Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

I came to escape this!

After an abortive attempt to visit Monterey Aquarium this morning which I gave up on after seeing that the queue was right out the door and looped up and down a couple of times (it's getting into Easter weekend, so every family in the country is on the road) I hit the road and after a relatively boring drive up US101 through Silicon Valley (Ooh, look! There's eBay! And ATI! And..) I'm now back in San Francisco.

It's certainly a steep city to drive around, and one of the places where I've really missed having a manual gearbox - the way in which Mason St dropped out from under me on the way to the Hertz drop-off point was kind of disconcerting, but the car's safely returned (final mileage on this trip: 2070, or nearly the road distance from Land's End to John O'Groats and back) and I'm back in the hotel I stayed in when I arrived in the country. They even gave me the same room as I had last time, bless'em.

While relaxing in the lobby (where there's wireless internet access) the peace and quiet was suddenly disturbed by a huge crowd of.. oh my god.. British schoolchildren and their wranglers. I came on holiday to escape huge crowds of British people, fergoddsake! They're all now safely checked and and distributed to their various rooms, but it's still amazing how many British people I've seen around here, particularly in Las Vegas. You can tell them a mile off by their pallid skin. It's even more amazing that people fly halfway round the world solely to visit Las Vegas, but maybe that's just people who've never been there before and don't think that there might be nicer places to go to. Like, oh, I dunno, the Sudan. Or maybe Fallujah.

Still, that's the end of the road trip - staying here until the flight back on Sunday, and with any luck seeing a few of the sights I missed when I was here before. Updates will continue until I get bored of updating.