Be sure to wear a flower in your hair

Our first reaction to San Francisco was one of relief to be back somewhere relatively normal after three days in Las Vegas, even if Graeme was a bit scared of all of the hippies. However he even made it to their main hangout, Haight Ashbury, where we saw the Grateful Dead's and Hunter S Thompson's old houses. The main attraction there for Graeme was Amoeba records, the biggest record shop we have ever seen, and Debbie finally dragged him out after about two hours, before he could spend the rest of our travelling funds on records. Debbie got revenge by spending hours in the City Lights bookshop, which was famous for publishing Alan Ginsberg's poem Howl. Much scarier than the hippies was the Bushman, a local character who likes to hide at the side of the pavement behind a piece of tree branch and jump out at unsuspecting passers-by. Hilarious!

San Francisco has a really cool public transport system that uses old European trams, known here as cable-cars or street-cars. We used them a lot, as although San Francisco is quite small there are lots of very steep hills. We also witnessed a bell-ringing competition which took place in an actual cable-car in the main square, and the competitors were all cable-car conductors. Some of them had obviously had a lot of time to practice.

On our first night in San Francisco we found an interesting little pub that had around fifty different kinds of beer on tap. We sampled quite a few of them. The next day, despite our hangovers, we decided to hire bikes and cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge. On the other side of the bridge is a quiet little town called Sausalito where we ate the local speciality, Clam Chowder, then caught the ferry back to San Francisco.

Close to the dock is a pier that has been completely taken over by sealion squatters. As they are a protected species the dock owners are not allowed to evict them and the pier has become a mini sanctuary, with sealion squat parties every evening.

The following day our livers had recovered so we went on a tour of the local Anchor Brewery (free beer!). This was in a cute area of town with some interesting shops including one that sold supplies for pirates and another that sold stuffed animals, our favourites being the mice dressed up as fairies and ballerinas.