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California 2003
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finally managed to get away from clients' e-mails and phone calls (we love 'em, really!), and drove up to the Heathrow Sheraton, where we had booked 15 days parking and an overnight hotel room at a reasonable rate. Everything else at the Sheraton was not reasonable, however - £14.50 for breakfast, if you please. However, Simon Pride very kindly came and bore us off to Kew in his nice new motor, where we adjourned to the local pizza place for supper, along with Wendy Grossman. And even more kindly, he bore us back again.
up early, if not bright, to catch the airport shuttle - amusingly known as the Heathrow Hoppa <scream>. We checked in, then wasted all the hours at the airport, getting progressively more bored, although some excellent singlle malt whiskies were purchased in the duty free. When we got to the finally final checkin, we found they'd upgraded us to Upper Class - this is clearly the style to which we'd like to be accustomed all the time, it really is the way to travel. Saw Chicago on the way out, which I enjoyed enormously.
flight arrived on time, and we caught a taxi bus thing into the City, and
checked into the Serrano Hotel and
unpacked. It was mid afternoon at this point, so we walked down to the Ferry
Terminal in the glorious sunshine and had a wander around, then caught a
bus back to the hotel, and had a meal in their restaurant, Ponzu (no, I don't
know what it means). The menu was a tad precious, but we dined on mongolian
lamb, stir-fried duck with scallops, and a wonderful jasmine rice with cilentro coriander
and pineapple. <smallworld>the waiter's girlfriend is at Hull University, which
is where Pete misspent a couple of years</smallworld>.
up and out of the hotel at 8 a.m., and had a typical American diner breakfast (I love them!) then walked down to Haight-Ashbury, via the wonderful Farmers Market near the United Nations Plaza. We got to HA too early, and it was mostly shut, but it was interesting to see. Then we strolled gently through Golden Gate Park, which is delightful. After that, we caught a bus down to Market Street, and committed some retail therapy in the Virgin Megastore (in the form of <cough> some DVDs) and a mooch round the CompUSA store.
we returned to the hotel, to find them offering a wine reception, so we got ourselves round a couple of glasses of Californian plonk, and Pete had a shoulder massage in the lobby (!). I popped outside for a swift ciggy, and got talking to an American woman from Boulder, CO doing the same - her husband is a VP at Macromedia, but I forbore mentioning their dire new web site, which I thought was very restrained of me. We then nipped upstairs for a rest and a read before dinner. When we woke up at 9.45, we thought it was probably best to go to bed <g>.
after breakfast, we caught a cable car up to Telegraph Hill, and wandered about for a while boggling quietly at the nice houses, and admiring the view, after which we caught another cable car down to Fishermans Wharf. Yes, it's touristy and a bit tacky, but it's got to be done, and we really enjoyed it, and bought some nice souvenirs. Lunch was a hollowed out loaf filled with clam chowder at one of the restaurants on the Wharf. Then we took a boat trip round the bay, and went to the Aquarium of the Bay (which was wonderful - wish we'd taken the camcorder), and then took an evening boat out to Alcatraz, which we'd booked before we left home. The weather was glorious, and the sunset spectacular, and the prison somewhere that, on balance, I'm glad I was only visiting :) - a fascinating evening.
we ate dinner in one of the many fish restaurants, and very nice it was too, although I can't for the life of me remember what it was!
once again, we wandered down to the Embarcadero Ferry Terminal, and caught a boat over to Sausalito - a very pretty little town. A wonderful flame-grilled burger was consumed for lunch sitting by the marina, and then we ferried back to San Francisco, and caught a bus up to Mission Street to collect the car. This all went pretty much according to plan, apart from us driving out of the rental lot the wrong way up a one way street (it wasn't marked, honest).
we put the roof down (it was a Sebring convertible) and set off across the Bay Bridge in bright sunshine - honestly, if someone had told me five years ago that I'd be tootling round California in a convertible, I'd have laughed at them :) We drove over to have a look at the Apple store in Emeryville, near Oakland, and managed to buy up their entire stock of iTrips, together with a nice screen protector for Qu (the Powerbook) - it sits between screen and keyboard when it's closed - together with a couple of neat retractable cables to pop in Qu's case (one modem and one ethernet).
