Road Trip California

Most of the time on the all-American road trip is spent in the car. Most of the journey out of the towns and cities is picturesque so I thought I would share some car-scenery with you.

Yosemite Dan

My brother Dan is going back home soon for a job in Plymouth. I will miss him a lot, and at first I was a teeny bit jealous, but as he tries desperately to cram in seeing as much as he possibly can in the two months he now has left, it has made me realise, again, how very lucky we are to be here.

As part of his efforts to see more of the country, he planned a road trip to Yosemite National Park last weekend and he asked us if we wanted to come along. No sooner had he asked, we were sitting in the car and driving over the Bay Bridge and out of San Francisco. We stayed in an old California Gold Rush mining town called Mariposa, an hour away from Yosemite. It was a tiny cowboy type place that took no longer than an hour to explore, which was lucky really as it was boiling hot, and we had plans to get up with the sun the next morning to get to Yosemite early.

It seemed that the sun had insomnia, as when we got up at 5.30am, it was already alive and kicking. In fact, at 6pm later that day it was still 33 degrees C, and reached 36 degrees on Sunday. Too hot to sleep, and certainly too hot to hire bikes without gears, and travel around Yosemite Valley. It was fun though, until goodness knows how many miles later, my bike muscles, stiff from a fourteen year hiatus, said no more please and refused to work. I sat my jelly legs down, mindful of my saddle sore and drank my own body weight in water reserving some to pour on my head like a real athlete. The park was now filling up quickly and as we had been there six hours already decided we should start heading off.

The next stop for the evening was Sonora, another old mining town, but with a lot more going on. We ate barbecued meat and cold beer for dinner and felt like rather full and very happy cowboys and girl. The hotel was full of motorcyclists and had an antique style wire cage lift which you had to propel yourself out of quickly lest it set off again, and the staff didn't seem to mind that three people were staying in a room booked, and possibly suitable only for one. Either they had seen much worse, they didn't care, or were too hot to care. The antique air conditioning wasn't as fun as the lift and kept us awake most of the evening, so the plan to get up really early again to see another part of the park wasn't quite realised.

We arrived a little later than planned at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, a granite walled valley flooded in 1923 to create a water supply for San Francisco, following the 1906 earthquake. Incredibly, this reservoir is still the place that we get our water from today, a staggering 156 miles away. As well as being so useful (we had already drank 2 liters each of it's bounty), it was beautiful, peaceful compared to the valley which gets most of the tourists (largely due to the fact that Hetch Hetchy has no facilities) and just a pleasant place to be on a Sunday afternoon. We strolled across the bridge at O'Shaughnessy Dam and through the rock tunnel until we felt lethargic with heat, and decided it was probably time to head off home.

(Dan took a lot of photos and some of them can be seen here and here)

The journey back seemed to take forever and we fell foul of the usual US lack of signs and almost ended up in Los Angeles. Over tired and over heating, we had still managed to see a lot of the park, and certainly more than we saw last time we were there and staying slap bang in the middle of it; plus we got to see some real American small towns, the like of which are difficult to describe, or certainly to do justice and which just do not exist in the UK. All of this was possible in a weekend and if that doesn't make me one of the luckiest people alive, I don't know what does.

The Truth is Out There

Opened in a redwood forest just outside Santa Cruz in 1940, the Mystery Spot has been attracting visitors ever since. If last Saturday was anything to go by, in their dead eyed droves.

In order to imagine the Mystery Spot, picture if you will an all-American B movie, with the usual terrible dialogue, dubious special effects, bad acting and poorly constructed set, featuring a science museum run by the non-scientific with a penchant for the extra terrestrial, and staffed by seventeen year olds. But if you can't imagine that, the Mystery Spot is an area within a forest where the normal rules of gravity do not apply. Balls seemingly run uphill and people standing up straight lean at a 17 degree angle. At the centre of the spot is a tilted hut where the weirdness is intensified.

The place is run by timed guided tours and as such your experience entirely rests on the charisma of your tour guide. Unfortunately, our guide was bored, smug, and had the worse West Coast nasal drawl I have heard to date. He wasn't in the league of a teenage Alton Towers worker for sheer terrifying incompetence, but I'm soo better than this, where shall I go tonight?, and the occasional who with?, reeked stinkingly from his pores. I won't repeat what his limbs and worse, his eyes were saying. The pores were bad enough.

His scripted 'jokes' were delivered with the same blase and disinterested manner as every other snippet of 'fact' was. If the timbre of his voice hadn't been grating on my pain receptors I would have simply stopped listening and carried on my own conversation like most other members of my tour group. In fact, as soon as it was possible, we joined the next group along to see if their guide fared any better. She did, but that is no boast really.

Still enough about the tour guides. The place itself was interesting, as were the other members of the tour group. Our small party was dripping with cynicism as it consisted of three scientists and me, but lacking the actual skill to tell you why it was obvious that this was visual trickery, I won't. Simple as that. It was cleverly done and interesting whether you 'believed' or not. We were told that some of us may experience feelings of dizziness and nausea when inside the hut and whether it is because I am entirely suggestible, or that the claustrophobia and lack of a horizon simulated travel type sickness where my brain tried and failed to adapt to the tilt, or a bit of both, I did feel sick and had to leave the hut.

