announcement: unfortunately i cannot get pictures on the blog today, there is something wrong with the internet connection here on the campsite we're at... i will try to get some uploaded soon, and put them on a separate blog. sorry readers, i tried and tried, but it kept crashing.
howdy boys and girls, here are some updates for you on our time in california over the last month working selling tree wraps for monarch manufacturing. if you have forgotten, a tree wrap is what you put around a small tree as it is growing, to protect it from rodents and weather and herbicide (pronounced erbicide here in this strange country, they don’t pronounce their h’s at the beginning of words). as there is an abundance of vineyards in california, this is prime territory for tree wrap selling. i think my last update was the 12th october which is a very long time ago, so i will have to revert backwards in time via my little notebook full of blog notes.
i think you ought to know that i am actually jack kerouac today (thurs 12th october), as i am writing this literally on the road, sitting on the sofa as bert drives along. any offers of help with the driving have been refused by bert, on the grounds of various reasons - roads are too twisty, or too busy, or he is fine and enjoys driving, and isn’t tired yet etc - i have slowly come to realise that there is a ban on me driving monty ever again, as bert finds it too stressful dealing with the unpredictability and wibbliness. hmph. actually it suits me just fine as i find driving monty too much like hard work, especially turning corners, or reversing, i don’t know how bert has done it all this time with no incidents, i suppose because he is a clever man.
week the first, 12th october onwards
we went from bakersfield - the site of james deans’s fatal car crash - up highway 99 to visalia. we visited lots of nurseries and vineyard supply places, and generally got positive responses, as has been the case all the way along, apart from 2 people who weren’t interested and hung up the phone on us. we went through lots of little towns, mostly populated by mexicanos, who work in the shops, the vineyards, the restaurants - parts of california are basically mexican. we went for mexican food one night and watched mexico play football, and then camped in monty in the parking lot of the mexican restaurant, one of our less swanky campsites. also this week, there was a huge dusty windy storm so we didn‘t do any driving that day as it‘s too dangerous in monty; bert got very bad backache - probably from all the driving he’s been doing - and went for a massage, and on the leaflet she said she also did table showers. i don’t know what a table shower is, does anybody else, perhaps it just means the bit when they wipe your back with a warm flannel after your back massage? anyway it made us giggle. i sat and read my book while bert had his massage (without table shower). we camped in walmart in visalia, to be woken up by the crazy carpark hooverer; we had lunch at the holiday inn so we could use the wifi there (this proves to be an ongoing problem when on the road and having to check in on emails, or send them in follow up to meetings); other notes i have made say things like - bought fruit, had an ice cream, i read my book, bert took a painkiller. not exactly the stuff of masterpieces, but there you go.
weekend the first (i wrote this at the time in fact thus the present tense usage).
friday 16th october to sunday 18th october
we are in sequoia national forest today, sunday, having spent friday and saturday in sequoia national park. a sequoia is one of those absolutely massive redwood trees, whose scientific name is sequoiadendron gigantium - when i have my own cat i will call him this. the sequoia you get on the coast, the giant redwoods, are taller and more slender, and their name is sequoia sempivirens, which i think means living forever, if my latin knowledge serves me correctly. we visited general sherman tree yesterday, who was named after a general that the person who discovered him served under in the war - he is the largest tree in the world. this is in terms of amount of trunk - there are taller trees than him, but still he is very tall. the diameter of his trunk is 40 feet! the poster said that for us looking up at the top of him it’s like a mouse looking up to the top of us. wow. these trees don’t die of old age, and are resistant to fire damage - they die by toppling over as their roots are so shallow, only up to about 3 feet deep. they figured out that sequoias need forest fires to disperse seeds as the heat dries their cones out which then drop their seeds to the forest floor, and the fire clears the layer of pine needles and other bits and pieces on the floor, so the seeds can germinate properly. so they do controlled burns if there haven’t been fires for a while, so that the sequoias can keep living.
these sequoia trees truly are amazing, and spiritual - the longest living one is 3,500 years old! imagine what it has lived through - jesus, the greeks, the romans, all those wars, lots of other things which i can’t think of now as history isn’t my strong point. you look up to the top of them and they just go and go and go, and their trunks are super straight, they get a bit thinner towards the top, not that you can see that far. a man we met this week who grows pomegranate trees has a cabin in sequoia park and in the night time he drives to the sequoias and plays them indian pan pipe music. we were kind of like, um ok whatever, but then when you see them you do get this real spiritual feeling from them, like they are giant guardians of the forest, all wise and calm, and i can totally understand why he does that for them. they’re kind of like those tree people in lord of the rings. i hugged one, but you can only get your arms round them a fraction of the way. it’s just unbelievable that a tree can be that huge and beautiful, and such a deep red colour with all these big old branches - general sherman has a branch whose diameter alone is 7 feet - that’s the diameter of most actual tree trunks.
we also did a little hike to the top of a big rock called moro rock, which has a great view of the mountain range. this is the owens valley, and the tallest mountain here is mount whitney. bert had flown over these mountains once, all the way up to 20,200 feet, which is very high. he once flew above a commercial plane and waved down at the pilot who must have thought he was hallucinating. there were 365 steps going up this rock, and lots of germans around the place, it must be their half term holiday time i guess. we also met a swedish family and a danish couple, at friday night’s campsite. scandinavians are very well behaved and courteous, and these were no exceptions. the swede couple had super blonde hair, and 3 very cute well behaved children. the danes were older and very sweet in a kind of eccentric unusual way. i always think it’s interesting when you talk to foreigners because you must get such a different idea of their personality than if you could converse with them fluently in their own language. perhaps this couple weren’t eccentric at all. i wonder how i come across when i try to speak spanish to people, how can you portray any of the nuances of your personality (if in fact you have any nuances) when you are struggling to just get the strange foreign words out and be understood. unless you have the fluency to choose a certain word over another then you can only communicate on a very basic level. which is fine as there are different levels of communication and most of them are quite basic anyway, and lots of how we communicate and how we perceive people is via paralinguistic information, ie not just through language, but through gestures and facial expressions etc. this is all very interesting to me, and hopefully to you too, if not i apologise for taking up your time with it.
anway as if foreigners and huge trees wasn’t enough excitement, but who should we meet on the trail going down to general sherman, but a big old black bear wandering along looking for food and rummaging around with his big paws. (very strangely i’d dreamt this very thing happening just the other day…if that dream is going to come true, then hopefully those other dreams of innumerable riches and lottery wins will soon materialise too) very soon a crowd had gathered, all of us watching the bear, only 10 feet away from us, videoing him and taking pictures in a frenzy. bert got the closest out of everyone because he‘s the bravest, and got some really amazing video footage which i will try to put on youtube. i got some pictures, and at one point ran off as i was getting a bit scared - mr bear looked up at us all and huffed and puffed a bit, then sidled off again the other way. obviously he didn’t want to eat anyone but i‘m pretty sure he‘d been considering it. they are amazing animals, and i can’t believe how fast they go considering their size - which means that they must be all muscle even though they look a bit chubby. imagine that big chubby hand swiping you across the face with those long claws, you’d be dead meat in no time, and what a way to die. it was very cool to be this close to a bear, and not really in any danger, even though i see danger everywhere so for me it was dangerous. if it had been a grizzly we’d have been nowhere to be seen, but black bears are much more placid, apparently. all i need to see now is a mountain lion and a moose and i’ll be able to tick off all the north american large mammals.
