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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
This is the final, rather belated instalment in my account of my trip to the USA earlier this year. If you missed the originals, the archive is at your disposal.
American road travel is a difficult thing to sum up concisely. It's so ingrained into the national psyche that thinking about it leads off into all sorts of other areas of American life. As is such a recurring theme when dealing with this image-conscious country, some of the things which are held as gospel truth outside the US just aren't true.
Take the state of the roads, for instance. A lot of American roads are maintained to standards which would here be described as "poor" - even Interstates have potholes in places, and many other roads are patched and bumpy and don't make for a pleasant ride. A lot of freeway sliproads are unswept and strewn with rubbish. The image of the wide-open, perfect road that people in the UK have about the US is - when we look at the harsh reality of it - about as accurate as the myth that railways in Continental Europe are always on time and the trains are never grubby. For such a car-obsessed country this is surprising, but ultimately, I guess, it's all about money.
The cars people drive on those roads, though, do generally stick to the stereotype. They're big, they're often absolutely butt-ugly (I got the impression that America's car designers design the way they do because That's What We've Always Done), and they guzzle fuel at one hell of a rate. This is because even with the recent rises the price of petrol in the US is utterly laughable compared to what most of the rest of the world pays. This, in turn, is because the rest of the world appreciates the need to put a brake on unbridled consumption of fossil fuels in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level where Americans can continue driving SUVs without the planet instantly overheating. Things are starting to change - I noticed quite a number of smaller cars with, presumably, correspondingly smaller engines around - but in the end, my hired Mustang had a 3.6 litre engine which produced about as much torque as a European 1.8 or 2 litre unit. This attitude is likely to persist for some time, or at least until oil gets really, really expensive. Some vox pops I heard on the BBC while in the USA reminded me that regardless of what liberal Californians might say, for large parts of America the right to own a sports utility vehicle that does 11 miles to the gallon, and to buy fuel for it at no more than $2 a gallon, is so fundamental and so central to American society that you might be forgiven for thinking it's actually enshrined in the Constitution. (I checked just in case, but apparently it isn't.)
And there's another thing. What seems to be a lack of any consistent standards on light placement means that such safety-critical things as turn indicators are pretty arbitrary in both location and colouring. They're often yellow, but they're also often red and involve flashing one of the tail lights to convey the signal - very hard to see in bright sunlight. Or maybe the front indicators, while almost always yellow, are placed so far towards the centre of the front end that it's hard to tell if they're turning left or right. Or maybe the car behind you has, for no apparent reason, a pair of bright yellow marker lights lit at the front in broad daylight. All very inconsistent, and all very confusing for the foreigner.
And one more thing! Some of the driving is just plain scary - not in cities, where it's generally impossible to drive more than 50 metres without being stopped at a set of lights anyway, but out on the crowded freeways. Some people weave in and out of lanes without indicating, pulling out to overtake one car, pulling back in to undertake another, back out to the outside lane for another one, and so on before diving across three lanes without signalling to disappear into an off-ramp. When this is all happening at 80mph on a freeway with constant streams of entering and exiting traffic on both sides it can get pretty hairy. One memorable incident for me was when an aging BMW zipped past me on the inside during one of these weaving-in-and-out manouvres, and when I made a slightly exasperated gesture (no, not the one-finger gesture) the driver, who could hardly see over the steering wheel, flipped me off while pulling out to overtake another car. Eek.
Still - what roads may lack in maintenance, sensible vehicles or courteous driving, they make up for in driving experience. There can't be many places in the world where it's so easy to drive - parking spaces are large, road signs are comprehensive (to say the least) and routefinding's a doddle. Even in cities it's easy, because of the convenient (yet strangely monotonous) grid system. Some drivers can be pretty rude, but that's usually limited to stressed-out city folk (although the urban drivers of San Francisco were a pretty laid-back lot, man) and commuters on the Interstates. Oh, and anyone you meet on the road in Las Vegas, but let's not go there.
My advice to anyone who wants to go on a road trip around the States is simple - get off the Interstates. They're full of thundering trucks and people in too much of a hurry for their own good. Check out the US highways and, for even more fun, state highways. They're generally more relaxed, the drivers are friendlier, and you'll see more and have more opportunity to stop and look around. If you want the True American Road Experience - wide-open, ruler-straight roads with nobody else in sight - the state highways of rural Nevada will provide that in spades. Just make sure you've filled up with petrol - that gas-guzzler will go through fuel at a rate of knots, so if you're heading off into the wide blue yonder check where you'll be able to fill up. Driving on the Interstates is just like driving on motorways anywhere else - a million trucks grinding along, bumper-to-bumper traffic at high speed, and few chances to take a break.
Another good policy is not to be overly ambitious. Driving more than a couple of hundred miles a day will soon get tedious, and if you overreach yourself (easy for us Europeans who tend to forget just how damn big the USA is) you'll be so exhausted after a couple of days that you'll just want to go home. Make sure to leave adequate time to get back to where you're flying out from too, as it's not unknown for people to completely lose track of the fact that they've travelled so far they'll have to do 1200 miles in two days if they're not going to miss their flight home.
Anyway, despite all the moaning at the top of this (and come on, some of those cars, pickups and gigantic SUVs really are butt ugly), I really enjoyed my time spent on the road in the US - quite an achievement for someone who's a train geek with militant views on public transport and unnecessary car use. How about next time I take a car and drive across the continent, then take the train all the way back again?
This completes the account of my trip to the States in March-April 2004. Before finishing, I'd like to thank all the folks who supplied me with untold amounts of help and advice. Virtually all of them are on The Well, and they know who they are. Particular thanks to the denizens of the sanfran conference for help, advice, recommendations and meeting me for beer to make me feel like I actually knew someone in the country. Oh, and for the introduction to the burrito ritual. I apologise if I failed to convey adequate expressions of religious bliss while consuming it - blame the jetlag.
So, where to go next?
Having managed to get to the airport ridiculously early and checked in 5 hours before departure (once they finally started letting people check in for the later flight - BA have two per day out of SFO) I've been looking around San Francisco airport's international terminal and - amazingly, remembering this is an airport we're talking about - it's really pretty nice. Getting to the airport via BART from the city is a breeze. The check-in area is spacious and airy with even a small aviation museum and various display areas containing interesting things from local museums. The line for security was long but moved quickly enough and once through the gate area's pretty nice too.
