San Francisco & Hawaii

Saturday, January 28th, 2012 at 02:32 | by Alistair Baillie

Well for once my travel plans weren’t buggered by the snow and I flew down to London on Friday night to spend the night in a hotel before flying out to San Francisco.

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Unfortunately due to Virgin not putting the flights on the same booking we had to wait ages to collect our baggage at Heathrow and then take it with us to the hotel.

Nice and early next morning we were up and on our way back to the airport to catch our flight out to San Francisco – Virgin Atlantic don’t do twilight checkin at Heathrow for some reason so even if you arrive the night before you can’t drop your bags off until the morning. Bag Drop is really the wrong word for it… It took over an hour to drop the bags off despite there only being around 20 people in front – clearly old people and people who don’t travel lots should have dedicated checkin desks – it would make it a lot quicker for everyone!

Anyway, the flight itself went quite quickly (around 9 hour flight time) and gave some awesome views of Iceland, Greenland and Canada before flying into a windy San Francisco.

A quick taxi ride to the hotel and then it was time to have a nap then pop out for walk around Fishermans Warf and to a bar for a quick dinner.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Fishermans Warf which is located close to bars and restaurants and only a short cable car ride from the centre of San Francisco.

The first full day was spent on an open top bus tour of the city, including going to the Golden Gate bridge, unfortunately it rained quite a lot both days we were there which is a shame.

The second day we went over to Alcatraz in the morning and spent the afternoon riding the cable car and having a wonder around the main shopping area.

We were only in San Francisco for 3 nights as a stop over on our way to Hawaii, so the next morning we were up nice and early again to catch the 830 flight from San Francisco to Honolulu.

Arriving in Honolulu we were instantly hit by the warmth – 20 degrees hotter than in San Francisco. We’re staying at the Hilton Hawaiian Village resort on Waikiki beach. It’s a huge hotel consisting of different towers, several bars, restaurants and hundreds of shops set amongst tropical gardens, 4 swimming pools and right on the beach.

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At night the entire resort is illuminated by torches (of the flame variety) which they run around lighting at 6pm.

So far we’ve spent most of the time here at the beach or the pool, but today we took an open top bus ride of the city and went out to Pearl Harbour. Tonight there is a firework display after sunset which luckily we can see from our balcony overlooking the beach.

I’m here for a few more days then it’s on to Vegas for a few days before flying back to Scotland and then back to work in Egypt a few days later!

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