we meandered around some more of the area, and ended up at the Half Moon Bay Brewery for dinner - I had Cajun catfish, with the best black beans I've ever eaten, and Pete had white sturgeon (!) with mango salsa - both utterly delicious, and a really nice place. Then we drove back to San Francisco, handed the car key to the valet parking service :), and packed everything up ready for our departure the next day.
up bright and early, and off across the Golden Gate Bridge and on to the wine country. We stopped for breakfast at a diner on the highway, which is where (I think) I left the Rough Guide to California. We didn't actually visit at many wineries, as we couldn't carry any of their produce home [sob], and you can't do much tasting when you're driving! But the countryside is glorious, and we took a lot of back roads - we much prefer to keep off the main tourist routes when we're driving abroad. We'd planned to stop in Calistoga for the night, but it was full (apart from a suite at $270, which we declined). However, we stopped at a bookstore there, and bought a Lonely Planet to replace the lost guide book - they had a nice cat :) But the book isn't nearly as good as the Rough Guide one.
we ended up at St Helena for the night, at the Eagle & Rose Inn - a strange place ... we couldn't quite work out what market it was aiming at. There was a built in kitchen with hob, microwave and fridge/freezer, but no crockery or pans - just a coffee machine and some cups, and plastic glasses [ugh]. And no full length mirror, which seems bizarre in a hotel room. Not cheap either. We ate dinner at the Market restaurant in town - very nice. As were their margheritas :)
more wine country, with particular emphasis on the hills - beautiful place. We stopped at the Hess Winery, which also features an excellent modern art collection. There is a stunning piece entitled Hommage by Leopoldo Maler, which is a burning typewriter - very powerful. We also visited the Roche Winery (well, we had to, really :), and bought an apron with my name on it!
then we looked at the map, and decided that Merced would make a reasonable place to stay on our way to our next destination. We trekked across central California in temperatures of up to 96F [wilt], and discovered that it wasn't (a nice place). But we were so exhausted that we booked into the Slumber Motel, at $44 per night including tax. It wasn't particularly salubrious, but it was clean and air conditioned, and curiously I had the best night's sleep there that I'd had all trip. For dinner, we consumed vast slabs of dead cow at The Branding Iron, one of the oldest restaurants in Merced (it says in the book).
[edit]
I forgot to mention that on the way we passed the Altamount
Pass Wind Farm - a wonderful sight. Thousands of wind turbines marching
across the hills.
up and out bright and early, heading for Yosemite. Stopped at a diner for breakfast, and had a fascinating chat with Betty, who travels round the world teaching ballroom dancing on cruise ships, and had come in to collect a package from Amazon containing two books on how to project manage a self-build house which she was about to embark on. She's 70 years old :)
then we reached Yosemite ... I don't think we can begin to describe it, really. Suffice to say that it's truly breathtaking. We took some photographs, but we don't have the skill or the equipment to do it justice. We wallked up to Bridalveil Fall, and then went to the visitor centre, as we were hoping to stay in the Park, but it seemed that everywhere was booked up. So we drove across Tioga Pass, which is only open a few months of the year, and is about 12,000 ft high at its peak - absolutely spectacular, with snow-capped mountains, tumbling streams, alpine meadows ...
at the end of the pass, we tossed a coin and turned left, and ended up in Lee Vining, a little town split by the highway [check number!]. We found the Yosemite Gateway Motel to be entirely satisfactory, so booked in there for two nights. Our room had a balcony with a lakeside view, and was very reasonably priced, and it was nice to come to rest for a couple of days :)
in the morning we set off for Mammoth Lake, detouring round the June Lake Loop - this is just fantastically beautiful country, although inhabited by seemingly millions of mosquitoes (as is Yosemite), all of whom seemed to want to lunch on us :(
while we had a sandwich lunch in the local diner, we put the washing on in the laundromat, and then went for a rest - I was suffering from mild sunburn from our trek across central CA on Sunday, and we'd hardly stopped since we got off the plane. I also had a slight nagging headache for a few days, which we think might have been a weak case of altitude sickness, as we were above 8,000 feet for a few days.