Best of all, the entire airport is covered by wi-fi. It's run by T-Mobile which means you have to pay for it, but it's definitely worth it. I can sit here noodling around on the Internet until either my flight leaves or my Powerbook runs out of juice, in which case I could probably sneakily plug into one of the power points around the place, but I don't want to stretch my luck.
And not to jinx things, but I believe my boarding pass has me in one of those seats with extra legroom.. we'll have to see about that, though.
Due to the weakness of the dollar, a lot of things are very good value in the USA compared to the UK. I was thinking about buying a digital camera when I got here, but on finding that the only decent price in San Francisco for the one I wanted (the Nikon Coolpix 5700) involved a $150 mail-in rebate which is impossible to redeem if you don't live in the US, I didn't. I have a few photos from my road trip, but as they were taken with my mobile phone they won't be very good quality.
When I was in CompUSA earlier, I noticed that the Coolpix 8700, which hadn't been released before I left on my trip, was now both in stock and available at a price that compares favourably with Amazon UK even with California sales tax and UK VAT+duty. After a bit of soul-searching, I bent the plastic and bought one. When I got back to my room to unpack it I promptly dropped it on the floor. Fortunately, no damage was done, and it's a really nice piece of kit from first impressions. The closest competitor was the Sony DSC-F828, but the sheer bulkiness of that model (and Sony's weird swivel-lens-barrel arrangement) put me off. The 8700 handles like a conventional SLR, which I like, and has all the manual tweaks and twiddles which I get worried without. I think we're going to be very happy together.
Quote of the day comes from the "For Your Safety" section of the 8700's operating manual:
"When operating the diopter adjustment control with your eye to the viewfinder, care should be taken to not put your finger in your eye accidentally."
I'll try and bear that in mind.
Added at 0022, when I really should be in bed: Some of my attempts at photographing downtown San Francisco by night are available to peruse. These are all shot using available light so they're a little grainy and fuzzy in places, but I'm still pretty pleased with some of the results. The images posted here are straight rescales to 25% of original - one or two have been cropped a bit but no other processing's been applied.
I'm writing this with a kind of low-level depressed feeling lurking around my head as tomorrow I've got to go through all the hassle of getting to the airport (the flight's at 1900, so I guess I'll just get to SFO really early and try to get a good seat) then sitting on a plane for 11 hours. All the hassle of packing, checking in, enormous crowds, security.. bleh.
Here on the second floor landing of the hotel (that's the first floor, if you're European) there are a couple of comfy chairs and a table within range of the lobby's wireless network access point and only about 20 feet from the coffee pot. I'm sitting relaxing and noodling around on the Internet for want of anything better to do, sipping lukewarm coffee (I let it go cold) and listening as the muzak in the lobby downstairs mixes with the sounds of Powell Street outside. Random shouting erupts occasionally while the blaring of car horns and sirens competes with the ding-ding of cable cars. The clock on the landing chimes the half hour. It's very peaceful.
Shortly I guess I'll go for a walk - maybe up into Chinatown and back - and hunt down something to eat once that's done. I've been toying with the idea of purchasing various expensive electronic items as well, but when it comes to the crunch I usually get all sensible. Which is a shame, despite being, well, sensible.
This is a very nice city indeed, and I'm sorry to be leaving tomorrow. At the same time, however, I'm not exactly pining to emigrate here immediately. I know that there's often a big difference between living somewhere and visiting as a tourist, and there are people who I've missed while I've been away (not to mention the cats) so I'm looking forward to being back in London. Not looking forward so much to being back at work because there are some fairly big decisions which I have to make in that department, but by and large, I think I'm ready to go home.
Expect a couple more entries before I leave tomorrow - I still have to write up my impressions of American television and road travel...
If you're ever in San Francisco and in need of some quick Mac-friendly Internet access, the San Francisco Apple Store at Ellis and Stockton has both an open area on the top floor with a bunch of iMacs running Panther available for Internet access (one of which I'm using now) and what I presume is meant to be a publicly available wireless network.
They're lovely shops, and are probably what computer shops are supposed to be like - plenty of competent advice on hand and the atmosphere's bright and airy without the maze of intimidating aisles and piles of beige boxes which make places like PC World (and CompUSA) such a drag to shop in. And of course there's plenty of hardware on display to fondle, stroke and play with... uh, sorry, I got a bit carried away there...
For Mac users, or for people who should be Mac users but don't know it yet, it's a must-visit - and there are plans to open one in London in the near future as well.
San Francisco, CA - 9 April 2004
Well, I don't know what it was that caught up with me today, but it caught up with me in a big way. After a late breakfast of corned beef hash at the recommendable (and open 24 hours) Pinecrest Restaurant I wandered around a bit, bought a couple of DVDs in Borders and headed down to the cinema in the Metreon centre to see Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, which had been recommended to me.
It's a bizarre film from the writer responsible for Being John Malkovich (though slightly weirder even than that) and centres around the possibility of erasing human memories, and in particular memories of relationships. I won't say much about it except that Jim Carrey has shown once again that there's more to him than Dumb and Dumber and dammit it's about time people noticed this, Kate Winslet was wonderful as usual (with blue hair, too) and Elijah Wood looks happy to be finally out of the pointy ears and hairy feet. It's well worth seeing, and probably even carries an important message in its conclusion once you've unravelled the labyrinthine timeline of the movie.
It's also a slightly disorientating film to watch and has lots of wobbly handheld shots in it, so I was thinking that it was this which was making me feel clammy and nauseous after the first half-hour of the film. Having resisted the urge to run out of the cinema and throw up a lot I thought it would pass once the movie ended and I got some fresh air. No such luck - after the credits rolled I felt sufficiently rough that I came straight back to my room and have been alternately napping and groggily watching DVDs since.
No idea what it is, and I'm feeling a lot better now than I was earlier, but I think it might be simple caffeine overdose as a result of living mostly on coffee (albeit anaemic American coffee) for the last week or so combined with the fact that I hadn't really stopped moving since leaving town last week. Hopefully things will be back to normal tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm going to wander out to find a snack with which to stave off starvation and then have an early night.
