We left Lake Tahoe this morning and spent the first part of the day punishing the poor car and ruining the gas mileage through the Sierra Nevada mountain range here. Pretty bloody impressive though!

We eventually reached our destination for the next couple days - Yosemite National Park! The park covers 750,000 acres, attracts close to four million visitors each year, and is about to celebrate its 125th anniversary in just a few days. Yosemite is internationally recognised for its spectacular granite cliffs, of which this is one (low-key) example here - Lambert's Dome in the Tuolumne Meadows area of the park.

Tuolumne Meadows is a large sub-alpine meadow with the Tuolumne River winding through it. It's hardly the main attraction of the park (we'll be doing that area tomorrow), but it was on the way to our campsite and worth a quick wander.

Within the meadows is Soda Springs, spewing cold carbonated water from the ground. According to the information boards, geologists aren't exactly sure what the source of this water is, nor why it's carbonated.

From the meadows we continued winding through the mountains, with more incredible vistas waiting around every corner.

High in the distance there is a Yosemite and Californian icon - Half Dome. More on that tomorrow!

This is the valley floor and western entrance of Yosemite Valley. There would normally be a lot more water visible in this shot, both in the river in front of me and a gushing waterfall to the right. As we've seen elsewhere though, autumn is not the ideal time of year to be visiting these sorts of places. Regardless, it's still pretty nice huh!

I mentioned yesterday that Yosemite is internationally recognised for its spectacular granite cliffs, and the best place to see them is in and around Yosemite Valley which is the focal point of the whole park. On the right is one of the more famous cliffs - El Capitan, extending 3,000 feet (900m) from its base to the summit.

A rock climber's paradise right here. Yosemite also contains thousands of lakes and ponds, 1,600 miles of streams, 800 miles of hiking trails, and 350 miles of roads within its 750,000 acres. It is currently the third most visited national park in the United States (behind Great Smoky Mountains and Grand Canyon) with almost four million visitors each year, and despite the summer tourist season being over for the year this place is still noticeably busier than elsewhere we've been lately.

Imposing cliffs aside, Yosemite Valley is also famous for its impressive waterfalls, meadows and giant sequoia groves, and unusual rock formations. One of those waterfalls, Yosemite Falls, is among the tallest in the world with a total drop of 2,425 feet (739m), when it's flowing that is.

In the distance is probably the most famous sight of the whole park - the granite monolith of Half Dome.

View of the valley entrance from above.

After punishing the car up the side of another mountain, we got a closer view of Half Dome from Glacier Point lookout on the other side of the valley. Half Dome is named for its sheer face and rounded top that make it look like a giant stone dome that has been split in half. In reality however, that's not the case. Once upon a time, the view from here would be of a massive glacier that carved out Yosemite Valley over time. Millions of years ago, the granite block of Half Dome was larger, but there was never a matching half. Instead, slabs of rock gradually fell away after being undercut by the glacier, leaving the sheer face we see today. If you're extremely enthusiastic, Half Dome can be climbed via a 17 mile (27km) round-trip trail that ends at its summit. The final mile of the climb is apparently grueling and involves hauling your enthusiastic ass up steps and cables along the extremely steep spine of the dome. Not one for those with a fear of heights.

The Half Dome trail is regarded as one of the world's most spectacular, but we were perfectly happy to enjoy this view instead :)

The eastern end of Yosemite Valley with Half Dome on the right, as seen from Glacier Point. Spec-fucking-tacular!

After running and driving around all day yesterday, we had a quieter day today doing a few hikes in Yosemite Valley. Many of the valley's trails revolve around its waterfalls, lakes, and rivers, most of which are completely dry at the moment.

There's still plenty of wildlife wandering around though.

I mentioned Yosemite Falls yesterday, which would usually being gushing down from high on the cliff face up there on the right.

Instead, I stole this image to give an idea of what it looks like. Anyway, that was Yosemite in a nutshell; next time we'll come in spring :)

We spent today cruising through the infamous Silicon Valley, a nickname for the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area which is home to many of the world's largest high-tech corporations as well as thousands of tech startup companies. We started with a free tour at the headquarters of Intel - one of the world's largest semiconductor chip makers, and inventor of the microprocessors found in most personal computers (including my own). Processors aside, they also have their fingers in other pies including motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers, integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, yada yada yada. Needless to say, there were a lot of chips on display, as well as information on the manufacturing process which is a bit of a mind-blow.

From there we headed to the Computer History Museum, where Kristina embraced her inner-geek (what little there is of it).

The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on society. Good stuff.

There are a huge array of artifacts and exhibits on display, including the original IBM PC from 1981 which dominated the personal computer market, and is the ancestor of all PC-based machines today...

The original Apple Macintosh (now simply branded as "Mac") from 1984, which spawned the "PC versus Mac" brand war that continues today...

And my first ever computer hahaha! This is the Amstrad CPC464 (separate monitor not shown), released in 1984 and handed down to me from my uncle around 1990 when he upgraded to something else. Growing interest in home computers during the 1970s and 1980s resulted in more companies besides IBM and Apple fighting for market share and producing various computers, all incompatible with each other in terms of their hardware and software. They were popular with those who considered the IBM and Apple products too expensive. Amstrad was one such company, and the CPC was their computer. This thing started it all for me; I used to create my own software after teaching myself its programming language, which is something I still do in my job today :) By the way, notice the cassette player on the right - more on that in a bit.

From personal computers to these old dinosaurs that occupied an entire wall or room...

And much smaller and simpler machines such as the Enigma here, famously used by the Germans during World War II to encrypt their military messages prior to communication.

