What to see in San Francisco?

MY 11-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER AND I ARE TRAVELLING TO SAN FRANCISCO FOR A WEEK IN SEPTEMBER. WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST THAT WE WOULD BOTH ENJOY, APART FROM THE OBVIOUS ALCATRAZ AND THE CABLE CARS?

L. REEVES, KILLARA

I always like to do a walking tour in an unfamiliar city, and San Francisco is a really great city for walkers. The Flower Power Walking Tour (see haightashburytour.com) of the Haight-Ashbury district, crucible of America's counter-culture movement of the late 1960s, would be my first choice. There's a lot of rock music history in this tour and concepts that your daughter might not be familiar with, such as the hippy phenomenon and the anti-Vietnam War movement, and some prep work from you will help her make sense of it.

Chinatown is a fascinating quarter of the city, with a legacy dating back to the gold rush days. The Wok Wiz Tours of the district (wokwiz.com), originally created by celeb chef Shirley Fong-Torres, get rave reviews. Another great walk is across the Golden Gate Bridge, but be prepared for wind.

One fun way to spend an afternoon is take the ferry across to Sausalito, a funky waterfront town in Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Sausalito was originally a fishing town and it later became a hangout for well-heeled yachties, and later still a chill-out refuge for the love generation, now popular with seals that lounge around close to the houseboats where the ferry comes in. Sausalito is affluent and artsy with raffish overtones, which gives it a fashionable mix of cafes and dining, including Japanese, seafood, Thai and burger bars.

Your daughter's life has been shaped by what goes on in Silicon Valley, in the Mountain View/Santa Clara area on the south side of San Francisco Bay. I'm suggesting this with caution, you might both be fascinated or bored rigid but if she wants to make a dent in the universe this place matters. Silicon Valley is the home of the Intel Museum, the Computer History Museum, Stanford University, NASA's Ames Research Center and the Google campus – although only viewable from the outside. The Apple company store is closed for a complete redesign, with a re-opening scheduled for the US autumn.