San Fran Day One: 'carpe dentum, seize the teeth!'

Lazy morning doesn't even cover this morning. I think we were more tired when we woke up than before we went to sleep; a severe lack of sleep due to overnight greyhound trauma catching up with us!

Eventually we made it out though. It feels good to be back in San Francisco, I feel right at home here and as a city it has such a good feel about it. We went a few blocks over to Divisadero to find some breakfast (lunch, let's not kid ourselves!!) and found a cool little cafe. We both had potatoes and then a concoction of eggs, grilled chicken, spring onions and mushrooms. Beauuuut. We also discovered a health shop that sold GLUTEN FREE BREAD! Hallelujah! Poor Kitty hasn't eaten bread for a month because we haven't been able to find any. Let's just say she is beyond excited to make some toast!!!

We then wandered back to Alamo Square to check out the Painted Ladies, the houses that are on all the postcards and whatever. It was a really clear day so we could see out over all the city from Alamo Square too. We were laughing at the fact that the poor people who live in the houses would never be able to casually sit in the windows of their houses/get changed with the curtains open for fear of the tourists taking pictures from Alamo Square. Being simple souls, this amused us greatly!

Our next mission was a great one: find the Mrs Doubtfire house. Laugh you might, but we knew it was on the same street we were staying on, and knew the house number from watching the film. We walked a fair few blocks and eventually found it. It had changed slightly in twenty years, i.e. there were more trees outside it, but it was definitely the house! Success!

Throughout the day we had been in contact with our tour group who also happened to be in San Francisco that evening. They wanted us to meet them for dinner that evening, so we thought why the hell not! The culinary destination was 'The Cheesecake Factory', located on the top floor of Macy's in Union Square. Polly and Andrea never ceased to tell us how much they loved The Cheesecake Factory whilst we were on the trip so ultimately we had to check it out for ourselves.

However, the group still on the tour were booked onto a sailboat ride around San Francisco bay which didn't finish until about 8.30. This left Kitty and I responsible for rocking up to the restaurant and reserving a table. For seventeen people. The woman looked at us like we were crazy and told us we wouldn't be able to get a table until about 10pm. Luckily this worked out perfectly, as by the time everyone trailed in from the boat it was about half past nine.

It was really fun to see everyone again and we had some excellent banter on our table with Robin, Ann, Trine, Andrea, Polly and Peter. On our side of the table was also another English girl called Francesca who had joined the trip in Vegas after we left and she fitted right in with us all too!

The food at The Cheesecake Factory was much better than I thought it would be, I had something called Chicken Madeira, which was chicken with mushrooms, asparagus and cheese served with amazing mashed potato and Kitty had fish tacos! We never got round to trying any cheesecake because we were too full so we may venture back another time, the cheesecakes were insane though, not like any cheesecake we had ever seen!!

The cocktails were pretty good too, mine was really strong! One of the funniest moments of the evening when was Trine enthusiastically started talking, then realising we were all staring at her blankly, said, 'Oh, I'm talking in Norwegian again.' Too many pina coladas for Trine!

Some of the group were going out for drinks after the meal but we decided to head back and, after saying goodbye a second time, headed off to catch our muni bus back towards Jeff's.