friday night we made a campfire and cooked hotdogs in it by prodding them onto long sticks and holding them in the embers, and making sure they don‘t fall off the stick, or get too close to the fire and go all bubbly and blackened. last night i made the campfire all by myself which i was very proud of as it was a pretty good one, took a while to get going. we bought tons of fruit so we’ve been trying to be healthier than normal, having yoghurt with fruit for breakfast instead of pancakes with bacon. we were going to have pancakes this morning as it’s sunday, but the milk had gone off as our fridge kept turning itself off last week, so i suppose that’s a good thing that we couldn’t have them.
we bought a book about montana from a thrift shop in a town called three rivers, on the way into sequoia park. it’s about a guy and his wife who live up there, and their first winter there, and the solitude and peace and lack of people - he’s a writer and she’s an artist and they are housesitting an old ranch and loving it, but having to get used to how you survive a montana winter which is pretty harsh i’ve heard.
we cleaned monty’s batteries and did an oil change as she was overheating sometimes, she is much better now.
on sunday we camped in sequoia national forest, and had an amazing view of the mountains and clouds and trees, with not another person in sight. we listened to the birds tweeting and the pine cones falling off the trees, and the squirrels scurrying around, and thought how lovely it all was. the only interruption was the sound of a jet going by - we looked up and bert said it must be obama as it was flying low and looked like airforce1, and there was another little jet nearby it. we read in the paper that he had gone over to california recently, so that confirmed the matter for us.
we watched a film called reds, which is about the russian bolshevik revolution and a couple from america who get involved in it, jack reed and louise briant. it’s a very good and interesting film, with jack nicholson playing one of the other main characters, back in his earlier days before he was mega famous - he sure is good at playing nutty people.
we bought some fruit from an italian man with a roadside fruit stall on friday on the way to the park. after the initial greetings and price discussions, he launched into his life story and how his wife had left him and gone evil and was with a millionaire, and his son had gone evil too, you can see it in their eyes he said. he was looking for another wife, and was planning to plant 100 acres of trees soon with this future wife. we wished him luck with both those things.
bert is currently up on the roof attaching the wires to the solar panel. there’s constant work to be done to monty, nothing serious, just bits and pieces, like we had to change the oil the other day, and then the fridge was being strange, the heater in the kitchen area still doesn’t work, the vent lids on the roof needed replacing as i’d put my elbow through one whilst trying to help with gluing the solar panel down. it’s all very interesting though learning how it all works. monty squeaked and sweated a bit coming up the hairpin turns in sequoia park - they say vehicles over 22 feet aren’t advised, but bert said nonsense to that. before we set off anywhere in monty you have to go through a pre take off list, rather like nasa astronauts have to i imagine, but on a smaller scale as we aren‘t leaving the earth‘s atmosphere. our list consists of: check the fridge is locked, the windows closed, the vents down, the crockery and pans stowed away, the electric hookup unhooked if applicable. at first we kept forgetting things, and a few times a pan of water flew off the stove onto the floor, or the fridge flew open.
week the second, 20th october onwards
this week we went from visalia to oakhurst. aside from working here are some things that happened:
drove out of sequoia park down through very twisty roads and very foggy weather, houses and fences and animals appearing every so often through the fog, and the yellow green red leaves of autumn falling around monty as she squeaked and held her breath for the really tight corners. bought some bar tape for my falcon bike, from a really cool bike shop which had old retro bikes on the wall, one of them was what someone (he couldn’t remember their name) had won olympic gold on. it was a gt one. watched some football (not with feet, with hands - by this rationale every ball related sport would be called football as you need to use your feet and there is a ball involved), at the holiday inn and took advantage of cheap beer and free pool table. camped out in their parking lot, kept hiding by lying flat on the floor when we thought a guard was coming over to peer in and see if we were in. nothing came of this and we got away with it, tee hee.
washed some eggs which had some egg on them that had smashed in the box, and put them back in their box minus the broken one. camped by a library in fowler and got moved on by the police, very politely when they realised we weren’t riffraff, merely tired people on the road. went in to the library to try to get online, which didn’t work, but i did get to talk to a nice man who had spent a lot of time in england. i told him the only time i saw the queen was in canada, which is true. camped off the side of the highway near fresno, ate pasta and listened to bert’s stories about an ex mafia man from new york he used to be good friend with, who he last saw when he dropped him off in mexico and heard he got muddled up with some mexican mafia man’s wife. i’m probably endangering both our lives by writing about this. bert also told me he once had a part as a stuntman in a film called heaven’s gate, and guess what the extreme stunt was this time? that’s right, rollerskating. the film was a flop, but he met kris kristofferson, who became an idiot when drunk, and another famous guy who is in films like goodfellas, but he can’t remember his name. that’s how untouched he is by fame, it all just washes over him.
camped at a lake called hidden view, near madera. rode our bikes around and looked at the sunset (not directly as it will burn your retina). tried to cycle over the dam but couldn’t, watched a squirrel and some hawks. watched half of jack nicholson’s film chinatown, by roman polanski. finished watching it the next night, it’s a great film, watch it if you haven’t already. watched a roman polanski interview on the dvd, and thought it was weird to be watching that when he is now all old and in the news for that rape case, and how awful that charles manson killed his wife sharon tate. all that aside, he’s an odd fellow, but obviously makes great movies.
hoovered and dusted monty. we have central vacuuming in monty, and generally it does a good job, but when i do it it just seems to ping the dirt from the carpet up into the air, and back down onto the carpet again, in a different section. i think 5% of the dirt gets sucked up, the other 95% just gets moved around. bert is better at it than me, as he is at most things that involve being patient and/or strong (you have to be stronger than you would imagine to do the hoovering, i find it very tiring, but it could of course be psychosomatic). realised we shouldn’t have filled up our fresh water tank with water from hidden view lake, as it was mouldy and smelly and we couldn’t use it, and had to embark on a cleaning process involving pouring bleach through it all. lengthy and time consuming, but good to do this every so often anway, and what is life if not a learning process. realised we can get online for 2 hours a day for free at starbucks as long as we spend $5 a month there - we can sit outside it in monty and log on too - this was a good thing to find out as there are starbuckses everywhere here, and while i would always rather go to a local independent coffee place, we are a bit restricted by mainly being on highways en route to other places, and thus it makes life easier as starbuckses tend to be in those out of town shopping areas and easy to spot. we have wasted a fair few hours wandering/driving around trying to get online to do work.
