It’s not like in the movies, Dad

So is reading a guidebook properly. Had we done that, we would have known that the museum closed on Wednesdays. I know, I was shocked too. Who would have expected the mores of market-town England in an American metropolis? “Okay, let’s go and see the Golden Gate Bridge. That won’t be closed.” Three bus journeys later (not entirely my fault), we walked up to that iconic structure, familiar from a hundred films, from Vertigo to A View to a Kill. We couldn ‘t see it. We were standing on it and we couldn’t see it. It was wrapped in thick fog. We could see 10 yards of world-famous orange cable then ... nothing.

“It’ll be interesting if we walk to the middle,” I said, striding off into the wet gloom.

“Daddy, I’m scared.”

“Don’t be silly.” The foghorn blared like some distressed primordial beast, and looking over the edge into that white immensity there could easily have been a lost and melancholic brontosaurus wandering into the bay beneath us. “Well, perhaps hot chocolate back home would be nice.”

SAN FRANCISCO in August is weird. The warm moist air blows in from the Pacific, hits the hilly city on its peninsula, turns into a cloud of fog and sits there. We drove into the city one afternoon on US Highway 101. One minute we were in blue-skied Californian summer, the next dour British November, closed-in, grey-skied, dense scraps of mist scudding down quiet, damp streets.

We were on the second leg of a family holiday that involved our three children Freddie (10), Bertie (8) and Matilda (6), American cousins Rachel (11) and Hannah (4), and various grandparents, aunts and uncles. We were staying in an apartment in a “Victorian” (as the late 19th-century houses are called) just by Haight-Ashbury. If you want to get to know somewhere and how it works, apartments are up there with walking and buses. It is always good to know how something works, what makes it tick; you get to know what to expect.

Some things, however, seemed destined to remain beyond my understanding. Customs officers, for example, I find trickily unpredictable. We were stumbling through San Francisco airport after a 10-hour flight, during which none of the children had slept and Bertie had thrown up spectacularly. I handed in the customs declaration form and staggered on. The official stopped me with a raised hand. He was wearing a surgical glove, disturbingly suggestive of mustard keenness for rectal examination. Every other customs officer in the area turned in my direction. Rubber gloves snapped like cocking guns.

“How many of you are there?” he asked.

“Five.”

“You’ve written four.”

“Yes, well, it says ‘to be filled in by one family member’ and then the question is, ‘How many family members are with you?’”

“You are supposed to write in the total number.”

My wife was gesturing, but I ignored her and pursued the point. “It’s not terribly clear, is it? At the very least it’s ambiguous. Instead of ‘with you’ it should say ‘of you’. ‘How many are there of you’.” Instead of an epiphanic good-lord-you’re-right look, the man seemed peevish. Janet’s semaphoring became frantic. I was about to tell her that it was hardly helping, when Bertie erupted again. Just the ticket: a score of rubber-gloved hands waved us into the USA as quickly as possible.

On the plane, I had asked the children what they expected America to be like: big was the answer. Big houses, big food, big people. They were partly right. Nearly everything seems chunky, industrially scaled. We drove our enormous 4WD over the bridges of San Francisco Bay and noticed that they are heftily riveted lumps of engineering, with none of that effete, airy-fairy, sinuous Calatrava nonsense. The washing machines could take our entire week’s clothes in one go. In Safeway, the plums were the size of apples. However, the people were disappointingly healthy-looking (we were in California), and the lavatories are pathetic.

There are few things worse than being in someone else’s house and discovering that you have blocked the lavatory. Our first morning in America and, hot-faced, I had to confess to my brother-in-law that, er, there was a slight, um, blockage- situation-type thing... With a weary sigh born of repetition, he handed me a huge plunger, which dealt with the blockage-situation thing in moments.