It's just as well I'd been shopping for DVDs earlier as this meant I had something new to watch - picked up the animated series based on Kevin Smith's Clerks, The Breakfast Club (not available in Europe last time I checked for some reason) and, because it was there, the fantastic Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which I've just finished watching and which is still one of the best movies in history. Shake it up baby now!
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.
7 April 2004 - Monterey, CA
I'm on the last leg of the big road trip now, and by this time tomorrow I'll most likely have returned the car back in San Francisco and be settled back in at the hotel I stayed in when I arrived - it was so good I've decided to go back there.
The best conversation of the day was when I called into a branch of a well-known American hamburger chain for some lunch and to use the bog, er, shitter, er, toilet, er, "restroom". While I was fiddling around for the right change I apologised for not being used to the money, at which point she informed me that hey, everyone's not used to having money at the moment, and that maybe if they can get rid of Bush things will get a little better. Bush, I was informed in no uncertain terms, stinks. These seem to be sentiments which a growing number of Americans agree with, which is fine with me.
The scenery between Bakersfield and here was mostly agricultural, including such Western favourites as tumbleweeds (I discovered what happens when you hit one at 55mph - not very much, as it happens), baked roadkill and vultures dining on the aforementioned roadkill. Highway 58 is a hidden treasure between Bakersfield and the coast. It's almost deserted, with plenty of wiggly and windy bits to make the drive fun and some fine scenery. After that it was highway 1 north to Monterey, which is another fun road. Parts of it really hug the coast and are very twisty and windy as a result, which is great fun unless you get stuck behind someone who's not got much experience of twisty roads and slows down to 15mph for all the corners. I stopped off at the Hearst Castle visitors' centre - unfortunately the last tour of the day had already gone so I couldn't see it in close-up, but it's a pretty amazing spectacle even when only seen from afar, perched on the hillside. The gift shop didn't sell copies of Citizen Kane.
Monterey is a strangely familiar-feeling town. It's a nice place - I decided to go and see a film this evening (I'll forgive Kevin Smith just about anything after Clerks and Chasing Amy), so went to see Jersey Girl. The cinema was a real old-fashioned fleapit with frayed seats and very little faffing about before the film itself started - three trailers then straight into the main feature. This is a real breath of fresh air compared with what I'm used to - 10 minutes of adverts, a bunch of trailers and hmm, maybe if the main feature starts within 25 minutes of the advertised start time you'll be lucky.
After I got back, I noticed in the motel's directory that Monterey had at least two "British Pubs", so took a wander down the main drag to see if I could find them. There was actually another one tucked down a side street which makes three British-themed pubs in one relatively small town, and further down the street there was a grocery store which had a sign in the window saying they specialised in British goods. I had no idea what was going on here, but I couldn't resist checking out one of the pubs and other than the fact that it didn't close at 11, wasn't full of smoke, didn't have spilt beer all over the bar and you didn't have to pay for your drinks as you bought them it was pretty accurate. Well, sort of.
Tomorrow is the last day of this grand road trip, and I'm kind of sad. It's been fun, but it'll also be nice to not have to get up every morning, check out of a motel and check into a new one in the evening. It should be a nice leisurely drive back to the Bay Area through Silicon Valley.
6 April - Bakersfield, CA
Back in California, and civilisation begins to reassert itself - this hotel has in-room wireless Internet access, so I can work with a decently fast connection once again.
Having hit the road at about 6:45 this morning in order to avoid the traffic and resisting the urge to 'accidentally' bang loudly on the next door to mine on the way out after its inhabitants kept me awake until god knows when last night, I headed straight down towards The Hoover Dam - sorry, Hoover Dam. I keep forgetting that this is the land of no definite articles.
The road gets narrower and windier past Boulder City, and in these nervous times there's a police checkpoint on the approach to the Dam. Once there, there's a spanky new multi-storey car park and visitor's centre in the same art-deco style as the dam itself. It is very, very well worth paying the $10 for the tour - the presentations and so on I can take or leave, but the chance to descend 500ft through the rock of Boulder Canyon in an elevator to go and ogle the turbines shouldn't be missed. It's an absolutely spectacular piece of civil (and, lest we forget, electrical) engineering, and a bit of geeking at heavy machinery and millions of tons of concrete was a breath of fresh air after the plastic ambience of Las Vegas. It's a real shame that the far more detailed hard-hat tours were discontinued after September 11th 2001. The tour takes place on the Nevada side of the dam - the state line runs down the middle of the river, so the other side of the dam is in Arizona.
There's not much I can say about this amazing piece of engineering that isn't written elsewhere (the dam's website referenced above has comprehensive numbers and lots of cool pictures), but one thing that's really fantastic is the star map embedded in the pavement around the dedication monument. This map reflects the night sky as it was on the day the dam was dedicated in 1935 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and what's really cool about it is that they took the trouble to inlay a long text explaining how distances to stars are measured, all done in shiny metal letters in a fantastic Art Deco typeface. Most people just walk over this, but I do recommend looking down when you do.
Another good idea is to go early - I got there just after opening time and the crowds arrive not long after that, so by the time I left at about 11:30 things were absolutely heaving.
With the engineering detour out of the way it was time to head west again. Unfortunately, this involved a long slog on a busy, high-pressure I-15 from Las Vegas to Barstow, followed by a long slog on a busy US-58 from Barstow to Bakersfield, followed by getting lost in Bakersfield to the extent that I had to ring the hotel for directions, so I think it's best to draw a veil over this bit of the journey other than to mention that it was also a much longer journey than it appeared to be on the map - when I was expecting to find Bakersfield about half an hour away I passed a sign saying it was 103 miles away, and my heart sank.
It would be rude not to mention the cool things I saw on the way, though:
Tomorrow - well, tomorrow I'm going to head west to the coast and up the first stage of SR-1 back towards San Francisco. It's likely I'll be back in the city a day early at this rate.
Las Vegas, NV - 5 April 2004
"Great God", wrote Scott while slowly freezing to death in the Antarctic wastes, "this is an awful place". Still, it could have been worse for him - he could have been in Las Vegas. If Scott, Oates and co. had been stuck on the South Strip having Celine Dion blared at them from all directions, Scott would have discovered some harsher words to use than the almost polite 'awful' he used in his diary.