we followed a man who told us he was driving to oakhurst, which was where we needed to be. he stopped and said he had to go a different way, but pointed out the way we had to go. this was very helpful as it was all windy little roads, that weren’t marked on our map. our map is bent and wrinkled and full of holes, it has had 5 weeks of being intensely peered at and studied, and folded and unfolded and sellotaped up and highlighted with a highlighter pen. i think i could now draw from memory a pretty good rendering of central california, like one of those people with asperger’s who can draw whole cityscapes from memory with not a window out of place. i wonder how many windows would have to be out of place for the drawing to go from being amazingly life like to just a pretty good attempt, but not significantly impressive due to a certain percentage of the windows being out of place. i read that they are trying to do away with the term asperger’s, and make the whole autism thing a sliding scale system of a diagnosis, rather than using specific terminology with a specific list of symptoms. this is interesting, probably lots of people have slight autism in a way, i used to have to make sure that all the lights in the house were off before i sat down to eat dinner. this is probably 1% autistic. i will monitor this on return to life in an actual house, here in monty we don’t have that many lights, but i have noticed that what few lights we do have, i don’t like them to be on, other than where completely necessary. whenever we get a hookup, which is rare as we like to camp for free, bert likes to take advantage of this by putting all the lights on - perhaps because he is american and they like to consume electricity - and i like to ask him why all the lights are on? he says it’s because we’re paying to be hooked up to power, so we should use it. i tell him that’s ridiculous and turn them all off.
anyway, the scenery out towards oakhurst was beautiful, rolling hills and little farms and trees planted, some with tree wraps on. we stopped in coarsegold to check we were going the right way, and asked in a local shop, there were 2 girls in there and one had very big hair and lots of makeup on, like she was on her way out to a really fancy 80’s party. which was weird as there was nowhere to go in that town, plus it was only 3pm. it was almost halloween by then, but i think it would be pushing it to have complimented her on her costume. it was strange nonetheless, and noteworthy, so i noted it down.
i looked at all the trees we went past on the side of the road, and wondered what they all are, then thought how it doesn’t really matter what they are, basically they are trees, and at some point in time they became categorised into families and types and genuses, but even if i did know what their names were, it wouldn’t change the fact that they were beautiful trees with trunks and leaves and branches. what i mean is, i always want to know what things are, or where they come from, or other manifestations of wanting to categorise things, but really this knowledge never stays in my head or enhances or changes the actual thing it refers to, that thing is still just that thing no matter what we call it or how we classify it. a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, kind of thing.
we found a really good thrift shop in oakhurst on friday morning after a very good meeting we’d had there. this thrift shop reminded me of the weekend junk market in crystal palace, and hanging out there on cold autumn days, and then having coffee, and i became a bit overwhelmed with nostalgia for a while. they had a whole outside section but most of the things in it were a bit grotty and covered in leaves and dust. we splashed out and bought an oven dish, and i got 2 books - pygmalion by bernard shaw, and a book about existentialism, from dostoevsky to sartre. i always thought existentialism was a philosophical movement based on existence (i hadn‘t got any further than that in my thinking) (and actually thinking about it now, aren‘t all philosophical movements based on existence?), but apparently it refers to philosophers whose ideas resist categorisation in the major genres of philosophy, and that the only thing that binds them together is that they resist being bound to anything. i haven’t read much of this book as it’s pretty heavy going, so i think i haven’t even understood what little i’ve read, and stand to be corrected. oh by the way, mum - they played love potion number 9 on the radio while we were in the thrift store - mum had a band with her brother chris and they made a record which was a cover of love potion number 9 on one side, and i think apache by the shadows on the other?
i saw an advert for 5 foot long sandwiches at subway, the sandwich shop, which made me gasp that anyone could need a sandwich 5 feet long. then i realised it said $5 for foot long sandwiches. which even still seemed excessive, but maybe i’ve never measured the sandwiches i eat, and maybe a foot long sandwich isn’t that crazy. i think it’s just you don’t normally measure sandwiches, let alone in the unit of feet. i think america is based on a concept of the bigger the better though, and that is probably why they do it. i might integrate it in to our everyday life - well bert for dinner tonight you can either have 17 feet of spaghetti with half a gallon of sauce, or 3 10 inch hotdogs in 12 inch bread buns and with 3 ounces of ketchup and half a foot of chopped onion. for pudding we will have 3 feet of ice cream, rolled up in a spherical shape with 2.5 feet of chocolate sauce on it. i will let you know how this system goes.
weekend the second, 23rd october
we drove up to yosemite from oakhurst, on long windy roads, gaining in altitude, making monty huff and puff. the trees were exquisitely colorful and we were feeling happy after our positive meeting that morning, and our thrift shop and the thought of a weekend in yosemite. in yosemite is the largest ever monolith, el capitan, which i can’t remember how high it is now, maybe 8000 feet? people rock climb up it, and they take a few days over this, and have to camp out on the rockface, by attaching their sleeping bags in to d-rings in the rock face and just hang there and sleep. bert used to hang glide in yosemite, and they had to be on the ground by 9am, before the meadows got busy with people, and as he glid by the face of el capitan (el cap for short, for those in the know), he shouted good morning to one of the climbers pegged into the rock. this freaked the climber right out and if he wasn’t securely attached, i’m sure he would’ve wobbled out of bed and right off the rock face, in which case i wouldn’t be telling this story as it’s not the kind of thing i would want you to know about bert, that he had inadvertently killed someone. anyway he didn’t, so that’s fine. there is another huge rock here called half dome, which is a half dome. the rocks here are curiously formed, they are all domes, or half domes, or their walls have remnants of where dome shaped rocks have been there and later fallen off, leaving semi circular marks. we peered up to try and see climbers, but you need binoculars, or a camera with a really good zoom. we looked through someone else’s binoculars - the world looks so rosy looking through someone else’s binoculars - and sure enough we saw some climbers.
friday night we couldn’t get a camping spot in any of the campgrounds in yosemite, so we left and parked a few miles outside in a layby (or pull out as they call them here, or turnaround). this was by a river, we ate huge burgers for dinner (maybe half a foot thick in places) and put the generator on and put on some music - a rare treat as we never have enough electricity, bert danced a bit after dinner which was amusing as there isn’t much space in monty for dancing.
saturday we got up early early to go back and secure a camping spot for the next 2 nights. i made coffee and bert went and queued up. actually that is a mis-recollection. i actually went back to sleep, and bert both made coffee and went and got in the queue. bert met david in the queue, who is a really cool guy from bodega bay, which is a place further north than san francisco on the coast. he takes pictures with an old field camera - i mentioned him in an earlier blog. he takes big black and white pictures with a field camera, like ansel adams. we have since been to his house and seen his photos and met his lovely girlfriend heidi, but that will come later in the blog. we agreed to meet up with him later in part 2 of the campsite reservation system queue, at 3pm. then we went off to glacier point to look at the view and the mountains, this was amazing, and we found where bert used to launch gliders and he had a funny turn of wanting to jump off and fly it all again as it was such a perfect flying day. i told him not to as he wasn’t attached to a glider so it wouldn’t be safe. we saw 3 red corvettes all parked next to each other near monty. at 3pm we had to go back to the camping reservation place to secure our campsite - basically you go at 6am to get on the list for cancellations for the day, then you go back at 3pm and they call out the names in order of who got there first at 6am, and you go up and book a site if one has become available. bert was first on the list, and got a round of applause when they called his name, and he went to get his little ticket that had a big number 1 on it. he looked very proud. so we managed to get 2 nights in the upper pines campground. david got number 2 in the queue and got a campsite near ours.
