47 Mile Drive, Berkeley and Isobune

Today we drove out over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley. Marjolein had been there before and wanted to show us the campus. We started out by doing part of the "47 Mile Drive", which is a scenic drive taking you through most of SF's most beautiful spots. Once again we were not disappointed, as we saw some stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge in the sea fog and made it up to Twin Peaks, which is one of SF's highest points and gives you the most unbelievable view of almost all of the city.



However we eventually gave up the 47 Mile Drive as it was badly signposted at several key points and we didn't have a detailed map. Originally we planned to carry on down to Palo Alto and Stanford University to meet up with Karl-Magnus again, but the traffic held us up quite a bit (and we got lost trying to find the freeway entrance) and we didn't make it to Stanford. Karl-Magnus had only slept a couple of hours the previous night so maybe this was just as well.

Back in SF we ate dinner at a "sushi boat" restaurant in the Japan Centre called Isobune, one of those where sushi floats around on a little river on small boats and you just take what you like. It had been recommended by a very talkative woman we met on the number 30 bus! Once again we seem to have found a restaurant where superlatives are used: it was one of the top 10 "speciality" restaurants in San Francisco and it was in fact America's first ever sushi boat restaurant. It was great fun but we ran into the same problem that we encountered at Yo! Sushi in London - the different coloured plates just stack up and you end up spending more than you planned. We polished off 19 plates of sushi and Saskia ate like there was no tomorrow.