Some of the many artifacts on display include old and somewhat still-current storage mediums, including the good old floppy disk, tried-and-true hard drives, and cassette tapes. I mentioned above my first computer had a cassette player, well that was how it stored stuff - cassette tapes were its disks! Geez we've come a long way :)

Old video game consoles! My brother and I owned three of these between us, and looking back at the games we used to play and get excited about, man - simpler times ;)

Every big name company had to start somewhere, and in the case of Google it started with just this one rack of generic PC components and custom software to answer search queries. And the rest is (search) history.

Speaking of Google, we went to check out their headquarters which is made up of several adjacent buildings collectively known as the Googleplex.

We finished our geek out by visiting this neighbourhood, and this house, to see...

...this garage. Technology giant Hewlett-Packard started right here in this garage in 1939. Today HP manufactures PC's (including my laptop) and a variety of hardware components for consumers and large enterprises alike, but Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started out with a line of electronic test equipment, running their new company from Packard's one-car garage. And again, the rest is history.

San Francisco - the second-most densely populated city in the US after New York though with a population of less than a million. "San Fran" is known for its steep rolling hills, summer fog, Victorian architecture, and landmarks including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and the former Alcatraz prison. More on all that later! We started in the Fisherman's Wharf area on the waterfront, overrun with tourists and tourist shops.

We mostly came down here to see these loud and smelly guys - a colony of sea lions that claimed these wooden docks for themselves back in 1989, just prior to a major earthquake hitting the area. The docks were originally meant for docking boats, but a local law preventing the movement of sea vessels in the presence of wildlife means they're now effectively useless for that purpose hehe. Video here.

View of Alcatraz Island from Fisherman's Wharf. Right in the middle of it is the now-abandoned prison which operated between 1934 and 1963. The three-storey cell house was designed to hold prisoners who continuously caused trouble at other federal prisons, and became one of the world's most notorious and best known prisons over the years. However, high maintenance costs and a poor reputation lead to the facility's closure.

From Fisherman's Wharf we headed for the hills, literally. There are more than 50 hills within the city limits, including some especially steep ones (up to a grade of 31.5%). Incidentally, the steepest street in the world is in New Zealand with a grade of 35%.

The road of this famous one-block section of Lombard Street consists of eight hairpin turns, intended to reduce the hill's natural 27% grade. It's a one-way section going downhill, and is pure punishment for the brakes!

From Lombard Street we continued walking through the residential hills, past typical San Fran architecture, and eventually into the downtown area to rest our legs on its mostly flat terrain hehe.

San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest in North America and the largest Chinese community outside of Asia. The area is crowded, smelly (both good and not-so-good), and probably as close as we've gotten to actually visiting China.

Ever had a fortune cookie with your Chinese food? Well did you know fortune cookies don't exist in China? In fact, the story goes that fortune cookies were invented right here in San Francisco, and Chinatown contains a fortune cookie factory. These three biddies spend all day folding fortune messages into the soft cookie dough before it hardens. We sampled a few, and my fortunes involved good luck with the colour yellow, and receiving some sort of pleasure by the seashore (read into that what you will).

San Francisco's cable car system is an icon of the city, and the world's last manually operated cable car system. Of the twenty-three lines established between 1873 and 1890, only three remain. And while the cable cars are used to a certain extent by commuters, the vast majority of their passengers are tourists.

The cable cars are pulled by a cable running below the street, held by a grip that extends from the car through a slit in the street surface between the rails. To start and stop the movement of the car, the "gripman" closes and opens the grip around the cable (similar to the clutch of a conventional car), with the grip's jaws exerting a pressure of up to 30,000 psi on the cable. At the end of some of the lines (specifically those utilising these single-ended cars), the car pulls onto a turntable like this.

The car is then turned by hand on the turntable and pushed off again hehe. Simple, but effective :)

No day in San Francisco would be complete without a viewing of the infamous Golden Gate Bridge. More on this tomorrow!

That was it for our first day in San Fran, rounded off by a viewing of the total supermoon eclipse tonight - an extremely rare occurence that hasn't happened since I was born in 1982 and won't happen again until 2033.

We started our last day in San Francisco by seeing it from above, atop the summit of Twin Peaks - a pair of hills forming one of the city's highest points.

Downtown San Francisco, as seen from Twin Peaks.

And downtown as seen from Alamo Square Park, behind a row of Victorian houses facing the park known as the "Painted Ladies". The houses were built between 1892 and 1896 and appear frequently in media and photographs of the city, including the opening credits of the television series Full House.

Speaking of Full House, this here is the house that was used for the exterior shots of the Tanners' house. According to Google Street View's history it was repainted sometime between 2011 and 2014, and so now looks completely different to what it does in the show (much to Kristina's disappointment - bit of a Full House nerd apparently).

Not too far away is the house used for the filming of Mrs Doubtfire; again, exterior shots only. Immediately following Robin Williams' suicide, this house became a makeshift shrine with fans leaving cards and flowers all over the place (which was probably a huge pain in the ass for whoever actually lives here hehe).

From there we headed to the Golden Gate Bridge for a closer look! The bridge is about 1.7 miles (2.7km) in length, linking San Francisco to its northern metropolitan area across the Golden Gate strait. From its opening in 1937 until 1964, it was the longest suspension bridge main span in the world at 4,200 feet (1,300m). The bridge is one of the most internationally recognized symbols of San Francisco, California, and the United States, and is probably the most photographed bridge in the world.

View from the north side, looking back towards San Fran with downtown on the far left.

We took a drive through the hills north of the bridge and city which are bloody nice, and surprisingly full of cyclists punishing themselves.

Sunset over the Pacific Ocean.

Golden Gate Bridge by night. Pretty :) Tomorrow we're back on the road for the two-day drive along California's Pacific coast to Los Angeles!