that evening we went to see a film by a famous climber called ron kauk, who is now sponsored by patagonia, the outdoor company. he talked a bit too about it all, he has spent his whole life climbing, mainly in yosemite, but all over the place. watching him climb was like watching a dance, all properly choreographed and thought out, really super impressive - you have to be very strong and supple to be a climber, and obviously not scared of it. i can’t imagine the attraction of climbing up huge rock faces for days on end, but i did do a bit of climbing when at school and enjoyed it. it makes your hands and wrists shake after a while, but there’s something pretty cool about climbing up a big rock i guess. ron said it’s nice because your life slows down to just being about literally the next move you’re going to make, where to place your hands and feet is all you worry about. you have to be in harmony with the rock and with nature and all things are connected. it was all very interesting food for thought, kind of buddhist ideas about connection and harmony and using what we have in nature and feeling part of it rather than separate from it. he said that children these days have nature deficit disorder and he is working with some places to educate children about nature and the outdoors etc. bert went to speak to him afterwards and told him about hang gliding - ron said he wouldn’t dare do that as there is no safety rope. ha ha. and of course bert knew someone that ron used to know too, who was a hang glider pilot too - this guy had taken ron flying somewhere round yosemite.
on sunday we had breakfast in monty with david, i made pancakes, which went down a treat. then we went and looked at david’s camera, when you look through it the image is upside down - it is basically a pinhole camera, and you put those big glass negatives in it and it takes a picture. all these new fangled digital slr cameras do the same thing, but just packaged differently, it is still 3 things you control - the aperture, the exposure and the shutter speed. i have never learnt properly about photography, i basically understand it, but haven’t ever had a proper slr camera to practise it with. it is on my list of things to do one day in the future. bert and i then cycled to the ansel adams gallery and looked at the amazing photos there, then looked at yosemite falls, which is the 5th highest waterfall in the world. we met david at ahwahnee lodge and had some beers and showed him photos of belize. ahwahnee lodge is this really beautiful old lodge in the park, it has huge high ceilings and old rugs and paintings in big frames, and huge wooden beams and a picture of john muir meeting teddy roosevelt. if you are an ahwahnee guest you get free tea and coffee - we would have exploited this except you had to show your room key and obviously we didn’t have one. so we just sat and soaked up the atmosphere and pretended for a few hours that we were rich and swanky and could pay $400 a night to stay here. in reality we paid $1.50 for a beer and weren’t rich and swanky at all. a man was playing the piano there which added to the loveliness. then we got the shuttle bus back to our campsite, which was also exciting as i haven’t taken public transport for a long while as it doesn’t exist in america generally. that’s not entirely true, but it just isn’t as widespread, lots of places you need to own your own car to get around, which makes me appreciate all the buses and trains and trams we have in england. also i have come to realise how lucky we are to have the nhs, and what a great achievement this is. all these things i used to take for granted, i now look at slightly differently. another thing i’ve always taken for granted is the oldness of england and all the history it has - this isn’t the same for the whole of the world. it’s so easy to take it all for granted or think of it as nothing special, and to be more interested in going off to see the world and all its wonders. really there are enough wonders in england to last a lifetime, it’s ironic that it takes a big trip away to bring that home, the longer i’ve been away the more i’ve realised what an interesting and varied and beautiful place england is. maybe after being home for a week i won’t be thinking that, it may be greener grass syndrome, we’ll see….
we saw a sign in the park saying watch out for lightning as it kills more people per year than any other weather related phenomenon. i can’t actually believe this is true, not these days with hurricanes and tsunamis and floods. maybe it was an old sign and it was true when they first made it?
david came for dinner and we made roasted chicken and potatoes in our new oven dish, which worked well. david once hung out with indians in the navajo area in utah, it reminded me of dances with wolves when he told us that, because after a while he got kind of integrated into their tribe and invited to places with them. him and bert told stories, they are the same age so that was interesting. it took a while for the chicken and potatoes to cook in the new oven dish, but it was worth the wait.
we heard bears in the campsite in the night, they are a nightly pest there and if you are camping in a tent you have to have your food locked up in a locker at your site.. the bears will come in and try to get in your car if you leave food in there, or in the trash to look for food too. i was glad to be in monty and not in a tent while there were bears around the place, but i think it’s really quite commonplace and not a real danger when they visit. on monday we left yosemite and drove to oakdale for the next week of work. lots of leaves were falling from the trees as we drove along, and with the sun on them they looked like little flecks of gold. i tried to video them, but some things resist being captured on video it seems.
week the third, 26th october onwards
we went from oakdale to sacramento this week. we laughed at a sign on the highway that says speed enforced by aircraft. bert said imagine an aeroplane landing on the highway and stopping and handing out a speeding ticket, then flying off again. i guess they fly above watching for people speeding then report back to head office, and they send out a little speeding ticket man in a car to hand the ticket out. seems a bit excessive to involve aircraft in this whole process. they haven’t gone for the zillions of cctv cameras down the highways like we have in England for some reason. perhaps they had a influx of trained pilots and need jobs for them all.
bert bought asparagus and some portobello mushrooms as he’d found a recipe for fajitas with asparagus and portobello mushrooms - it was nice, we gave it 9/10. we camped out at an airport in oakdale which was near our appointment in the morning. we saw an albatross plane there, that a man was restoring - this is a sea plane, it has a really big fat belly so it can land in the sea. it was blue and white and we took loads of photos of it with the sun setting behind it. then the mosquitoes came out and bit us to death which wasn’t very nice. a button fell off my coat, the very button i’d toiled over with my needle and thread. i made up my mind to take the coat to a proper tailor and choose 6 whole new buttons, as the 2 new buttons didn’t match the 3 existing buttons anyway. we wondered about how come time goes so fast, and imagine in not too long, the beatles will be 100 years old, and people will still listen to them i’m sure, but they’ll be like the equivalent of us listening to music now that is from the early 1900s which seems like eons ago. time just marches on and on without ever stopping, it’s so strange. and the more aware we are of this, the faster it seems to go, you try to slow it down but you just can’t. and who knows how long you will live, so who knows how much you should be trying to cram in or not in to however much time you do or don’t have left.
