A mini American adventure: San Fran: the whole shebang

Where in the world do walking plants, gnomes, sasquatch, naked bottoms and texting bananas get together and unite?

At Bay To Breakers, one of the biggest parties in the world. And to think we almost left to go to a Travelodge on the edge of the freeway instead. We'd have missed the centennial of the event as well! Shame on us.

While the official race for the runners started at 7am, we headed out about 9am and wandered sheepishly (especially in Adam's case) through The Castro towards Haight St where the apparent action was.

When a guy passed us and asked "What's the occasion?" as he chortled along with his teeny dog, we started to worry. Americans don't do sarcasm. Do they? Oh dear. Maybe no one's going to be dressed up. Maybe we're just a bizarre group that consists of Rey Mysterio, a flamingo, a sunflower and a sheep/bunny hybrid walking the streets on a Sunday morning...

How wrong could we be.

Thank you Fell Street. So dedicated are the party goers that they're pretty much all pished off their faces by about 10am. There's music everywhere - whether it's coming from someone's costume or one of the houses on the street.

In case you haven't realised yet, Bay To Breakers is the fancy dress Mecca - which makes incredible inspiration for future costumes. This one, in particular, blew me away.

A frickin' People Wash! With music and bubbles! Inspired.

My sunflower costume was a pretty big hit, if I do say so myself. And I only got used as a trash can once. If you can get into a flower pot, I urge you to try it. Much fun to be had! And if you happen to find a watering can in the shape of a flamingo, then think outside the box and make yourself a flam-bag (flamingo handbag, geddit?) a la Sian.

Here are some of the best costumes we saw (WARNING: you will see a wrinkly, naked old-man bottom below - there were lots of this sort of bottom on show on the day).