and headed out to Hetch Hetchy, it was a really lovely place and the dam was enormous. We walked over the dam and headed off around the reservoir but we didn’t make it round to the waterfall as it was a little further than we had all thought and we didn’t have enough water with us - with half of Helen’s rucksack missing we had no camelbak! We then headed to the picnic area to finish of the chilli before heading back to Alameda for the 4th of July celebrations the next day. We got back to Alameda early evening, checked back into the Marina Village Inn than arranged to meet Dominic at the local curry house. Wow it was the first time we’d had Indian curry in a long time and it was good!

We woke up to find that Mum had really bad toothache and needed to go to the dentist. Poor Mum - if it wasn’t her hip giving her grief it was her tooth! She couldn’t have got toothache at a more

inconvenient time due to it being Independence Day which is a bank holiday and everywhere being shut! They headed off in search of a dentist and we stayed at the hotel, we were going to walk up to the parade but we kind of lost track of time and before we knew it everyone was back at the hotel. Mum hadn’t found a dentist but after the various pain-killers kicked in, they had watched the parade and she was feeling a little better. Our plan for the day was to have a barbeque and drinks at the yacht club then go out on Steve’s boat and watch the fireworks in the harbour. Wow how great was that? We had a very pleasant afternoon then headed off to Steve’s boat later on for the fireworks. Steve’s boat was amazing, he lived on it and to us it was very big and posh! We had asked Dominic if we needed to take any drinks and he informed that Steve had enough alcohol on board to sink a small cruise liner’! He wasn’t joking!!!