Golden Gate Bridge, Transport Disasters, Mon-er-raaaaaay...

Hi Everyone,

I hope everyone is well!

We had a bit of a transit nightmare day yesterday. We seem to be having
problems with public transport in cities of late, finally made me realise
actually how good london transport is!!! However busy it gets!

Rob headed down to the ferry building to get our tickets for our trip down
the coast today earlier in the morning, when he got there at half ten
there was a sign saying 'out for lunch'! He ended up walking half way
around the city and back and ended up back at the Amtrak office at the
ferry building where he actually got our tickets.

This meant that he was late meeting me at the golden gate bridge look out
point, this was good cause as per usual I was late as well! lol! The
golden gate bridge is sooooooo amazing! I think its the most stunning
bridge I've ever seen! Its sooooo cool! Our original plan was to walk over
the bridge and catch a bus on the otherside to Berkeley. However this
didn't really work out...

We walked across the bridge which was ABSOLUTELY amazing!!! Fantastic
views of Alcatraz and of San Fran city. The city doesn't look as steep
from a far as it is when you're climbing some of those bad ass hills! lol!
Although they haven't been soooo bad! We strolled across the bridge really
calmly and took lots of photos (of course). Did you know that the bridge
was intended to be painted grey, the red colour was a base coat, the San
Franciscans loved it soooo much they kept it red. It takes a ridiculous
amount of paint to keep it looking like that every year! At the otherside
we realised that we couldn't get a bus to Berkeley and cause it was
getting quite late and neither of us had eaten anything we decided to
postpone the trip and do it on a full day properly when we got back from
the coast!

We wandered back over the bridge and headed for a diner, however this
ended up being closed and in a really weird area. We'd taken two buses to
get there and ended up then just getting on a BART train (underground
train) in the wrong direction and had to get off and go back in the other
direction to get back to Montgomery! Sooooo annoying! When we got back to
Montgomery we ended up going and grabbing something to eat and then
decided to go to the cinema.

We wandered back down to market through china town. Unfortunately we
didn't realise that there really wasn't much on at all and ended up
watching Vantage Point. Basically Dennis Quaid drives a mazda really
really fast around Spain and Forrest Whitakker has a camera that really
refuses to break at all! It wasn't the worst film ever but they did the
classic american film thing of not explaining anything but just having a
random arab criminal cell! Was quite weird!

Today we got up at 6am and after putting our bags in lockers at the hostel
we headed down to the ferry building to catch a bus to Oakland where we
caught a really comfy train (with loads of leg room) called the starlight
coast train to Salinas, where a bus (with a very enthusiastic driver)
drove us into Monterey, which is pronounced Mon-a-rraaaayyyyyyy. It makes
you want to jump into the Simpsons monarail song! lol! She took us on a
mini tour of Monterey.

Monterey is where John Steinbeck lived for years and off course it has
'Cannery Row'! I find this is AMAZINGLY exciting cause I love Steinbeck!
After lunch we went to the Monterey aquarium, it has a fantastic
reputation. Also it was really raining outside - whats with the
californian weather??? lol! The aquarium was ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!!!!! Best
aquarium I've ever been too! We saw penguins, beautiful jelly fish (evil
creatures! lol), sea otter (they were sooooo cute) and every type of sea
coral and urchines and fish! It really really was a fantastic aquarium,
was fantastic for kids, there were lots of things to do! Owwww we saw
hammerhead sharks and great whites and tortoises etc!

After that I donded my awesome emergency poncho, cause it was bucketing it
down and Rob looked really embarrassed as we wandered around town. We
headed to a diner called Archer's Diner where Rob had an Oreo milkshake
and I had coffee! We read the foolish news, which was really quite good!
After that we headed to check into our hostel which is really really cute!
I like it, we're about to headed out for dinner and to have some Monterey
wine! lol!

Tomorrow we're gonna make pancakes for breakfast in the hostel and go and
explore more of Monterey, in the afternoon we're heading back to San Fran!

Happy April Fool's Day for yesterday!

Lots of Love,

Sarah xxx