Pete had always wanted to go to Mono Lake, ever since he'd read about it in a book on entymology. It has an extraordinary ecology due to its source coming in from the mountains, coupled with no outlet for the lake, thus giving rise to extremely alkaline water. We hadn't realised, until consulting the guide book, that Lee Vining is on the edge of this lake (!), so we had a good wander round in the evening, under a spectacular sky which photographed very well :) It's a fascinating and beautiful place, and we really enjoyed visiting it.
off on our travels again ... we returned across Tioga Pass, and went to see Yosemite Falls before heading for the Monterey Bay area. We decided on Santa Cruz as a base for the last three days of our holiday, and checked in at the Sea and Sand Inn ($640 for three nights!). We had to change rooms after the first night, but that was fairly painless, as the housekeeping staff moved everything for us. It was a lovely setting, with the beach about 100ft from our ground floor window - we could hear the Pacific surf and the sealions barking at night.
on our way from Lee Vining, we'd received an SMS message from Claire, our cat sitter, asking us to "read the e-mail about the computers" - we'd had no mobile phone or Internet access while we were there, so we were quite anxious when we got this message. Of course, having carefully bought 10 hours of local call access from www.budgetdialup.com, I had no worries about getting online from the motel ... except that I didn't have any access numbers to look up their access numbers [doh]. So we wandered off into town, found an internet cafe, and handed over $2.50 to find the numbers for Santa Cruz, then went for a wander on the Wharf, before going back to the motel and dialled in. Typically (bloody computers) there'd been a power cut while we were away - quite a long one, as the UPSen gave up - and none of them are set to autoboot. So we wrote an e-mail explaining which machines to switch on, and relaxed again :)
then we sat in the motel garden with a glass of the aforementioned duty free (some 16 year old Talisker, as it happens), and listened to the waves on the beach below us.
the day dawned rather cloudy, so after a detour to Moss Landing (more later) we headed off to Monterey Aquarium, which was huge fun (especially the sea otters). A wonderful place, and well worth a visit. When we emerged from there, the sun was out, so we had a wander round Cannery Row and a bite of rather late lunch, then took a tootle round Pebble Beach before embarking on one of the highlights of our trip - a drive down Highway 101 to Big Sur.
this is another area that words simply can't describe - at least, not my words. It's astonishing - a truly beautiful part of the world, with the Pacific crashing down on the rocks below the road. We had deliberately timed the drive so we could return at sunset, but the bastard weather ghod was watching us, and it clouded over as we turned round. Still, it was a magical drive.
we got back to the hotel at about 9.30, and ordered a pizza from a local delivery service.
saving the best till last ... we drove down to Moss Landing (lovely little place) to pick up the Sanctuary boat for our whalewatching trip - a fabulous experience, and we saw a blue whale! (in fact, they've posted this sighting on their web site). The sea was fairly choppy, but that doesn't bother us - the sun was shining, and the whales were about, and it was wonderful :)
afterwards, we drove back to Monterey and had a lunch of seafood pasta on Fishermans Wharf, and admired the hundreds of sea lions that bask on the rocks all round the bay. Then back to Santa Cruz for a wander round the town - unfortunately, we encountered a kitchen porn shop (always very dangerous for us). They sold me a copper bowl for my Kitchenaid for the princely sum of $30, plus a lovely wine bottle stopper with an Orca's tail on it, and some tiny microplane graters. Only when we got back to the motel did I stop to wonder just how I was going to get it home!
for dinner, we splashed out on the Mainsail restaurant, which sits on the waterfront, and was a short stagger from our motel. I had Ahi tuna with sesame seeds, and Pete had some exotic prawn thing.
drove to the airport via Half Moon Bay, looking at all the wonderful beaches along the way. Unfortunately it was very cloudy, and got progessively colder as we drove north, to the point where we had to put the roof up.
dropped the car off with National, caught the monorail to the airport, checked in, and ... home. Long flight, no upgrade :( Stopped for lunch on the way back from Heathrow with Chris and Liz, which was very welcome, and then hit the M4. Got back about 5.45 p.m. UK time - ghod knows what it was in California, about 9 a.m. next day, I think.
wonderful trip - enjoyed every bit of it. Photos are here