There is a certain initial goshwow factor to all the neon, flashing lights and astonishing buildings - after all, there's something to be said for a compact replica of the New York skyline, complete with Statue of Liberty and integral rollercoaster - but after that wears off there's very little here but grind, grind and more grind. For a city designed from the outset for tourism, no effort at all's been made to accomodate pedestrians comfortably on Las Vegas Boulevard (aka The Strip). The pavements are narrow and crowded, the cycle times at crossings favour road traffic to a ridiculous extent, and it's occasionally impossible to proceed further in the direction you're going without looping through a casino lobby. Of course, this is good for the casinos as once you're inside they're incredibly disorientating and it can be hard to find your way out again without being presented with any number of chances to spend. It's not much better if you're in a motor vehicle - despite having up to five lanes in each direction the Strip is a constant traffic jam, only with more than the usual complement of stretch limos, vast pickups and cars which seem to be powered by the bass component of their enormous stereo systems.
The mega-hotel-casino complexes on the South Strip are themed in a way that strips and distils the cultures they're supposed to represent down to the simplest visible symbols. Inside they have all the ambience of a slightly up-market motorway service station, presenting a thousand opportunities for visitors to have their wallets emptied even if they don't want to go gambling - steak restaurants, all-you-can-eat buffets and shops selling all kinds of tat clamour for the tourist dollar as well as the more traditional slot machines and gaming tables. Slot-jockeys sit at their machines (or at two machines in some cases) praying silently for a big payout that will most likely never come. Because it's something you have to do, I lost a dollar on the nickel slots, lost a dollar on impulse on a dollar slot, then won $1.75 on a quarter slot and decided to quit while I was almost back to where I started.
Outside, a billion hustlers push cards advertising assorted services of a more or less dubious nature on passing tourists (allegedly erotic in nature, but I get the impression that most of these exercises have all the raw, heaving erotic appeal of a gynaecological procedure) while crowds of visitors shuffle slowly up and down the road like commuters on their way to work. The various pools and water features outside the casinos, one of which scared me half to death last night by kicking off a display of water jets accompanied by a recording of Celine bloody Dion (who seems to be the reigning queen of Vegas showland) singing that song from Titanic, smell strongly of chlorine.
Downtown is slightly more manageable, only with slightly smaller casinos, lots of wedding chapels and (of course) the first stop for many couples arriving here - the faceless bureaucratic architecture of the Clark County Courthouse, probably the only government office on the planet that's open 24 hours at weekends. An average of 300 couples a day stop here to obtain marriage licences, and when I passed by this afternoon the queue was out of the door and halfway across the entrance yard. Various hustlers and salespeople pushing wedding packages work the crowds, hungry for commission. Very few of the people standing in line looked ecstatically happy at their impending nuptials, and most just looked tired, hot and harassed. Once they've done the paperwork and got their marriage licences there are effectively two choices - the county Civil Marriage Commissioner will marry them across the street or they can get themselves to one of the many (as I said before, 15 pages in the Yellow Pages) wedding chapels. Most of these push a romantic image of eternal bliss and how Very Special they'll make your wedding, while in reality it's generally a case of being processed as quickly as possible before being shoved out the door for the next couple waiting behind you. I came away with the impression that marriage in Vegas is great for people who like standing in queues, and with my opinion that compulsory waiting times before the grant of a marriage licence are a very good idea strengthened enormously.
I'm sitting drinking coffee in the Excalibur before heading back to my room across the road. Above me a sign points to "Sir Galahad's Prime Rib House", while just around the corner is the Canterbury Wedding Chapel. I hadn't been aware of Galahad's skill at cooking steak before, but you're nobody in the Vegas service industry unless you can cater to the almost infinite demand for inappropriately-sized portions of prime rib and shrimp.
So what is Las Vegas? Well, the realist in me says that it's a veneer of fun and chlorine-bleached hygiene covering a whole mass of exploitation on any number of levels. Vegas is one of the minimum-wage service job capitals of the universe, too many people come here with dreams of riches or a quick route to an improved life only to lose everything they had in the first place, and I doubt that all those full-service girls (and boys) that can be delivered to your room with one quick phone call are pursuing an active career choice.
The sheer conspicuous consumption of the place (and Vegas is located somewhere with very, very limited water resources, not to mention the fact that you can't even get here without consuming huge amounts of fossil fuels in one way or another) is something I can't bring myself to overlook. I can't help but think this place is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, and having seen the piles of uneaten food being carted away from the buffet area at the Luxor and the thousands of overpowered cars grinding slowly up and down the Strip the only conclusion I can come to is that it's possibly the most selfish, exploitative, greedy and shallow place on the planet. The constant push is to spend and consume, and there's very little else to the place. Despite its claims to the contrary, very few people indeed come to Las Vegas and get rich, and most of them own casinos.
But there's another voice inside me as I write this. There is certainly something amazing about a city in the middle of the desert with so few inhibitions having grown so explosively in less than a century. 30-plus million visitors a year can't all be wrong. At least a few dreams have come to life here, and there must be plenty of people for whom a Vegas wedding has proven to be the foundation of a solid and lasting marriage. It would be churlish and unfair of me to ignore all these factors in my evaluation, and plenty of people around me at the moment appear to be having fun. Some of the buildings are fun too, and if you take away the giant Sphinxes and other paraphernalia surrounding it I find the fascist architecture of the Luxor pyramid strangely appealing. I think it's because it reminds me of the Ministry of Love in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or maybe the Met Éireann building in Dublin.
Oh yes, and the hot-off-the-line Krispy Kreme doughnuts sold in the Excalibur are splendid.
I'm still glad that I'm getting out of here tomorrow morning, though. I'm leaving early, before the traffic on the Strip builds up to its usual choking intensity, and heading to.. hmm, not sure yet, via the Hoover Dam.
I've always held the opinion that if you want to know about a place, the place to start is the phone book. I currently have the Las Vegas phone book in front of me, and the classified section (the Yellow Pages) contains:
More mundanely, there are a mere 4 pages of tyre fitters, 2.5 pages of shoe shops and 29 pages of plumbers.
