All I would know about San Francisco before last week is that the city has a pretty long bridge which is famous the world over.

Well, Nadine and I went to this city in California last week for a lightning fast trip and discovered that there is a lot more to see than just this famous old red bridge.

C L I C K H E R E F O R T H E P I C T U R E S

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Tired after an eleven hour flight from Hong Kong we arrived in San Francisco last Wednesday afternoon. The rest of the afternoon we pretty much slept in bed, and towards about 5 pm we set out to venture around this town the first time.

We took a cable car from Market Street to Fisherman’s Wharf and had a seafood diner in one of the many restaurants along the piers. The one item on the restaurant’s menu that attracts most fame here is the renowned clam chowder, so we included two cups of it in our diner. Indeed this is a very good start of your diner - or a diner in itself if you order a bowl instead of a cup.

After a few nightcaps in the Buena Vista cafe (claims to have invented Irish Coffee) we headed back to the hotel on O’Farrel / Mason Str.

Our next day was spent still jetlagged for a large part! In the afternoon we went to see the Golden Gate Bridge, Presidio Park, and the Palace of Fine Arts. On the way back we asked our cabbie to drive via Lombard Street, which’s got one of the most crooked streets we’ve seen before.

After this we went back to the hotel, did some shopping in the area, had a huge piece of cheesecake in the Cheesecake Factory, and then had diner in one of the many 24hr diners in the area. (Boy did we eat a lot of food on this trip!)

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Our last day was the best: if you want to see the San Francisco area you must rent a car. So that’s just what we did. We were awake very early so we were in a car rental company at about 6.30 am. About 30 minutes later we were cruising away in a brand new Ford Escape (unfortunately they had no Explorer available!).

Via Bay Bridge we drove to Berkeley and had a look around the campus of the University of California. Then it was off to Napa and Sonoma Valley. We made stops at two wineries but only tasted a little wine (got to drive you know). With four bottles of wine in the back of the car we cruised back to the city, but not before we had a quick look around Sausalito. This is a smaller village on the other end (Northern end) of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s got a great view over the city and the village itself has beautiful houses along it’s coastline and on the hills.

Back to SF over the Golden Gate Bridge, and headed for Twin Peaks. That’s the big hill in the middle of the city from which you’ve got a great view on the whole of San Francisco and the Bay.

After Twin Peaks it was down south along Highway no. 1 - the Pacific Highway. This beautiful road takes you down the west coast while some of the best views I’ve seen pass by my eyes. This is a truly great highway ride, with a much varied landscape.

I could have driven on for hours and hours along this highway (up to LA in fact!), but duty called for Nadine, and our flight would leave at 11:30pm that night, so had to head back to the city again.

We departed on time from San Francisco and took 14hr 40min (!!!!) to fly back to Hong Kong. We had headwinds of up to 200 km/hr, so this made our trip quite a bit longer than scheduled. The jetstreams over the pacific are very strong this time of the year, and to minimize the impact, we flew back a route following the US west coast up north, to Alaska, across the Bearing Street, over Russia, and down south again over Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

We arrived back in Hong Kong safe and sound at 7am, and back in the house at 8.30am

This was a great break and we look forward to our next!!

Cheers!

C L I C K H E R E F O R T H E P I C T U R E S

I spend a Sunday morning messing with a new toy I bought yesterday: a Wireless broadband router from Linksys/Cisco.

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We got only one PC in the house so you might wonder why we got a wireless router…. Well the only key reason I could find to buy the router is that it would allow me to hook-up Nadine’s IPAQ pda over WLAN to the PC. Alright - and what’s the key benefit of that? Well, for me it is simple: I can now carry the PDA into the living room / kitchen / bedroom and still tune into a Dutch radio station over the Internet via Windows media player.

This is great, the PDA now functions like a little portable radio, but this one lets tune in to virtually any radio station in the world! And in the living room I can hook it up to my stereo and listen radio with top quality sound.

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Furthermore, we can synchronize the IPAQ from anywhere in the house (and from outside) with the PC. It also enables us to browse files on the PC from the PDA. All over the airwaves via WLAN.

I bought the G Wireless router and not the B type, but I’m only using the B type WLAN at the moment. I still bought the G type router coz it was only 200 HKD extra over the B type, so when I get a laptop with built-in G WLAN, it can connect hi-speed in my home WLAN. I spend 700 HKD on the G router (that’s 70 Euro or about 90 USD.

Anyway - check out them pictures. One shows the Linksys router sitting neatly under my broadband modem. There are two antennas on tha back of the router, and they give good coverage in my whole place (but I live in Hong Kong - our places are small!). The other shows my IPAQ playing Radio 538 live over the WLAN… really: no cable can be seen

Cheers,

Marc