17th - Skiing! Having read that Squaw Valley USA is one of America's best skiing terrains, we were very keen and anxious to get on the slopes - so keen we even set the alarm to get us up at a more normal time than usual. We got all the equipment and bought our lift passes ($232 - ouch!) which we thought worked on a rather old-fashioned system. Rather than giving you a proximity card that you slip into a pocket which opens the lift turnstiles when you get close en...

17th - Skiing! Having read that Squaw Valley USA is one of America's best skiing terrains, we were very keen and anxious to get on the slopes - so keen we even set the alarm to get us up at a more normal time than usual. We got all the equipment and bought our lift passes ($232 - ouch!) which we thought worked on a rather old-fashioned system. Rather than giving you a proximity card that you slip into a pocket which opens the lift turnstiles when you get close en...

10th Feb - An early start today to collect the car from its on-street parking space, which would cost us money after 10am, to move it to another car park near the pier where we are getting the ferry to Alcatraz.The ferry only took about 20 minutes to get us across to the island, as it's a lot closer to the mainland than you would think.A retired SFPD officer was the volunteer ranger who welcomed us to the National Park Service run former penitentiary and gave us ...

3rd March - After a mammoth 4 hour session updating the blog into the early hours of the morning, we arose rather late and too late to go on NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's once a week tour today, so unfortunately Kirsty will have to miss this NASA facility! We decided that since Venice Beach was so nice yesterday, we would continue looking at the beaches, starting with Santa Monica beach. We have seen the pier and beachfront at night when Regis and Hazel took...

25th February - We woke up to a lovely hot day so we decided to walk along Hollywood Boulevard, which is located really close to our hotel but is a few miles long.The Boulevard contains the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where over 2000 stars of film, television, music and radio have been honoured with their own brass star embedded in the sidewalk (how American are we!We didn't call it a pavement!).There were many names we did not recognise but there were many that we d...