this week i booked my flight home which was quite a momentous event. as soon as i had done it i immediately thought oh no what have i done, that will mean the end of my adventure. but i don’t think it will, and i really want to go home for christmas, and who knows what will happen after that? it’s not worth worrying about it all. i booked my flight with ken, who i used to work with when i worked at bunac, which is a company that organises work visas for america and canada, and camp america programmes etc. they now do volunteer things to places like costa rica too i see. i worked in the flight and insurance department booking people’s flights and insurances, as you would expect in that department. ken was, and still is, the in house travel agent. he knows lots about south america, and he has a brazilian wife, and he once was on a flight with icelandair (which is who i’ve booked my flights with), and there was a man across the aisle from him who during the flight slowly removed all his clothes until he was naked. i hope this doesn’t happen on my flight. i think. anyway bert is coming too, we booked that flight too, so if there was a naked man on the plane i probably won’t be allowed to look at him. anyway you can book flights (naked or otherwise) through ken too by calling him or emailing him or looking on his website which is: http://www.gsworld-travel.co.uk/, or ken@gsworld-travel.com. he is very helpful.
we saw the exact same identical model motorhome to monty, built in the same year, just a few months later (they have a little stamp on their sides saying month/year of manufacture). we rang the man who had this one for sale, and talked to him about it, he was selling it for twice what we paid for ours. we didn’t tell him that, but it’s good to know that if we wanted to sell monty (*sob*), california would be the place to do it. i hope she doesn’t get wind of this, because maybe she’ll become like hal the onboard computer in space odyssey which i’ve just finished reading. i’m sure you know the film, but basically hal the computer becomes emotionally aware, which he’s not meant to be, and the guilt he feels over knowing the real reason for their mission to saturn leads him to start killing off the crew members as he doesn’t know how else to process the feelings he’s having other than by getting rid of the things making him feel guilty. i hope monty hasn’t read the same book and got any ideas. we will keep a close watch to look for signs of sabotage.
we went through another dust storm this week and had to stop in monty as we couldn’t see anything except dust. it was very windy which isn’t good for driving monty in, she blows around a bit. i think it would take some really fast winds to actually blow her over though so i try not to worry. we did our laundry in an actual laundry at a campsite we stayed at, wow what an amazing time and effort saving invention the washing machine and drying maching is, it felt like such a treat. normally we just hand wash our clothes in a bucket which sloshes around as we drive along, then put it on rinse mode which is the same bucket without bubbles in it, then it gets hung up in the shower. it works really well actually.
wednesday we had to go visit an existing customer in northern sacramento, who wasn’t happy with some of his tree wraps. i won’t go in to too much detail but basically this was a strange day of measuring sections of tree wraps to see if they met with the standards they were meant to - kind of post production quality control. it was long winded, and essentially an exercise in the customer proving they are always right, no matter how psychopathic they are. after this we went to a place called lodi and met a new customer and we took him out for dinner and had a cool time, drank wine and played liar’s dice (also known as perudo) - i was out first as i’m obviously not a good enough liar. we camped out in the garden of the man we’d taken out for dinner, who lived by a river, which was very beautiful and we took photos of it.
we went to see doug and kt, they have the caribbean island broker company that sells caribbean islands mainly in belize, and bert had taken doug flying to take photos of the islands whilst in belize. they live just outside sacramento, in a really nice house, with a huge fish tank, a cinema room complete with a popcorn making machine and sweets, and a ms pacman arcade game. they have 3 children, kevin, hayley and matt. hayley showed us her biology project which was a lot of bugs pinned to a box. she still needed to find an earwig for it. kt’s dad was there too, he’s called terry, and had been doing jury service that day, but nothing too exciting, just a fraudulent cheque case. we had dinner with them and looked round their house and the garage where doug is doing up an old triumph car. it’s purple which i liked but it’s going to be green later. and kt has a car that when unlocks itself by sensing that you are close and have the key in your hand, you don’t even need to press the key or anything. pretty clever huh. the next day we went bowling with them, as we had been talking about bowling (terry and kt go bowling every week) and found out that bert had never ever gone bowling before - which i find hard to believe after all the things he’s done in his life. i suppose he was too busy doing crazy things, and didn’t have time for a normal safe sport like bowling. typically, he got about 7 strikes, so he obviously has a natural inclination for bowling. though at one point he fell right over with the ball still in his hand, which was funny. i got 1 strike, and came last in both games. kt had her own bowling ball which is pretty cool, and he own shoes. we wore those bright orange and yellow ones that they loan you there. all in all it was really good fun. the last time i went bowling i was pretty drunk so it wasn’t impressive, i think this time was a slight improvement.
weekend the third, 30th october
we drove to san francisco and went to see jen and joe, who live in redwood which is south of san francisco. jen is my friend from america who i met at leeds university where she came to study for one year. she got married to joe last year, he is from detroit. i had met up with them in guadalajara last year, pretty much the same time of year. jen is now pregnant too, which is very exciting, she is due in january. they don’t know the gender of the baby yet, as it had its legs crossed last time they went for a scan.
we went for mexican food, then to watch joe play in an ice hockey match. ice hockey is big in america, it looks pretty dangerous and fast, you have to be a good ice skater to do it, but apparently they take anyone in some of the leagues, even people who can’t even skate and have never skated before. hmm seems an odd choice of sport if that is the case. sadly joe’s team lost. we sat and watched and jen told us about when she was training for her half marathon and she’d wrongly calibrated her pedometer thing the whole time she was training, but didn’t realise, so when she did the race, according to her pedometer she’d ran half of it and then she looked at the mile sign and she was only about a third of the way along. jeez what a bummer, but pretty amusing. jen is making a recipe box out of wood, and carving it with their name on, she is also making quilts, which she showed us and they are really cool. i’m hoping she’ll make one for us to use in monty, but she might run out of time before the baby is born, it’s due january 26th. joe is building a motorbike.
so on saturday jen and joe gave us a big tour of san francisco which was really cool, it’s a nice city, if i had to choose a place to live in the states it’d probably be here. it reminded me a bit of brighton, which is also hilly. first we went on lombard street, that windy cobbly street, that was cool (we were in jen and joe’s car, not in monty, monty wouldn’t have thought that street was cool, she would have got stuck), then we looked at a diego rivera mural, then we went to fisherman’s wharf. at fisherman’s wharf there are lots of cool shops, and more importantly a whole load of sealions, which just hang out there on these pallets in the water. they are the strangest thing i’ve ever seen, they lie around sliding around on top of each other, making funny barking noises, then one of them will plop into the water and have a little swim, maybe to cool down, then sludge himself back up on to the other sealions, or not if he fails and flops back in, to the amusement of everyone watching. they seem to be sleeping and snoring here, perhaps as a kind of rest period before going back in the sea long term. they arrived there after the 1989 earthquake in san francisco and stayed due to a plentiful herring population. some of them migrate to the channel islands during the summer months, that’s the channel islands near 300 miles south of san francisco, not the ones in the english channel.