The above just about summarises the priorities of this weird, unworldly city. This is an incredibly seedy place, but it's a good-natured, un-selfconscious kind of seedy and a lot less intimidating as a result. My motel room is exactly like the rest of Vegas - slightly peeling and decorated with poor taste including a pink pan in the lavvy. Still, having come from northern Nevada over the last couple of days, arriving here is somewhat like landing on Mars.
I got here after taking a long detour off US95 south of Tonopah, which was a little too full of enormous RVs and groups of that kind of motorbike which (a) takes up an entire car-width parking space, (b) uses most of its engine power generating noise, and (c) when viewed in the car's rear view mirror, looks alarmingly like the rider is riding a giant set of motorised birthing stirrups. The detour was through the Death Valley National Park, and it's a trip I can recommend anyone to take. Foolishly, I had the roof down and as a result I'm a kind of lobster pink with a fantastic shadow of my sunglasses on my face, but the trip was still fantastic. Not only does the National Park contain Badwater, in the middle of the salt flats and the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere (280-something feet below sea level), but it contains some of the most sun-baked and desolate landscapes you'll see anywhere. It's unbelievable that early settlers crossed this godforsaken, dessicated area, which regularly records the highest temperatures on Earth. It was blazingly hot today, but in summer it's much, much hotter.
The highlight was probably Artist's Palette, a rocky hillside which has been stained different colours by various mineral compounds. It's almost impossible to describe and probably even harder to photograph convincingly, so I can only suggest going to see it yourself. The only downside to visiting all these desolate places was the irritating habit Americans have of leaving their car engines running while getting out to look at views (or in extreme circumstances, just sitting in the car park with the engine running and looking at the view through the windscreen). Yes, I know it's nice to keep the air conditioning running, but your SUV sitting there belching out fumes and noise doesn't exactly add to the sense of isolation, guys.
At Zabriskie Point I pulled the car into a parking space next to another Mustang convertible, silver this time, which to my surprise turned out to have the registration number just before mine - while my hire car is -323, this one was -322. I guess that's another one on hire from Hertz. The car had gone after I had a quick run up to the Point to ogle the view, so I didn't have a chance to find the driver and ask.
Back on the main road I re-entered Nevada and stopped to fill the car up in the fantasically-named Pahrump, a town with the most offended-sounding name I've ever heard. From there it's a fairly short hop to Las Vegas, and an extremely lengthy crawl up the terminal gridlock off the Strip to get to the motel with only one burst of abuse from someone who thought I'd somehow be able to move the car forward and out of his way so he could cross behind despite another car being right in front of me. Welcome to Vegas, I thought..
April 3rd - Tonopah, NV
Nevada, the land of open spaces, seems to have its fair share of the kind of things you find away from everything else. There are numerous military installations signposted from the highways (and I bet there are a good few that aren't signposted, for that matter) including the old Nevada nuclear test range, part of Nellis AFB which covers a huge area (over 5,000 square miles) between here and Las Vegas. As a result, it's also a conspiracy theorist's mecca as the home of the famous Area 51 where, if you believe some people, crashed alien spacecraft are kept. Sounds like a load of old dingo's kidneys to me, but there you go.
There are also various places signed from the road as 'Conservation camps' which the first couple of times I read as 'Concentration camp' as they're run by the Department of Corrections. I presume these are work camps out in the desert. There are regularly signs by the road declaring that it's a prison area and hitch-hiking is therefore forbidden.
The surreality index certainly starts to increase towards the south end of Nevada. Not only are there those huge test ranges out there in the desert, but nestled at the southern end of the state there's what I understand to be one of the most surreal places on the planet - Las Vegas. I'm going there tomorrow (hey, I feel I just have to see the place) so will report more on that as it happens. After that it's a quick look at the Hoover Dam (not far from Vegas on the Arizona border), then I turn round and start heading back towards San Francisco.
Another thing that I stopped off to take a look at on the way down from Eureka (only about 150 miles via US-50 and Nevada Route 376) was the fine collection of petroglyphs (rock carvings) about 25 miles east of Austin. They're very, very old and well worth stopping at if you're passing by.
Apart from that, the drive down was uneventful on a road mostly shared with pickups, trucks and the kind of RV that's the size of a small town. European motor-caravans occasionally have a moped mounted on the back for getting around. American ones generally tow a full-sized car, a four-by-four or even one of those famously environmentally unfriendly SUV things. I guess the ultimate RV would probably tow another RV, just in case the first one broke down.
Internet access from the hotel here is shaky - it often takes the modem two or three redials to negotiate a connection, and even then it's at 26400bps. Still, I'm using the toll-free number (extra charge from the ISP) this time after using what was listed as the local number for Eureka which turned out not to be a local call at all and landed me with a hefty surcharge for the phone calls when I checked out. Ho hum.
2 April - Eureka, NV
I'm currently pretty suntanned. Well, it's that kind of pink suntan that pallid Brits get, but the sun's certainly got to me over the last few days. This hasn't been made much better by all the driving around with the top down on the car, but there are some experiences for which that's pretty essential. One of these experiences was today's drive, which originally was going to be only as far as Reno (around 215 miles from Berkeley) but which I rather impulsively extended by about the same distance again in order to get as far as Eureka, Nevada. Why did I do this? Well, highway 50 through Nevada is known as "The Loneliest Road", and I had to find out for myself whether that claim was true. Over 400 miles in a day is a lot (and to tell the truth, I'm shattered after 8.5 hours of more or less non-stop driving), but if you look at a map of the USA I've only travelled a tiny distance across the country as a whole. This place is big.
(And this entry's long, so hit the link to read the whole thing..)
Leaving Berkeley on the I-80 towards Sacramento I was wondering if this drive was all a big mistake. This stretch of the I-80 has to be a strong contender for the Worst Road I've Ever Encountered, and that includes roads like the M25 and the M4. Too many lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic weaving in and out at a speed slightly over the speed limit, constant streams of traffic joining and leaving, the whole nightmare cocktail that takes any pleasure that there may be in driving and converts it into irritation and stress. This goes on more or less until the road reaches Sacramento, at which it becomes much worse and then gets better as the local traffic thins out and the road points itself purposefully towards the Nevada border.
