Every so often you just need to switch off, go somewhere else and get away from it all.

So we (me and her) are popping off to California and Texas for a couple of weeks of not being here. Texas is already planned (friend with water-front-condo + 7 days = batteries fully recharged). California on the other hand is proving a toughy.

I used to live in Mountain View (I arrived in town just a few months before the bubble did what bubbles tend to do) so I've seen quite a bit of California, enough to know that you can't fit California into a week (not by a long way!).

We're already booked up in San Francisco (in one of the Joie de Vivre Hotels for four nights) where I'm told we have to go to Alcatraz and drive over the Golden Gate Bridge. Not that I mind doing it again, I have actually been to Alcatraz around five times (on at least one occasion I selected a foreign language audio tour just to change the goal posts). 

I've been using a package called Knapsack for MacOS to start to get the inventory sorted out. So far far SFO we've got:

• Breakfast or Dinner at Top of the Mark
• Alcatraz ( and Angel Island if the Combo Tour is running)
• Telegraph Hill
• Helicopter Tour (I had no idea these even existed until I'd left CA)
• Seaplane Tour (the cheaper/maybe more romantic version of the above)
• Shopping (Apple Store, REI, NorthFace, Fireside Camera, Filmore St, Chesnut St, Somewhere else I don't recall)
• Alamo Square (To take another shot of Steiner's Painted Ladies)

• Twin Peaks
• Coit Tower
• Baker Beach
• Golden Gate Park
• And I suppose we'd better go to Fisherman's Warf (is the bush man still there?)

There's lots of other places I vaguely recall from 8 years ago, although I can't always remember the names of places -- that said, Google Maps has a great feature called Street View so I can navigate with street-level imagery, its so cool!

After our 4 nights in SFO, the jury is still out on exact plans. We've got a hotel booked in Half Moon Bay the evening before we fly to Texas (so we're close enough to the airport). At the moment  Knapsack looks like this:

Originally I'd planned to squeeze in a tour out to Yosemite, then over Tioga Pass to Mono Lake (which I don't ever recall going to) then down through Lone Pine and Bishop towards Sequoia and then over to Santa Barbara and up PCH. Then several things dawned on me:

• We spent a trip to Scotland a few years ago just driving everyday and hardly left the car
• 55 mph(!)
• Tioga Pass will so not be open by the time we're there (and I can't belive it can take two months to plough clear)

So the plan is to spend a day North of SFO, spend Tuesday head down to my old haunt on Tuesday (I need to pop into Frys -- luckily my other half was introduced to Frys a couple of years ago in Houston and it went down well!).

Then we'll be heading probably towards Morro Bay (Santa Barbara might be just too far) before a leisurely cruise up PCH. Hopefully will fit in  Hearst Castle and endless stops on the beach, its looking like Big Sur for Wednesday night, to be sure to get to Half Moon Bay in good time Thursday.

BTW I've been using Google Earth almost exclusively for finding stop over places (B&B's and Motels), the links to travelocity.com traveller reviews are indispensable.

Anyway if you have any ideas for a pair of thirty something Brits visiting CA to get away from it all for a little bit let me know!