after this sealion weirdness we went to have some clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl, ie the bowl you eat your chowder in is also the bread, so you can eat it afterwards and it’s all soupy and warm and nice. next we looked at a sock shop and bought jen some stripy socks, and bert bought some socks that were touted as socks that made you feel like you are walking on a cloud. he had cold feet so had to put them on with his sandals, which is always a good look. i suppose after a while of wearing them, these socks would be more like walking on fog. i have tried them, and they are really soft and cloudlike. next we went to the golden gate bridge, which was covered in fog, so we couldn’t see it. then the fog lifted and we could see it. then the fog came back and we couldn’t see it. it carried on like that for most of the time, we walked all the way across it. we saw alcatraz too, sometimes, then sometimes we didn’t, then sometime we did. and lots of boats too, and a huge big tanker with crates on it, i don’t know what was in them though. apparently they paint the golden gate bridge the whole time, when they finish at one end, they start the other end again. what a strange and probably boring job. we figured out how they paint the cables that go up and down it vertically, there is a little machine which goes on the cables and has paintbrushes inside it, and they paint the cables as they go up and down them. clever. i asked why it is called golden gate when it’s not painted gold, joe said it’s because that area of water was called the golden gate, long before the bridge was there. you’d think, knowing that, that they would have therefore have painted it golden. perhaps golden paint is very expensive though, i would imagine it is.
after this we went to fort funston which is a hang gliding site. bert bumped into an old hang gliding buddy, eves tall chief, because bert always bumps into people he knows everywhere we go, as you all know by now. i think perhaps bert is a semi famous person. they weren’t gliding that day as the wind was non existent so we looked at the view for a while. nearby to here there was a big old bus parked by the sea, it was all painted black apart from 5 big white letters on the front which said NIAYH. i wondered what that meant. then down the side of the bus i saw it said NOW IS ALL YOU HAVE. i thought that was pretty cool and an interesting motto. and quite true. i just looked it up online and it turns out they are a band, and that was their tour bus, you can see their website and listen to their music, which is kind of jazzy and cool - http://www.niayh.com/message.php
we then went to ashbusy haight, which is where hippieness basically started in the 70s. bert had been there but only briefly, not to hang out there as a hippie, he was too busy becoming famous and flying and doing wrigley’s adverts and things. these days, it’s a cool area to hang out, but isn’t insanely hippiefied. has cool shops and bars and things, we went for a beer in a kind of english pub type place. we all got id-d, as is the custom in america, i always forget to take my id with me, and obviously as i look about 12 there’s no way they’re not going to id me - today thankfully i had my driving licence with me in my bag. it seems the policy in some places is to id anyone under the age of 40. the coolest 2 things we saw in ashbury haight was firstly tons of old 10 speed bicycles, which heightened my resolve to restore my falcon one, as it’s so cool. and also a guy who’d set up a little desk and chair on the street, he was all smartly dressed in an old style suit, and neatly combed afro, with another guy sitting on the pavement playing (or maybe just tuning up) his guitar. the guy at the desk had an amazing old blue olivetti typewriter, with white keys, and a little suitcase on the floor with a sign on it saying choose a price and a subject, and get a poem. how super cool is that. there was always a queue for his poems, so we didn’t get a chance to get one, and we wondered if all his poems were essentially the same, and what the quality difference was between a 1 dollar one or a 10 dollar one. if i ever go back there i will see if he’s still there and get one, then put on a disguise and get another one, and so on, and compare them to see if it’s the same poem just recycled for different people.
we ate an ice cream, and went back to jen and joe’s for pizza, and to answer the door to little halloween trick or treaters. seems like i missed out a whole important part of growing up, as i don’t remember ever going trick or treating, or having any trick or treaters visiting us at home. our house is pretty scary and up a cobbly little path and people who live around the area probably think it’s a loony asylum (it‘s not far off), thus they don’t visit it even to get sweets. we looked at jen and joe’s wedding photos which were really cool, they got married last year and went on honeymoon to costa rica which looks ace too. we showed them some photos of belize and our glacier park hiking trip, one of which was me standing in lake with my trousers rolled up and jen said what are those on your legs are they ug boots? then realised that they were actually just my legs. obviously my legs are kind of fat and furry and pale coloured. we ate some jolly ranchers after our pizza, and looked at the recipe box in the making, and the garage with tons of tools and motorbike bits in it, then went back to sleep in monty who we’d parked up the street by a nice park.
sunday we had french toast with jen and joe, which was really yummy. joe printed out very clear instructions how to get back through san francisco, as we were now headed north and they live south of there, and off we went. it was really cool to see them again after seeing them last year and before that not seeing much of each other as obviously we live in different countries.
we drove back over golden gate bridge, which wasn’t at all foggy today. we drove up to calistoga, which is in the napa valley area, which is where there are tons of vineyards. calistoga is a spa town and we found a fairly cheap campground which had internet which is always a nice treat. we cycled around and found a really nice food shop and treated ourselves to buffalo mozzarella so we could make a tricolore salad with an avacado we had and some tomatoes too. i remember when mum first discovered this salad, after a trip to italy i guess, and we had it ALL the time. it must have brought back nice memories for her, but it made us a bit sick of mozzarella after a while. we never told her at the time, but i think enough time has passed to bring it up now. the best thing mum makes, actually she makes tons of nice food, but the all time best is her banoffee pie, i can’t wait to get home for that. hint hint mum it’d be really great if when i get home in december there is a welcome committee of a giant banoffee pie at the airport, in fact perhaps you can dress as one and wait at the arrival gate like that?
anyway, we went to check out the prices of the hot springs at one of the spas in calistoga on sunday night, and asked the man behind the desk - george (i read it on his badge) - lots of questions about the mud baths, and what a happy feet massage was (self explanatory really), and he gave us a tour of the mud baths, which looked great, you sit in a hot load of mud for 10 minutes and go all hot and muddy, then have a scrub, and a massage and then a rest. george and i talked about england, he said he liked my boston accent ha ha. we said we’d come back at 7pm for the 10 dollar hot springs until they close at 9pm. this was only half an hour away. or so we thought until george informed us the clocks had gone back last night, so it was actually 5.30 not 6.30 now. oops this is the 2nd time this has happened to us. anyway i went back in to see if i could leave my bag there while we went off cycling, and he grabbed me and said he would let us both in now for free for the rest of the evening; he slapped a little bracelet on my wrist and told me in a whisper to go and get my friend. so i went and got my friend (bert) and he got his bracelet, and we got our towels in we went. what a treat this was, it was the best hot springs i’ve ever had, as anything free tends to be the best thing ever. he even brought us free bottles of water. what a random act of really nice kindness, he had obviously figured we weren’t exactly rolling in the dollars, and had a sudden urge of generosity. it really amazed me and also when things like that happen to you, you want to pass the gesture on and do nice things for other people, it has a positive circle affect, i think everyone should indulge in one random act of kindness per day and imagine the butterfly affect it could have on the world, before long everyone could be all happy and smiling. when we got home we had some coffee ice cream, which made it pretty much the most perfect evening ever.
week the fourth, november 2nd onwards
this week we were in the napa valley all week, which is calistoga, napa, sonoma, santa rosa etc. there are acres upon acres of vineyards, some with tree wraps, some without. this week i learnt that a vineyard generally produces good grapes for 20-30 years, depending on the grape, apparently some can be good for up to 100 years. obviously market preferences can mean that you may not necessarily keep your vineyard for that amount of years - if you are growing merlot grapes and suddenly chardonnay ones are all the rage, then you would maybe pull up your merlots and replant chardonnays. i don’t know much about wine at all, apart from that if you pay around 10 dollars or more a bottle it will probably be quite nice, and if you pay around 5 dollars it probably won’t. i know that malbec is nice, from argentina, and i once liked one called valpolicella, and merlot is generally fine. what a heathen i am, and here i am working in the vineyard business. grapes of wrath indeed.
