Breakfast was included at the Hotel, it was OK, the usual mixture of waffles, cakes, cereal, bagels with tea or coffee plus scrambled egg and mini sausages, it did fill you up though.

From Napa we made our way up to Calistoga (the furthest north we travelled), a lovely town square, in fact the whole of the town is worthy of a longer visit, maybe next time. On the way we passed dozens of vineyards (I think there are in the region of 500 vinyards here).

After picking up some bread and sandwich things it was off to Lake Hennessey for lunch. We ate by the shore, even though it was sunny there was still a chill in the wind (hence our coats).

With the short days it would be dark soon, so we made our way slowly back to San Francisco. As we neared the Golden Gate Bridge, the sun was dipping below the horizon, a slight detour to a fabulous viewpoint where the setting sun’s rays gave a firey glow to the bridges red colour, beautiful.

Even I am glowing red

As it was getting on for 5.00 pm by now the roads were quite congested so we slowly made our way back, Robin dropping us back at 5.30 pm. Tim had been back and had gone out again, we had a portion of curry for tea and around 10.00 pm Tim returned. Some nice conversation later and it was sleep time.

Saturday today and it is theatre day, we are all off to see A Christmas Carol and we will go out for a meal as well.

We started off walking to the Noe Street farmers market, on the way spotting a library where I did manage to print off all the ticket details this time. The market was nice, plenty of root crops at the moment. We were looking to buy some Persimmons, the variety you have to leave until they are so soft you can push your finger inside them, to go with our ice cream on sunday (tomorrow). There were no ripe ones here so we walked to Market Street then caught the tram to the other farmers market. Here we found all the fruit and veg you could possibly want.

Walking down through Castro

With our freshly acquired bag of Persimmons we hopped on the underground and walked back to Tim’s apartment where we spent a very leisurely couple of hours. By 5.00 pm Tim was back and Robin collected us, off to the theatre we go.

As the play did not start until 7.00 pm we went for food first. The resturant we wanted to eat at, The Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot was full so we had a meal at the Chabaa Thai Cuisine instead which was very good. It was only a walk across the road (Geary Street) to the American Conservatory Theatre where we had tickets for A Christmas Carol. It was very well done and we all really enjoyed the show.

After complaining about the lack of christmas decoration, Robin and Tim gave us a tour of some very well decorated houses, including one where they still had the cherry picker out front they were using to decorate a huge tree! they were very serious about their christmas decorating.

Once back we chatted for a while until Robin had work to go to and it was getting late so we turned in to our beds.