On the Road Again - with Beer and Candy

We had an earlier breakfast this morning (Monday 13th August) at the driftwood cafe in Lake Tahoe. Nice. After this we checked out our motel and hit the road.

Just before 2pm we arrived at the Budweiser brewery ready for the tour. By this point we were pretty hungry with empty stomachs, but had not had time to get lunch for fear of being late -they only run two tours per day. The tour started with two free drinks of your choice while you watched a video. I chose some kind of raspberry flavoured number they do which is 8.5%. Em chose a bud lime - a bit like Corona with lime. Em was driving so didn't even finish her first. I put away two and then when the videos finished we glided round the parts of the factory that tourists are allowed close to. One of these areas was the huge kegs they brew the beer in - I think each one is 22000 gallons from memory. I think she also said that if you drank a case of 24 beers a day it would still take you 68 years to get through a keg of this size!

We left the brewery and headed literally round the corner to the Jelly Belly factory - by this point we were starving, although in our forty minute tour we managed to tie ourselves over with three jelly beans...

Finally we managed to get a semi unMcsatisfying lunch at about 4pm. We there found out an interesting fact - that McDonalds Milkshakes have more calories than the burgers. My Big Mac was 540 calories, yet the Milkshake...710 (medium size). In our one 'meal' we'd managed 100% of our fat for the day. Free refill anyone?

We left our McLunch and headed the last hour of the journey into San Fran -however we stopped at the North Face outlet store en route. This is so cheap compared to the US normal stock - and the US normal stock is so much cheaper than the UK stuff. You can pretty much exchange dollars for pounds on the standard price tags (before they get marked down for outlet store). Our visit was also a useful way of avoiding rush hour traffic in San Fran.

We finally arrived in San Fran at 7:30pm and preceded to spend one whole hour and about 10 dollars of gas just driving round looking for overnight parking at a reasonable rate - by reasonable I mean under 30 dollars! We drove many times round and only getting 8.5mpg! The sat nav took some wrestling as quite a few roads it wanted us to go down were blocked off.

In the end, we had no better options than to pay for valet parking at our hotel. The nightly price is $33 + 15.5% tax! Consequently we'll have to be on a diet of bread and water, while the car gets a warm blanket and a roof over its hood.

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Now fed and watered we have showered and are feeling more relaxed back at the hotel. This is good practice for alcatraz tomorrow, as our room is not much larger than cell sized and we have shared toilet and bathroom facilities, lol. We ate dinner at 'Little Delhi'. It was one of the best lamb kormas we've ever had!

Now, time for bed. We rise at 7:30am to get breakfast and get across to Alcatraz.