Back on the Road – First Stop: USA

We’re back on the road again! We spent a couple of months back in Sydney to catch up with everyone since it had been nearly a year since we’d seen them. And it was nice to experience all the things we’d missed while we were away. For example: good Asian food, good coffee, a month long heatwave, sunburn, mosquitos. So after nearly a year in Europe seeing lots of churches, castles, museums and so on we’re now off to South America to see lots of nature, landscapes and animals.

We started off our trip in the US, stopping in at San Francisco and catching up with our friends Nicole & Chris again (3 times in one year!). We spent our first day trying to fight off jetlag and going for a walk around San Fran.

So we started out walking along the piers and had a nice surprise when we came to Pier 39. This is where a large colony of sea lions had picked out as their home. After an earthquake in the 1989 the sea lions decided to abandon their old home and moved to Pier 39 and pretty much took over the entire place. Now you can go down there and watch 100 or so sea lions fighting for a place to sleep on the pontoons. I don’t know why, but these guys love to pile on top of each other rather than be on an empty pontoon.

We also checked out Lombard Street (which is also known as the crookedest street). It gets pretty busy there, all the traffic is tourists driving their cars down the street while people at the bottom block traffic because they’re busy taking pictures.

We also walked around a nice parkland called Land’s End. We were originally planning to see the Legion of Honor but got distracted by all the birds that live there that we ended up spending our time watching a little hummingbird zip around from bush to bush, a large hawk coming down to ground level to pick up a meal he had left behind and a raven chasing another hawk through the sky, doing flips and other acrobatics to try and escape.

On our final day we finally went to see the famous Alcatraz prison. I was so jetlagged that I fell asleep several times, pretty much every time we sat down for a break.

After Alcatraz we did the touristy thing of going for a ride on a cable car. It’s definitely a tourist activity, a bit like the monorail in Sydney, but you get to hang out of the side of the cars as you go along. Although you have to be careful as a few times we came pretty close to some parked cars.

After a few days in the city we went with Nicole and Chris up to Yosemite national park. We got there just in time to see the sunset from one of the best viewpoints. There was still a bit of snow on the mountain peaks, but the forest was all green.

Then it snowed. And snowed. And snowed. So the next morning when we left our hotel we could see cars coming from the park with 30cm of snow still stuck to their roofs. Since we didn’t have snow chains we couldn’t go too far into the park, but we did get to see some great snowy landscapes and chuck snowballs at each other so it was all good.