Bread's Area

Our flight was around 8am, so I called a taxi to pick us up from Hotel around 5:30am.  Luckily we had a driver living in the same hotel, so he took the taxi from his office first and went back hotel to pick us.  The taxi driver is a very lonely person (I guess).  Start from the time he picked us, he could never stop talking.  He told us all about himself, how he sick and need operation, how the hospital operation room doing his type of surgery, how he divorced and how he was from a IT profession to become a Taxi Driver because of the IT bubble burst.  For god sake, I am also an IT guy.  His voice exactly same as Mel Gibson, made me remembered the movie "Conspiracy Theory".  Eventually, we had to leave the North America and back to reality.  Start working in one of the most busy city in the world "Hong Kong".

 

In the morning, we started with the most famous public transport, the old style San Francisco tram.  We brought a day pass.  Found that there are two type of tram.  One is having 2 front side, they could be driven in both way.  The other one is driven from one side, that means they need to make a U-turn when they arrived the terminal.   We took the tram from the financial centre to Fisherman Wharf.  Since we brought the ticket to Alcatraz Island on Monday.  About the tickets, it was really hard to buy.  We arrived San Francisco on Monday.  We had been to the ticket office to ask for the most early ticket to the Island.  The answer from the ticketing box, "The most early one is 2:30pm on Thursday.  After that it will be Sunday 12:30pm".  So we have no choice but buy the Sunday one and we have to visist Las Vagas first before we could visit the Island at the last day of our trip.  The Island is very famous because it had been used for the Hollywood Movie making.  It was a prison before 1963, but it was closed down because of the high maintenance cost.  It was famous also because there were quite a number of  serious criminal living here.  And also there were several attempt to escape story, those were very interesting. 

 It was Saturday.  The Pier 1 became a Farmer Market.  They had many fruit selling there and the also let the people to try.  We had tried some too.  They also sell plants and flowers.  Most important, they sold fresh oyster there.  2 dollars each but 10 dollars for one dozen if take away.  After eating the oyster, we took BART to San Francisco Government Building area.  Then we took bus there to Golden Gate Garden.  Next to the Garden, it is the Pacific Ocean.  We stayed there for awhile and took some birds picture.  Golden Gate Garden is very large, it just walked 2 famous points there and went back to China Town.

 

We were at the Coit Tower to see the far view of the San Francisco City.  Saw a little puppy belong to a student from Hong Kong.  We walked around in China Town afterward.  Visited a cake shop that was making fortune cookies.  After the demonstration, the shop owner offer us the custom made Fortune cookies.  Each cookie cost 2 US dollars.  Expensive lehh.  Then we went to the Golden Gate Bridge, a very famous place in San Francisco.   Lastly, we went to the Fishermen Market and ate a Chowder Soup there.

 

Last day in Vagas, finally we do a bit gambling.  We lost all our budget, 2 big US dollars. hehe... 

Eventually, we arrived our main objective of our trip "The Grand Canyon".  Before going there, we went to the hotel tower to see the game overthere first.  There were very exciting games, you can see it from the picture.  We followed a local tour to Grand Canyon, it was a very shot trip in terms of time.  It took us only 7 hours to go from hotel to the bottom of the Grand Canyon Valley river and back to hotel.  We first trave by a bus to the mini-plane airport.  Flew to the helicopter base.  We went to the Valley bottom by helicopter and travel the river by the boat over there.  Then flew back to the base and travel to the skywalk by bus.  After the skywalk, we had lunch in another spot in Grand Canyon.  Finally we went back to Las Vagas around 8pm.  After that, we went to the old city centre of Las Vagas to see the largest LCD screen in the world.  And that was the final point of the day. 

Travel by BART (San Francisco Underground) to Airport in the early morning around 6:45am.  Then changed the terminal train to terminal 2.  Just when we arrived the Las Vagas airport, the first thing we saw are the gambling machines.  After checked in at the Stratosphere Hotel, we went for a walk in the city.  We went to see the Coca Cola and M & M show room.  Then we had a little rest in the hotel.  We had a buffet dinner in Flamingo and then took a look of the famous Las Vagas Hotel night scene.

 

Time to say goodbye to Vancouver and say hello to San Francisco.  We only stopped one night and San Francisco and went to Las Vagas on the next day.   After checked-in at the hotel in China Town.  We walked to the Pier number 1.  From pier 1 walked to pier 39.

 

From Meritt to Vancouver, it is only around 2 hours drive.  Once back to Vancouver, we went for a chinese lunch in a  restaurant (Yum Chea).  The "Dip Sum" is very good, up to Hong Kong standard worr.  We won't waster our time, went for the Whale watching immediately.  It was a 4 hours function and very interesting.  Watched a log of killer whale jump at the sea.  But it costed Hundred something Canadian dollars...quite expensive.