However, before the border there's the woody and mountainous Sierra Nevada, and the road climbs constantly through forest, past markers counting off the elevation in thousands of feet (Americans love elevations. Just about every city limits sign also carries the town's elevation.) until finally, all of a sudden, the road breaks the treeline and a breathtaking view of snow-clad mountains appears ahead. A long train of Union Pacific box cars was fighting its way up the steep railway gradient next to the Interstate. The roof was down and the altitude meant I was freezing cold, but turning the heater on full blast helped prevent my limbs freezing solid and right then, the view was so amazing that I didn't really care anyway. It can be hard keeping to the correct lane on I-80 at this point because the lines on the road have been worn away by the winter snows and the snow chains which are needed for vehicles to get through when the roads are covered in snow - the surface is cracked and scarred from all this abuse.
The road tops out at Donner Summit (7229ft ASL) and from then it's a long, slow, curvy descent down through the Sierras and, eventually, to the state line. Crossing a state line turned out to be something of an anticlimax - just a sign saying "Welcome to Nevada" and a bump as the road surface changed from California road to Nevada road. I had noticed an inspection station spanning the westbound road a few miles earlier, flying the Californian flag, so maybe things are a little more rigorous going into the Golden State than they are going into the Silver State.
Being in Nevada, Reno seems to consist mostly of casinos. There was a little heavy traffic as it was Friday afternoon, but once past Reno and the splendidly-named Sparks things loosened up again and I stopped at a small town called Mustang (appropriately, as the Absurd Hire Car I'm driving is a Ford Mustang) to finish thawing out my frozen limbs and, well, put the roof back up as it was a bit too chilly. The turning I was looking for was a bit further down the road - the US50 (ALT) which would take me through Fernley to US50 proper and the beginning of the Loneliest Road. Fernley turned out to be extremely congested, probably as by then it was 4:30PM and everyone was leaving work for the weekend, but having eventually meandered through town I found myself on the right road. After Fallon, the last town of any size for hundreds of miles, the traffic dropped off and the road began to live up to its name.
There's a common British stereotype of the American rural highway - a two-lane strip of tarmac with a dotted yellow line down the middle, stretching off ruler-straight into the distance with nothing else in sight. That's just about what some stretches of 50 are like, although as it climbs and descends quite a bit it has its share of windy hairpin mountain bends as well, particularly around Austin. There's no sign of human habitation for miles and miles, but lots of different scenery to look at - salt flats near the beginning, some arid scrub used for cattle ranching, hills and mountains, and even occasionally another vehicle. Especially when it's dark, cars coming the other way are often visible for a couple of minutes or more before they pass by. Their headlights appear, appear to hover in the air for some time, and then suddenly get bigger and bigger before whooshing past in the darkness leaving nothing in front of you but tarmac and road edge markers flitting past. The altitude means the air is cold and crisp, and also means the landscape looks even more windswept and remote than it would otherwise. There really is nothing out there, and if you break down you're reliant on someone stopping and helping you out unless you're near one of the very few gas stations or the (one) phone along the stretch from Fallon to Austin. The phone is marked as "The Loneliest Phone", and from the road I could see it was covered in notes and other bits and pieces. It also appeared to have a couple of bullet holes, which doesn't seem to be at all unusual for this part of the world - road signs seem to be particularly popular things to use for target practice from a moving pickup.
Being a bit dim I hadn't bothered to fill up the car in Fallon before the really isolated bits of the road began, so although I had half a tank of petrol I also had about 180 miles to go before reaching my destination for the night. With the road being as isolated as it is, running out of petrol was not at all an attractive option, so I decided it would be wise to fill up when I got a chance. The chance eventually arose and I pulled in at a place which, while marked with a place name on most of the maps, consisted of one building with a small motel area, a bar and one petrol pump. The bar, of course, had lots of men in cowboy hats sitting at it. This, I thought, was about as far as it's possible to be from Berkeley, at least politically speaking. The folk were friendly and I was invited to stay for a drink (once it had been ascertained that my accent wasn't French), but as it was getting later and I wanted to get to Eureka in time to get something to eat, I had to press on.
The road wound on, and on, and on for a long time, through Austin (about 100 miles out from Fallon), and on towards my final destination, Eureka, where I finally arrived at 8:25 - eight and a half hours after leaving Berkeley. Eureka is a pleasant small town (Highway 50 is the main street) which was founded when some incredibly rich deposits of silver were found in the area and half the universe headed there to stake claims. It has a few hotels and motels along with a couple of bars and cafés, one of which (the Eureka Café) was kind enough to remain open a little while past their closing time of 9PM so that I could get a steak sandwich (okay, a large slab of steak with fries and a couple of slices of toast on the side).
I now have to decide whether to now head north and up to Oregon before swinging down back into California from the north, or south and down to Las Vegas and Death Valley before taking Highway 1 (the Pacific Coast Highway) north from LA to San Francisco. Whatever I do, I have to be back in the Bay Area by next Friday so there's plenty of time to take things at a fairly leisurely pace from now on. I might even stay a second night in Eureka to have a bit of a rest after today's massively long drive. I'm finding I like Nevada - the people are friendly and the scenery's, well, big.
Who says you need to go down the coast to LA to spot celebrities? While walking up University Avenue in Berkeley just now I passed a vaguely familiar face lurking in a street corner looking bemused. I identified him as someone I'd seen in a news story last night, someone who's having a 15-minutes-of-fame experience at the moment courtesy of a truly appalling audition performance on the American version of Pop Idol (which has inexplicably been renamed American Idol round here) by the name of William Hung. Google tells me that he's a student at UC Berkeley, so I guess seeing him around there isn't at all surprising.
I have to say I feel kind of sorry for him, having seen how he's being chewed up by a hungry media looking for comic-relief stories - it seems to me that news stories on American TV networks aren't considered broadcastable unless the two anchors can do a fake laugh at the end of the report and make some witty comments at each other. Still, I hope he makes a goodly wad of cash out of this while it lasts and then gets back to focusing on his studies when, as is crushingly inevitable, the media gets tired of him and the fame thing all ends.
1 April - Berkeley, CA (in the launderette)
Drove back down to the East Bay after breakfast, via California Highway 20 (very very windy, but lots of trees) and US101 as I'm going to a do in San Francisco this evening and Berkeley seemed like a sensible place to stop off as I wouldn't have to go all the way into the big city by car. The lady who runs the motel took one look at my driving licence and told me (in a strong Californian accent) that she's from the UK as well and still has a British passport, even though she's been here since 1960. I have to admit I had been wondering - Sheila isn't a common name around here at all.
