Some more pics of San Fran that really should follow the post below...sorry

 The afternoon after we arrived in San Fran we decided to walk from where we were staying near Haight Street to the Castro district - which didn't look far on the map - but of course the map didn't show all the hills we had to traverse! Anyway it was a great walk and we passed by lots of interesting houses and gardens and we marvelled at the weeping rosemary...in this example it formed this magnificent curtain

 By the time we got to the Castro it was just on dark. The giant rainbow flag was unexpected but welcome. We had a great meal here that night and then decided to walk back home again - although this route didn't take us over so many hills.

 The kitchen of the airbnb apartment we stayed in.  The owner or renter, Zach, was staying in NYC so he was letting both his bedrooms out - one to us and then the other to two different couples during our stay.  This apartment was beautifully fitted out.  Enormous kitchen.

 The National AIDS Memorial Grove is situated in the Golden Gate Park which was just at the end of our road. The Circle of Friends was a large area within which a giant circle made up of the names of people who had died of AIDS were inscribed.  Thousands and thousands of names.

 A fun thing that we did, among many, was to see Wizard of Oz on this giant screen, accompanied by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

 On our second last day we took a bus trip to Muir Woods.  This is a really nice pic of Steve on one of the bridges that we pass as we walked through the forest.

Homlessness is a huge problem in all the cities we visited but it seemed that there were more people living on the streets in San Francisco than any other city.  Some locals explained that this was because homeless people came to SF because of the milder climate and the more progressive social policies and practices.  Some people we spoke to reckoned that homeless people (and among them were a very large number of people with mental illness) were given one way tickets from other cities to travel to San Francisco.  So in this pic there lives a man underneath that sheeting. He sat in a wheel chair and covered himself up with the tarp etc and left his suit case next to him.  I took this pic a couple of hundred metres from where we were staying.