We had a bit of a lie in this morning (must have been the late night) but left the hotel about midday. Seeing the area in daylight (again, amazing sunshine - I love California!) we soon realised you could see the Hollywood sign from the corner of the street! We went to another Mexican café for a mammoth breakfast (we only ordered eggs but was a full mean which arrived!) and headed off to find a hop on hop off bus tour. We're staying on Melrose Ave in West Hollyw...

Today Jo & I convinced Dollar to rent us a car so we could begin our road trip. They got their revenge by giving us a ming green focus and convincing us no to use the sat nav until we were out of the city or it wouldn't direct us to the route we wanted….so after reading the instructions on how to drive an automatic and checking some basic highway code we were on our way armed with the map from our bus tour & my iphone compass trying to navigate ourselve...

Tuesday saw Jo & I board another tour bus to napa & sonoma to sample some grape juice It was an 8.30 start and incidentally while waiting for the bus to leave we saw 3 crazy people swimming in the ocean - despite glorious sunshine it was about 3oC outside!! It was a 2 hour drive trhough pretty countryside to the first vineyard in napa - the Madonna estate. We got to sample a couple of whites & then some reds, all very nice. We then headed to the Sut...

Today Jo & I were up early (5am!!) to head off to Yosemite. I remember this from geography class, it's the oldest or biggest or busiest national park or something like that.....it's like the peak district only as with everything in america its bigger! After picking everyone up we drove across the bay bridge - a double decker suspension bridge just as impressive as the golden gate bridge. We drove through hours of fog until we hit the sierra mountains. Here t...

So yesterday we had quite a chilled day. After breakfast we caught a cable car up a big hill to union square & wandered round some shops. We then caught a tram back to fishermans wharf where we had soup in a bread bowl for lunch (it's famous apparently). We then wandered round the shops (mainly food shops) on pier 39 before boarding the boat to Alcatraz. Alcatraz is a famous prison (apparently - tho I'd never heard of it but I don watch enough films with badd...