Even though it means subscribing to just about every cliché in the book, there really is a certain pleasure to driving down clear roads with the top down and the radio on. This is, in fact, made slightly better by the fact that the car's equipped with a Sirius satellite radio receiver so there's (a) none of the constant hunting around for stations that famously characterises driving long distances in the USA, and (b) a non-stop 80s station with no commercials. It's got the BBC World Service too, which is useful for getting news from the world outside this Disneyland where the preface to the state drivers' manual is written by the Terminator. "My fellow Califhaaniaahns..."
Last night I went to a place I'd been recommended for dinner (the Italian restaurant next to the DMV in Fort Bragg - not in the Lonely Planet guide but still highly recommended) and was barely able to finish my lasagne despite it being a half order and very nice indeed. I've decided to cut back on eating a bit - breakfast should be quite enough to keep me going all day, and if I persist with having lunch as well I'll probably double in weight by the end of next week.
Filled up with 10 gallons of petrol this morning (these gas guzzlers really eat fuel when you're on winding roads with a lot of speeding up and slowing down) for the absurdly low price of $20.90. Bizarre to think that around here the price of gasoline is considered to be at nigh-apocalyptic levels, isn't it?
"Bizarre" seems to be a word that comes to mind a lot as I'm writing these updates.
Heading inland a bit tomorrow, I think - maybe into Nevada to swing round north and make a big loop returning to San Francisco by the end of next week. I'm looking for some of those famous wide-open roads there are supposed to be round here. It'll certainly be away from decent GSM cellphone coverage and copious internet access.
(P.S. I keep brazenly passing road signs that say "DO NOT PASS". Am I committing a traffic offence by doing so?)
31 March - Fort Bragg, CA
Given that I'm in a country that's sufficiently squeamish that the word 'toilet' is taboo, and where the euphemism is king ('restroom', indeed), what I just saw on the telly was kind of astonishing. A new 'virtual colonoscopy' using a CT scan has been developed which means that people can be screened for colo-rectal polyps without the need for a colonoscopy, so what do they do? They send an unfortunate reporter along to have one and broadcast a blow-by-blow account on the 5pm news, including some choice shots of the inside of the journo's rectum when the virtual colonoscopy shows up a potential polyp that means they have to get the sigmoidoscope out anyway. And an enormous amount of TV commercials are for various prescription only drugs - lots of "Ask your doctor if Foobinol could be right for you!", which must make doctors' prescribing decisions awkward at times. It's all pretty bizarre. Is this, by any chance, a nation of hypochondriacs?
Anyway, I'm in Fort Bragg, on the coast in Mendocino County. It took about six hours to get here up the winding Pacific Coast Highway, also known as California Highway 1. The average speed was pretty low as this isn't a typical US road at all - the 2-line road reminded me of Europe, winding around the edge of cliffs and hills. While these roads are like the roads I learned to drive on in the UK, a lot of American visitors seem to have problems with roads like this and slow right down. I guess that if you come from one of those states where all the roads look like they were just drawn on the map with a ruler, winding roads must be at least slightly scary.
My hire car is what's embarrassingly described as a 'muscle car' - a Ford Mustang convertible that is, inevitably, red. I have christened it the Early-Midlife-Crisismobile. Unfortunately, Hertz only do one type of convertible at a reasonable rate, and this is it. Having got my head around the bizarre automatic gearbox, managed not to stomp on a nonexistent clutch pedal too many times and discovered the handy cruise control it's not too bad to drive at all (hey, just point in roughly the right direction, accelerate to the speed limit and turn on the autopilot), and the fact that most of the roads are wide and have at least, ooh, 25 lanes seems to help.
Oh, and according to CBS, pink is the new black. I'm sure that last week black was the new black, but what do I know about fashion?
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.
San Francisco is like a living transport museum. Beside the famous cable cars it also has a rapid transit system (BART), on-street and underground-running trams plus one line worked entirely by historic tramcars from all over the place (the F line), trolleybuses (that's buses which pick up power from overhead wires), conventional buses and outer-surburban rail (Caltrain).
That's not bad going for a city in a country which is mostly famous for inadequate or plain nonexistent public transport, and it makes me wonder which enlightened transport planners were able to make this incredible diversity happen. Running a fleet of diverse and elderly trams is very difficult - different types of vehicle mean drivers and mechanics have to be trained on multiple types and spares holdings are almost impossible to manage. It's a joy to see so much elderly rolling stock not only still in use, but obviously cared for lovingly. Transport museums are fun places, but it's much more fun to actually see and ride on heritage vehicles in a working environment rather than just looking at various stuffed and mounted examples. It's kind of like the difference between stuffed animals in the Natural History Museum and seeing real ones on a safari.
But back to the cable cars. I finally got to ride on them in the evening once the tourist crowds had died down, from Powell and Market to the other end of the line and Hyde and Beach, then walked to the other Powell line terminus at Mason St for the journey back. I haven't yet tried the California line, which has a different type of rolling stock. (More in the full entry..)
The experience is interesting, and I'd just love to see what the Health and Safety Executive would say if such a system appeared in the UK. Riders standing on the running-boards and hanging onto poles would probably give them a corporate coronary. The cars are pretty small, and because of the conditions imposed by the cable-hauling system have to be manually pushed around on a turntable at the end of the line to point them in the opposite direction.
The traction system is fairly simple - a slotted channel between the running rails hides a cable which is driven at a constant 9.5 miles/hr by a central engine. The only onboard power the cars themselves have is batteries to power their lights, and motive power comes from the cable or from gravity. The gripman (they're not drivers, they're gripmen) controls the car by operating a mechanism that grips the cable by variable amounts to provide traction and by using any of the three braking systems the cars have on board. Brakes are really, really important when gradients as severe as they are in San Francisco - remember that the reason this system was devised was because the hills are simply too steep for conventional tramways.