Only a couple of days later, and with sinking heart, I confronted the same situation in Tahoe. By then I was beginning to know what to expect and knew where to find the huge plunger. When we moved into our apartment in San Francisco it came as no surprise at all to find a plunger handily sited right next to the lavatory. The problem, without going into too much detail, though believe me I have delved into it at length, is one of design.

American lavatories have a ridiculously narrow wastepipe surmounted by a “flapper valve” cistern rather than the robust valveless siphon job we have in Britain. Instead of a Niagara-like, pan-emptying gush, the American cistern dribbles ineffectually into the pan, leaving the contents undisturbed. Take it from me, always know where the plunger is.

THERE WERE bigger things to worry about on the first half of our trip. We were staying just outside Tahoe City on Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, about a 3½-hour drive (at American speeds) from San Francisco. I’d read about the “bear menace” in a British newspaper, and as we got close, there were signs telling us to watch out for bear families crossing the road, but all we ever saw were chipmunks. There were other roadsigns that I thought terribly officious, but as the 4WD laboured up a steep incline, I realised that “Trucks Upgrade” was not necessarily telling lorry drivers to buy better vehicles.

Similarly, “Vista Point” was not a place name. We were driving around Emerald Bay at the southern end of the lake. “Let’s have a look at Vista Point.” We parked at the side of the road and crossed over to look out from the, ahem, vista point. My jaw clunked downwards.

Revealed before us, as we came out from under the trees, with all the drama of a flung-back curtain, was a “western ” landscape that had existed in my mind for years, formed from a hundred cowboy films — The Outlaw Josey Wales, Jeremiah Johnson, Wild Rovers — thickly forested, snowcapped mountains, a vast expanse of water, and air so thin you become conscious of breathing. The physical scale is magnificent, or “ossom” as the Americans around us said; the human timescale is absurd.

The lake, despite being longer than the English Channel is wide, was not seen by Western eyes until 1844; the road that looks like the merest scratching in the mountainside was laboriously hacked out in 1913.

Real western-film-type stuff went on around here. The Donner Pass was named after the emigrants from the Midwest who ill-advisedly brought their wagon train up through these mountains in 1844 and had to resort to cannibalism to survive the winter. On the Nevada side of the lake are such notorious places as the old silver-mining town of Virginia City, Reno and Carson.

The town of Truckee has a jailhouse that looks like a film prop, but was actually in use until the mid-1960s; it also has one of those hardware stores that could kit out John Wayne for a cattle drive or a little light prospecting. As you might expect, it sold nails, hammers, power tools, rope, ladders, chain, locks, window-frames — but then it also stocked canoes, hiking boots, extreme-weather clothing, skis, fishing rods, baseball bats, footballs, Frisbees, snowshoes, golf balls... This was an entirely new experience for me. I spent an hour browsing in two aisles. Extraordinary: this shop was a stuff-men-want-to-buy store. We should have them here.

And there is no end of activities to pursue around Tahoe. Skiing in the winter, swimming, sailing, water-skiing, mountain-hiking, horse-riding, cycling along the nominated cycle routes... We even went white-water rafting. You tell yourself it can’t be that risky or it wouldn’t be allowed, but you can’t help a sense of uneasiness as you complete the various disclaimer forms that the rafting company requires.

Then again, as we discovered, every activity in California requires lots of these, from go-karting (“only one on the track at a time, please”) to hiring a bicycle. Rafting, though, is definitely worth the ink: a peaceful paddle through seven miles of open country with the adrenaline-charged thrill of bouncing through the rapids at the end.

AFTER THE hairy-chested outdoor life of the mountains, returning to San Francisco was a bit of a shock. Particularly as children and cities are not an obvious fit. Strolling as a family down Haight one evening among the dropouts, would-be-hippies, proto-punks and grunge hangovers, we were the weird ones who stuck out, but we never felt uncomfortable. Unlike our perhaps ill-advised stroll along Market through Civic Center, the area where the concert hall and various museums are located. I have never known such a concentration of down-and-outs, junkies and homeless. It makes King’s Cross look like Frinton.