According to the spot's website, some of the speculations include there is a UFO / UFO parts buried underneath, or there is a hole in the ozone layer directly above the spot, which obviously explains everything.

The whole 45 minute tour is engineered well and at the end you get a free bright yellow bumper sticker, which is worth the $5 entrance fee alone. Sadly, we had to return the hire car and were running very late so whizzed right through to the end as quickly as we could. I actually know exactly what people must have thought of us, as they were embracing the spot and trying to work out how it works (or in some cases worrying about UFOs), as I went to the Falstaff Experience in Stratford Upon Avon once only to watch with amusement and some derision a group of people clutching their McDonald's Value Meals to their breasts and walking by every single exhibit at some speed. I now know that they had to return their hire car in time, or catch a bus, rather than as I had assumed at the time they had no interest whatsoever in Tudor England.

The bright yellow leaflet I picked up at some point during our almost an hour long wait for our Mystery Spot tour, after exhausting the gift shop wares, had many strap lines, from"It's crazy. It's Perplexing. It's Nature's Magic. That's why it's called The Mystery Spot" to my favourite "It's Unusual. It's Amazing. It's Wholesome, Interesting Entertainment!" which as it turns out was true, and apparently some promotional literature written in the 1950s never has to be updated again, which is somewhat more impressive.

A Montage For Mr Gammon

I foolishly told someone I would write a blog post after they pointed out, correctly, that I haven't written in a while. My trip outside proved fruitless on the inspiration front, although I almost got caught on a nearby bridge just about to be raised for a passing boat, when all the barriers went down after a very short horn type warning. After an ungainly jog-walk, I inelegantly shimmied under the barrier forgetting just how large my bottom is.

Anyway, that little adventure not being enough for a whole blog post, I decided to look back in my inbox at some of the more ridiculous things I have told people and present them here, unedited and out of context, although I am not sure context would help. So, Mr Gammon, here is a list which may make your idea that I make sense 57% of the time redundant, but thanks, I was actually slightly surprised that you could pretend to be nice ;-)

• [In mid-2006] I devised an ingenious way to hook my keys to my skirt so that I wouldn't get locked out. I have no idea what this was, why I needed it, or whether the bold claim of my ingeniousness was in fact true (although I do have suspicions about this point)
• There was a French chef on Saturday Kitchen this week and rather than say something was a doddle - he said dodo and it was funny and he was sad and his head said must try harder and everyone tried not to laugh. I liked him instantly. With these descriptive powers, I am constantly surprised why I am not a best selling author.
• [In 2007]I look like a sack of potatoes going for a quick sale and ravaged by a bored child with a pink highlighter pen; not really a look that I want at a wedding (although it could work in a thousand other places).
• I ate a pina colada flavoured yoghurt today. Not only was it disgusting, I think it is rotting my organs from the inside, as opposed to my outside organs which are rot free.
• I once saw a old couple dancing like they used to in the 50s at 2 in the morning in front of a curtain less window with a devil may care attitude and eyes only for each other and it gave me goosebumps and I felt privileged to have witnessed this.
• I saw half a rat earlier this week, the tail end. It didn't look like it had been mauled by another animal but cut in half by a blunt instrument such as a spade. The circumstances of this siting has bothered me all week.
  
• I have now managed to stain my fingers pink with beetroot but the onion smell is gone thank goodness (unless of course it has burnt my nostrils out). I am a food calamity. I guess if I didn't eat so much, it would be less of a problem!
• What does a friendly ear look like - does it have a massive slit along the crease that passes as a smile? I can only imagine a sinister ear in a friendly disguise, but not a very good one clearly; a transparent friendly disguise, possibly with some skimpy red leather hot pants around the lobe.

So there you go. Maybe I should have quit after the realisation of my large bottom?

Shakespeare's Sausage

Yesterday, after weeks of searching for a bargain price, then getting scuppered by bureaucracy, the tale of which I don't plan to go into you'll be relieved to hear, then watching the ticket prices rise, and getting both increasingly frustrated and giddy with excitement, I booked plane tickets for a visit home.

Home; the land where my family and friends are, where some people speak like me and share a similar culture, and the place that I think about probably more than is healthy.

But when the flights were booked, rather than increase ten fold in excitement causing the neighbours to complain about the strange high pitched squeaking, I felt, well just a bit unsettled. Maybe because it isn't home any more; this is, and with the knowledge that this will be our home for another year at least I guess that's a good thing.

We moved around the UK a few times and whenever we went back to visit the places we used to live, I felt strangely displaced, and I imagine it will be just the same when we are back. I am looking forward to it; seeing as many people as we can possibly see, the cold and rain, and surprise, surprise FOOD. We have already made a list of what we have been craving and it is ridiculously long. It will break my heart if my first sausage isn't Shakespeare in my mouth, but maybe disappointment, a greasy face and a 'broken heart' is just what I need in order to feel more settled here. Who'd have thought that?