GlobeToddles

The perfectly sculpted physiques. The busy, always-on-the-phone people who power walk their way down the boardwalk. The polite smilers who have enough friends, thank you very much... ... are all conspicuously absent. This is L.A.? Are you sure? We moved down to sunny southern California at the start of November and we are staying in a really quaint little beachy suburb called Hermosa Beach. For anyone who's been to Sydney I'd liken it to a small Manly. There's a lovely boardwalk along the wide, volleyball-crazy beach; a pedestrianised avenue teeming with bars and restaurants that bisects it and leads up to a small shopping district; a bunch of pretty houses; and a curious stretch of bark-covered path a few blocks inland that delights runners and dog-walkers alike (local legend is that it was to be a railway but the tyre companies bought the land to prevent this from happening). So on our first day we took a stroll along the boardwalk and pier and down the avenue (all of

Ah, San Francisco - I wouldn't quite say I lost my heart there as the song goes, but I now have a lot of affection for this wonderfully varied and extremely liveable (and yes, incredibly hilly!) city. I thought I'd be bored by month two in San Francisco. I thought I'd be more than ready to move south, with the late afternoon fog and just-too-cool ocean breeze finally becoming a nuisance by the time we got into October. Truth be told, when we planned this whole trip I didn't expect to like San Francisco anywhere near as much as I did - after all, I'm a southern California girl at heart, with my first introduction to the golden state being San Diego (which is pretty much as far south as you can go), right? I'd visited San Francisco a few times before, and after Alcatraz and the sea lions at Pier 39 (oh yes, and a couple of interesting bridges), I thought I'd be pretty much over the place. But I was blissfully wrong. When the time came to leave I waved farewe