The children would have been perfectly happy just staying in the apartment, as it had an enormous television set with an enormous number of channels, several of which were showing cartoons at any given time. The apartment may have been in a “Victorian”, but it was the essence of sophisticated city living: brushed-steel kitchen, blood-red walls, black furniture and glass tables, gloriously metro-chic, gloriously unsuitable for children. So we took them out a lot.

They met the prospect of Alcatraz (“It used to be a prison!”) with the same enthusiasm as for the gallery, but our relatives had booked it for us beforehand, so we went. My first reaction to the famous island prison was one of disbelief. How could they have let it come to this? The governor’s residence is a complete ruin, fenced off and looking ready for demolition; the cell block reeks of damp and paint hangs in peeling tatters. But as soon as you put on the headphones and start the audio tour, it becomes a powerfully evocative place.

Two former warders and two former inmates relate the history with an accompanying soundtrack of clanging gates, jingling keys, the eerie foghorn and, at one point, a knife being driven into flesh. Here are the voices of men who knew Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly, and as they speak you look into the cells where they lay and realise they haven’t been touched since.

In fact, the whole place has barely been touched since the prison closed in 1963, and this gives it a haunting power, something that our monuments, lovingly restored by English Heritage and the National Trust, so conspicuously lack. Alcatraz looks and feels like an early-20th- century high-security prison that was abandoned 40 years ago; the presence of notorious gangsters and killers still lingers. There are Norman castles in Britain that look as if they were run up last week and have all the atmosphere of a Little Chef after hours.

To stand in that damp, chilly cell block, hearing that New York accent talking about the most infamous characters in American history that he knew personally... well, it was almost worth flying to San Francisco for in itself. More surprising still, when I asked the children what the best bit of San Francisco was, they did not say, as I thought they might, miniature golf or go-karting, but Alcatraz.

You think of San Francisco as a relaxed, genial, cool kind of a place, and it is. On our last evening I stepped out for some post-prandial chocolate from the store on Frederick Street. The radio was on and a woman was sitting at the counter drinking coffee. “I like this song,” the man behind the counter said. “It’s Strauss. The Blue Danube.” Another man appeared from behind the shelves. “Shall we?” he said to the woman, and they began to waltz around the chiller cabinet.

I left them to it and walked back to the apartment, thinking about the unpredictable. I wouldn’t have guessed the highlights of the trip would turn out to be standing at the side of a road and an abandoned prison. But then, you never know what to expect from America.

David Mills travelled as a guest of Jetsave Holidays

Travel brief

Fly-drive packages: Jetsave (0870 060 0230, www.jetsave.co.uk) has nonstop flights from Heathrow for £255pp, with Virgin Atlantic; car hire from £100 per fortnight. Or from £385 per adult (£285 per child) for 14 days’ fly-drive, with flights from Edinburgh, Manchester and other regionals (with KLM via Amsterdam); the price includes hire car, but not accommodation. Or try BA Holidays (01293 437250, www.baholidays.com) or Kuoni (01306 747002, www.kuoni.co.uk). In Ireland, contact American Holidays (01 673 3840).

Where to stay: Jetsave offers a range of accommodation options. For example, seven nights at the Caesars Tahoe hotel in Tahoe City start at £448pp. While in San Francisco, seven nights at the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway start from £427pp. Apartments in areas including Pacific Heights and Richmond Heights are available for short-term rental from the San Francisco-based Amsi (00 1-415 447 2000, www.amsires.com). Three- bedroom apartments start at £897 per week. Or try San Francisco Lofts (415 355 1018, www.sfranciscolofts.com). If you’re planning to tour around the state, www.lanierbb.com has a large directory of B&Bs, and you can book online.

Alcatraz tours: tours often fill up two weeks in advance, so book ahead through Blue and Gold Fleet (415 705 5555, www.blueandgoldfleet.com); adults £9, children £6.

More information: visit the excellent www.sfvisitor.org.