we cycled to see a potential customer down the road from calistoga, then cycled to an italian castle winery just up the road. this castle was built and designed by a guy who had made his money from the winery he owned in italy already. there was a video showing of him talking about how he did it all, he had a fairly red nose and red eyes so i concluded he was a big wine drinker, probably an occupational hazard of being in this business. it was a very impressive castle, i almost felt like i was back in europe. we picked some grapes and ate them on the way out. i’m surprised they have any grapes left as everyone must do this on the way past all those lines of vines growing. on the way back to monty we were cycling along merrily when bert spotted a hawk on the other side of the road and started pointing and telling me to look. this frenzied pointing carried on right up until he clipped my back wheel and went flying to the floor. i turned round as i heard the commotion, to see him hit the dusty gravelly ground, at quite a speed. i immediately braked and about turned and found him sitting on the floor telling me there was a hawk we had to see because it had caught a mouse. i think he was in shock but we walked along to look and the hawk had gone. bert was ok, and once we had ascertained he was ok, i let myself giggle a little bit. soon my giggling had turned into all out laughter. i generally pride myself on not being one of those people who burst out laughing at other people’s misfortune, but this was quite comical. if he had been seriously injured, i really wouldn’t have been laughing at all. he had some cuts and scrapes which we inspected later and they weren’t serious, so i continued the laughing for quite a while and into the next day too. sorry bert.
we looked in bike shop in calistoga which had some pretty cool road bikes, we asked them about upgrading my falcon bike, which i wish in retrospect that i had done, as today it pretty much stopped working. i don’t know all the technical names of things, but the back gear changer mechanism got embroiled somehow in the spokes of the back wheel and it all seized up and is now unridable, unless we get a whole new back cassette and chain and maybe wheel. which for a 10 dollar bike seems slightly excessive. but it’s a such a cool bike, so i’m still thinking what to do with it…
another thing we did this week in amongst working, was to visit the air museum in santa rosa. this was pretty cool, they had tons of planes there, and 2 helicopters, one was a huey, the ones that became really famous during vietnam, and it had lucy in the sky with diamonds painted on the side. it was kind of chilling to see a helicopter that had actually served in vietnam, it made my spine shiver. imagine it taking all those poor young soldiers off to a war that they shouldn‘t have been fighting - we peered in the windows and saw the little makeshift chairs, and imagined the soldiers all crammed in there, before descending on ladders to vietnam below and knowing that the likelihood of them surviving it was tiny. bert served during vietnam, but never got sent there thankfully apart from that time when he did called up but it was the other robert combs on the base. he is lucky like that. he said each week on the base where he was in wichita kansas, they showed scenes filmed straight from the battlefields in vietnam, supposedly to boost morale and kindle patriotism and a desire to fight the good fight or whatever, but in fact it just scared the crap out of them all.
at the museum was a t38 tiger, which is like a tiny rocket, with a really short wingspan, they train astronauts in it. bert once won airman of the month (he was an air traffic controller, and only just learning to fly little cessnas in his spare time there), and as a reward he could choose which plane to have a flight in. he chose the t38. the pilot came along, who was only 22, bert was only 18, and strapped him in with the warning that he don’t touch any of the buttons, and trust the seatbelt, and to make grunting noises to help fill your lungs up when all the g force kicked in. eeek. bert was seated up front in the little bubble cockpit (it only had space for 2, and the pilot sat behind). so he had a clear view right down the runway, as the plane fired up and zoomed along with massive engine noise from the rocket engines, accelerated up to 2000mph and banked vertically up so that all bert could see was sky sky sky rolling past, then did an upside town turn and flew straight back down towards the earth, and went upright again just in time, then proceeded to do 360 turns and all these other crazy manoeuvres. bert wasn’t sick once, he didn’t even feel sick, he probably could’ve been an astronaut in that case. wowsers. we saw an albatross plane, the same type which we had seen in oakdale at the airport we camped at there. this one was orange instead of blue. there was also a f4c phantom, f105 thunderchief, the nose cone and part of the engine of an s71 blackbird - this plane holds the speed and altitude records, it can go at 2200 mph, and at 85000 feet. bert hasn’t flown in one of these.
we camped one night out at doran beach, near bodega bay as it was near Sebastopol where we had some appointments. bert got a really good fire going and we were sitting around it, when a man appeared in the half dark, stomping towards us resolutely, with something in his hand. oh my gosh what does he want we thought. then he smiled and said, here have some fire starter, it makes lighting a fire easier. oh thanks we said. as he walked away we figured that he maybe hadn’t approved of bert’s fire starting methods, which is to use newspaper/old cardboard etc to start the fire. this is totally fine, but i guess tonight’s fire had got a bit big at firest, and maybe the man was peering out of his window worrying about our safety. anyway it was a nice random act of kindness, and we shouldn’t assign any ulterior motives to it, like he was trying to subtly tell us off. tonight also a foghorn went off pretty much every 5 minutes, which was slightly annoying but ok.
the 4th november was brother james’s birthday. i sent him a book from amazon about hand made bikes, which he liked and told me he is making 2 bikes at the moment, which was a fortuitous coincidence, as i had no idea. me and bert went to a very cool record shop in sebastopol, called incredible records, run by a canadian man who had tons of rock and pop memorabilia, he had aeroplane tickets of the beatles, and unpublished beatles photos, and a bruce springsteen jacket, and other cool things. we parked monty near our first morning’s appointment and a sheriff came to ask us what we were doing, and who were we, we had to show him monty’s papers, and he had to act all officious, i think he was probably bored and felt like intimidating some people. we weren’t intimidated, but he did ask a lot of questions. we went wine tasting laster today as we had been working hard and needed some fun. we went at the castle as it was only 10 dollars each for a tour of the castle and 5 wine tastes. last time we’d gone there to have a look at it from the outside, we had bought a 1 dollar little chocolate, when i took it to the desk to pay, the man had to put someone on hold on the phone for me to buy it which i felt a bit bad about as it was only a little 1 dollar chocolate in this big swanky castle. wine tasting was fun, i felt drunk after the first 2 tastes, but continued bravely on for the remaining 3. it is so nice to drink proper wines, so different from cheapo ones. we splashed out and bought a bottle for my impending birthday. i haven’t seen it since, i can only assume that bert has either hidden or drunk it. we also splashed out on another hot spring visit, and then slept in monty outside the spa on a little road. it is really cool to get away with parking for free on the road - we had met a policeman there one day and asked him about parking here and he said no way, they’re always patrolling it and we’d get moved along. they must have had a busy night fighting some actual crimes that night as we didn’t see anyone around there.