Firstly, the car has brake shoes which operate on the wheels. Secondly, there are tramway-style track brakes - blocks of softwood which press down on the rail surface. These brakes are responsible for the fantastic smell of overheating wood when the car's descending a steep gradient. Finally, if all else fails there's an emergency slot brake, a stepped wedge made of steel, which is dropped into the cable slot between the rails like an axe-blade. Operating all these systems plus the grip and the bell (which is used with the same regularity as, say, car horns in Naples) is incredibly physical work as the gripman throws himself around the car pulling huge iron levers and stamping on pedals. It's also a very skilled job - being careless with the grip can lead to the gripper mechanism spot-welding itself to the cable (with alarming consequences) and balancing braking on steep downhill gradients to keep the car under control takes skill. Add to that the fact that it's out in the open rather than in a nice warm cab and it's clear that most cable car crews do it because they love the cable cars - they all start out as bus drivers initially, and MUNI doesn't pay them any more for driving cable cars than they do for driving a bus.
It's quite an experience riding on one of these things, and despite the crowds of tourists it's worth having a go. As part of an urban transit system they're more of a tourist attraction than a commuter service, but plenty of people do still use the cable cars to commute. Given the phenomenal hills in the city it's a lot like riding a very genteel roller-coaster, and probably a lot more fun than taking the bus.
There's more about the Cable Cars here.
Well, this morning I thought I'd do the tourist thing and amble over to Fisherman's Wharf in order to take a walk around the shore to the Exploratorium, which is just the kind of tourist attraction I like. Having run away from the Fisherman's Wharf area pretty fast as it's one big tourist trap, I hiked a couple of miles around the top end of town until I finally reached the Exploratorium to find that (as someone had actually told me yesterday, duh) it's closed on Mondays. Ho hum.
The Exploratorium is housed at the old Palace of Fine Arts, an extraordinary fake Roman temple ruin that's well worth a visit anyway so the trip wasn't entirely wasted. I took the bus back to Fort Mason and walked back to Fisherman's Wharf as being both a tourist and a transportation wonk, I thought I'd better ride the famous SF cable cars at least once. This is quite an ordeal as they're usually packed with tourists and there's always a queue, but coming here and not riding on one of the world's only remaining cable-hauled tramways would be a shame.
Unfortunately, while I was in the long queue being forced to listen to a busker demolishing Wish You Were Here and the crushingly inevitable Stairway To Heaven, a sensation like having a handful of gravel thrown at my head made me reach up to realise that (as a lady in the queue pointed out a few seconds later, though in a more circumspect fashion) a seagull had crapped on my head. I guess that it's a statistical inevitability that anyone spending a lot of time outside will get crapped on by a bird eventually, but still, it's kind of surprising when it actually happened. I cleaned myself up as much as possible with a few tissues and then headed back to the hotel (not via the cable car for obvious reasons, and trying to avoid touching things as much as possible as my hands had traces of bacteria-laden ick on them) to the hotel for a shower and a clean T-shirt.
So, that's my tourist day. I went to a museum that was closed, stood in a long queue, and just as I was getting to the front of that queue a seagull crapped on my head. Who said holidays are never fun?
Finally, for anyone interested in these things, here's a cool link - the live track status page of the MUNI Metro's tram subway in central SF. This is approximately what in Europe would be known as a pré-metro or a Stadtbahn - trams which go underground in the centre of town. Note the extremely complex crossover/turnback sidings at the eastern end of Embarcadero station (labelled EML/EMR).
I've been getting plagued with regular spam text messages on my phone from some company wanting to upgrade my phone for me from the last few months, Normally this is just an irritation, but hey, they were kind enough to send me one overnight. While I'm in the States. Roaming. So not only did they spam my phone, but I had to pay to receive it. Ain't that just something?
Unfortunately, the rules on SMS spam in the UK don't seem to take this into account, largely because there aren't really any rules. Maybe it's time there were.
Sure, in this instance it only cost me 15p (+VAT). But what happens if the amount of spam SMS traffic increases? A few messages a day over a couple of weeks would soon see those 15ps adding up.
Well, after going out for most of the day on a nerd pilgrimage to the University of California at Berkeley and then to a slightly dodgy-looking bar in the Mission to meet a bunch of people from The Internet (tm) almost all of whom I hadn't met before, I got back and found that my room has indeed been changed - the new room is much nicer, has a bath, has a desk, and even has a window which looks out on the street (and the cable car line) rather than out onto a fire escape. Hurrah!
Oh yes, and they have free coffee available 24 hours/day, which has to be a big win.
I'm posting this from a cafe (okay, it's a Starbucks but they at least have convenient wireless Internet access) in Berkeley, California as I'm on holiday in this part of the world for the next couple of weeks.
It's my first visit to this country and it's proving kind of interesting as the USA, so far, is one country where it seems all the stereotypes are true. The cars are indeed huge, the petrol is indeed absurdly cheap (although $2.00 a gallon is being seen as an indication of forthcoming Armageddon by a lot of folk here) but with this being the Bay Area one stereotype is inaccurate - the public transport's actually pretty good. Although I've never been here before, I've had so much US culture and tradition injected into my consciousness by simply having been alive for 30 years that nothing's entirely new or alien.
The one downer is that my hotel room (which to be fair to the hotel was the only one they had free when I checked in last night) doesn't really match the impression given by the hotel website. Not much of a surprise, but this one not only has a view only of a fire escape and a brick wall but is also part of the fire escape route itself - an emergency pull outside the room just opens the door, so there's no internal lock or anything. Oh, and the radiator hisses loudly and woke me up in the night. So I decided to test out the much-vaunted American notion of customer service and asked for a better room - we'll see what they've done for me when I get back later..
The flight out sucked, as flights generally do, so I guess I should draw a veil over that. The trip into town was fantastic, though - BART is fast, cheap ($4.95 to downtown is pretty good) and no hassle to use. I recommend not bothering taking a cab from the airport if your destination's served by BART (and before any angry cab drivers start wishing me harm, I should point out that recommendation was originally made to me by a San Francisco cab driver).
I think I like San Francisco - although pretty big and intimidating at first sight, it's got everything the dedicated transport wonk should want - on-street trams, a metro, regional rail connections, and even trolleybuses and antique cable-hauled streetcars.
Oh, and I've already heard people walking down the street having conversations consisting of "And I'm, like, shyeah, and he's like, duh..". See? All the stereotypes really are true!