Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

More trains. And malls.

I thought I'd wander down to Silicon Valley today (another nerd pilgrimage) just to say I'd been there, so I took Caltrain (a commuter railway, but with astonishing full-size rolling stock hauled by great big growling Proper American Locomotives, which is fun) down to Palo Alto. I looked at some malls (most of California appears to be malls, and it's often hard to find somewhere that isn't a mall) and then came back again. Oh, and I had noodles for supper in the Metreon Centre. Not a very exciting day, really, but all the walking seems to have given me a tan.

I've booked into the same hotel for when I get back into town next week after my Road Trip(tm), because it's really nice. The said Road Trip begins tomorrow when I collect the car from Hertz (who are conveniently just around the corner) and attempt to drive it out of town to the Golden Gate Bridge without causing massive traffic jams, seeing as I've never driven an automatic before. Driving on the wrong side of the road holds no fear for me as I've done that plenty of times, so at least I don't have to worry about that too much. But still, why are so many people in this country scared of gearsticks?

And for a country so obsessed with road travel, the maps here really suck. There doesn't seem to be a local equivalent of the Ordnance Survey map, so general purpose maps seem to be pretty nonexistent and the road atlases are pretty rubbish too. Ho hum.

I'll be on the road from tomorrow morning, with a brief stopover back in the East Bay on Thursday night in order to attend a party. Updates will probably be pretty intermittent for the time being, depending on how much Internet access is available.