The next day we headed into the City across the Golden Gate Bridge from the North and parked up near San Francisco Bay. We went to a shop to buy some food and ate lunch near the palace of Fine Arts. Afterwards we made our way along the pier at Fisherman's Wharf stopping to take pictures of Alcatraz. We tried to get on a tour to the island but they were fully booked so instead headed for Coit Tower located in North Beach which gave some great views of the City. We then made our way over to the Financial District and a Starbucks to get the internet and book some accommodation. We found a reasonably priced place South of the City near San Francisco Airport. By this point we were all hungry so we headed over to a nice Italian restaurant near Market Street. After filling our tummies with wine, pizza and garlic prawns we headed onto Market Street and caught one of the trams down to Fisherman's Wharf and walked from there back to the van. We then headed to our motel for a good night's sleep.
The next morning we headed back into San Francisco, this time from the South and opting to park a bit closer to Market Street, though still in San Francisco Bay. We ate lunch in Maritime National Historic Park and then headed for Market Street and Union Square. We had a browse through some of the shops and bought a couple of surf type items and chilled out in Union Square. Originally we had planned to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge but the weather wasn't too good that day so we decided to check out Lombard Street, which is an iconic zigzag road in North Beach. We had to park up and take some photos as our poor old van couldn't handle the steep slopes of San Francisco. We then headed for our penultimate location, Yosemite National Park, located to the East of San Francisco. We made it within 50 miles of the park before crashing for the night.
Knowing that Yosemite was going to be heaving due to Memorial Weekend we headed there early and had some great luck, a spot had opened up at a campsite about a 15 minute drive from the entrance to the park due to a family not turning up. Although it cost us just under $40 a night it was much cheaper than staying in a motel in the area. We pitched up our tent and headed into the park around 3 pm to try and find somewhere to swim, in hindsight this was a huge mistake as the park was ridiculously busy at this time. We spent over an hour getting into the park, followed by at least an hour trying to find a lake without success and then finally we spent about 3 hours getting food and exiting the park. We spent the evening having a BBQ and a couple of beers before hitting the air-bed.
The next morning we spent a couple of hours deciding what to do, which turned out to be hiking to the top of Half Dome, which I thought was a 3 mile round-trip, but that was just the base, the top of the mountain was actually a 15 mile round-trip. It took us 7 hours to climb the 4,800 ft mountain but it was definitely worth it, we saw some spectacular views and got some great pictures but as we had set off late we didn't have much time to spend at the top. It took us only 3 hours to get back down and that was a pretty fast pace, though we had to be quick as the sun set only 2 hours after we left from the top. We made it back to the campsite exhausted but satisfied for some well earned sleep.
We awoke feeling stiff from the day before and slowly organised ourselves for another day in the park. We headed to Tuolomne Grove to see some Giant Sequoia trees, on route we saw a wild brown bear and her 2 cubs. At Tuolomne we met some guys from Ireland doing a piece of filming and had a good chat with them. Afterwards we headed to a place called Tunnel View which gave a great view of the valley and mountains. Next we headed to Mirror Lake, a perfectly still lake that acted as a huge mirror providing an awesome view of the mountains. Finally finding a place to swim we stripped down to our shorts and got ready to take the plunge. Paggy and I walked in to find it so cold that it hurt our legs so got back out. Oskar and Paggy then decided to go in fully and were (to mine and Kev's amusement) clearly feeling the cold. Kev and I realised the best way to approach this was just to run as fast as we can so as to minimise the pain, though it didn't make much difference, it was still freezing cold! Once we'd heated up we got some food and had another BBQ and a few games of cards round a fire before going to bed.
The next morning we got up very early (6 am!) as Kev and I wanted to watch the Champions League Final between Manchester United and Barcelona in Sacramento. We made there around 11.30, 30 minutes before kick-off but the Sat-Nav took us the wrong way and we spent the next hour looking for the place, arriving 30 minutes in with the score at 1-0 to Barcelona. We had lunch, a couple of beers and enjoyed the 2nd half. The final score ended up 2-0 to Barcelona. We had a couple of games of pool and then hit the road. We spent the night in a motel about 120 miles from Seattle.
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