A little bit of history

We wake up excited by our first day in San Francisco. Or at least we kind of do. I'm pretty hungover but Izy persuades me to get up and embrace the hotel breakfast which is passable (we've been in better places) at least until we reach the nearest Starbucks.

The sun is shining and we wander up through Union Square and north to North Beach to the Beat Museum. On the way we stumble across a Chinese Street Festival which is teeming with crowds and street stalls and generally lots of fun. I manage to get some good photos - our new camera has seen a lot of action this holiday.

The Beat Museum is really good - obviously the owners are pretty clued into the whole scene and in touch with the defendants of the legendary Neil Cassidy and the director and actors of the new film of On the Road. We have a slightly sad chat about the demise of Jack Kerouac - Izy has been re-reading Big Sur on the drive up Highway 1 - and spend quite a while looking around the museum which is really interesting and informative if a little lacking in actual stuff - the referee shirt worn by Neil Cassidy while driving Ken Kasey's Further Bus is the only actual relic of the period - although the photos and video interviews are fascinating. Afterwards we go to the famous City Lights bookshop - which was the publisher of most of the seminal Beat writing - including Howl which was the subject of an obscenity trial in the late 50s. Mindful of how small our suitcases are we try, however, not to get too carried away at the till but Izy gets a few postcards and its good to have been there.

After all of that, we're off to Fisherman's Wharf to experience the famous arcade museum. The huge former shipping warehouse has hundreds of well-preserved arcade machines and so on from as early as the late 1800s. These include Waltzer pianos and some pretty tricky antique baseball games - all completely playable. I am in my element getting to grips with a classic Star Wars arcade machine and finally the brilliant Pirates of the Caribbean pinball machine after i manage to wrestle the controls off an annoyingly tenacious 40 year old man. Izy wanders around reading up about the emergence of the fairground culture in turn of the century America and wracking up the high scores on Skee Ball.

Finally as the chill sets in in the late afternoon light, we scale the hilly heights back to our hotel where we settle in with take away sushi to watch the Real Housewives of Atlanta followed by the Real Housewives of Miami and then, for a bit of culture, the Real Housewives of New Jersey - a classic old school American hotel experience.