a park that was made famous in a TV show - maybe Who's The Boss? I can't remember. Took a few photos then wandered a few blocks to meet up with a blogger friend of Shandos's and her husband.

We'd originally planned to meet them in the park (she's a dog blogger and they had a nice dog as well), but with the constant bushfire smoke hanging around we decided to meet at their place instead. They were a nice couple - migrants from India around 15 years ago and had some interesting perspectives to share on life in the city and in the USA as well. We didn't end up leaving until around 6pm!

Drove south to our hotel near the airport (we were staying well out of town as it was the cheapest option we could find!), and struggled a bit to find an acceptable option for dinner. Eventually we just had McDonalds which neither of us were especially happy with.Read more