on the 5th november, we went to a wine and grape expo near napa. this was exciting, mainly because we got loads of free pens from the different stalls. we made some good contacts, which will hopefully turn into sales soon. we saw a pretty cool mobile wine bottling machine, a big complex conveyor belt and vats and switches and corks, all in the back of a truck. we didn’t see it in action but the conveyor belt was going round and round. we went for a walk in a park in napa, which had some redwood trees in it, and a bench made out of a huge tree trunk with a bear carved in one side, and a squirrel in the other. we slept by this park in monty as we liked it, and again nobody moved us along. we did actually see a lot of police in napa for some reason, but they must have been too busy with other things too. i always get a bit scared parked on the street, you never know what might happen, but we always park in a safe place and nothing has ever happened. sometimes you might hear a squirrel on the roof, or some car headlights shine in to the bedroom, but that’s as bad as it gets usually. it’s always nice to wake up in the morning and think ha! a free night’s camping.
friday we did some work related things in napa, and wandered around the town a while - it was drizzly, which i liked, but other than that it was unremarkable. there were no people around, perhaps because of the drizzle, or perhaps it is quite unpopulated. the shops seemed closed or closed down, not all of them, but enough of them for me to keep commenting on it to bert who didn’t share my interest in the matter. i started to think perhaps the town had been deserted for some reason which everyone except us knew about.
we made some huevos rancheros and had a big ‘discussion’ about whether you are supposed to use scrambled or fried eggs. i said fried, as i’m sure most mexicans do, but bert said (and made) scrambled. either way they are all eggs, but it seemed vitally important at the time, so i made bert make me some fried eggs too even though he had just made a ton of scrambled ones which he then had to eat. i think you‘re only meant to have 1 egg per day, bert had 4 that morning.
weekend the fourth, 6th november
friday we drove up to see david and heidi in bodega bay. we hadn’t met heidi before, she was really nice, as we had expected. she is a nurse, and works in medical imaging. they have a really cool house, overlooking the ocean, and 2 cats and 1 dog. the cats are called charlie and cats, and the dog is called zoe. they are very sweet, zoe would be a good sized and well behaved dog for living in monty with us, but we didn’t take her with us as that would have been rude. charlie the cat seemed to like me, perhaps he could sense that at home i have a cat called charlie too. they look similar except david and heidi’s charlie is all black whereas ours has white socks and a little white bit on his head, if i remember rightly. we watched the fog lift and the ocean and rocks appear, and went for a short walk on the beach. how cool to live right there on the ocean, the waves were big today, bigger than usual, perhaps they wanted to put on a good show for us. we looked at david’s photos, which are really amazing, black and white and of rocks and mountains and landscapes, and some that you can’t quite figure out what they are. he said he likes the ambiguity and watching people trying to figure out exactly what a photo is, because really it doesn’t matter, it’s more about the beauty of the picture itself and the reaction it provokes, not just the identifying of what or where it is or when it was taken. he said people like to be able to categorise things, and get cross if they can’t. if he had a website i would put a link to it, but at the moment he doesn’t unfortunately. they cooked us a really lovely salmon dinner. we showed heidi round monty, she really liked her. we showed them the video of bert’s water gliding operation he had in lake havasu, and a dvd called south to south which is 2 ultralight pilots who travel from buenos aires, over the andes, up central and north america, across the north atlantic to greenland then to scotland, then through europe, down through spain to morocco, down all the way to south africa. what a trip. bert had met them at an air show in florida, one is swiss, the other south african. they said the best thing about their big trip was their great friendship. that’s a nice thing.
some issues that arose whilst visiting david and heidi, is that i don’t know anything about england. i am pretty sure we don’t have bears there, i don’t think we have any animals that can kill people. did we used to have bears though? does europe have bears? and what about all that history stuff, i mean there’s a lot of it so i couldn’t be expected to know all the answers, but seriously i don’t know any of them. can anyone recommend a good english history book? i’m starting to think i’m not english at all. any knowledge i do have of england is from films, so i really do think that cate blanchett was once queen of england, or that mel gibson headed the scottish resistance, or that helen mirren is the queen. hmm this is quite embarrassing, but again a good thing to have learned from my travels i think, the fact that i know nothing. in fact as i remember it, this makes me pretty wise, as this is what socrates used to say about himself, that he knew nothing. and he actually knew tons of things. anyway, if anyone knows anything i might need to know when faced with questions or comments about england in general, please feel free to share it with me.
saturday we had pancakes with david and heidi, and coffee, then set off, down highway 1. this is the highway that goes all the way down the west coast from top to bottom. it’s really beautiful, and there are tons of long distance cyclists on it. lucky them. it is very undulating too - not so lucky them. heidi told us that levi leipheimer (lance armstrong’s team mate in the tour de france this year, he broke his wrist so didn’t finish) lives nearby them and organised a bike ride for charity that went past them. how exciting, i was hoping we’d see him and could offer him a cup of tea from monty. driving along this highway reminded me of cornwall a bit, as it’s kind of windy in places, and there are cute little villages off it, by the sea, and it’s kind of quaint. again we crossed the golden gate bridge and came south through san francisco to get down to the carmel and monterey area. we went through a place called castroville which bert knowledgeably informed me is the artichoke capital of the world. we bought some artichokes therefore for dinner later. john steinbeck is from this area, from a town called salinas, which is a bit inland and sadly we didn’t get there to see the museum. in monterey is the street called cannery row - it used to have a big tin cannery factory on it, thus the name. they would work for 14 hour days stuffing sardines into cans and packaging them all up. soon, they had fished all the sardines out of the sea, so it all pretty much closed down.
we stayed that night in monterey at a cheap campsite after driving monty around downtown to check it out. it seemed like a really nice town, i saw a few pubs and nice looking shops, and a university department of international languages. for dinner we had our artichokes and some salmon we had got too in bodega bay. i have only ever experienced artichokes pickled in jars, artichoke hearts. but you can cook the whole things, with all the leaves, and you cook it until it’s soft soft, then one by one you take off its leaves and dip them either in melted butter or mayonaisse and then eat the fleshy bit of the leaf. you do this with each leaf, which as they get closer to the heart become more and more meatier with artichoke. then you scoop out some spikey bits and then eat the heart, which is so tasty. bert had used to live in monterey, so he knew all about artichokes. bert lived on 17 mile drive which is a really swanky area, he had a job selling porsches, and he often was salesman of the month and was really good at selling the porsches, so he had a nice house here, we drove to look at it, and it was pretty cool, in a little community off 17 mile drive, which is the road that goes from monterey to carmel. carmel is a little town on the beach, the beach rises steeply from the sea into the town almost. there are lots of boutique shops and swanky tie shops where bert used to buy his ties for work at the porsche shop. clint eastwood has a bar there and we had a drink in it, clint wasn’t there, but if he had been bert was going to say hello clint eastwood, you had dinner at my house when i was 8 because my dad was building you a house in carmel, but you probably don’t remember me.
on sunday also we went to monterey aquarium, which was amazing. they have seahorses, and jellyfish, and otters, which we saw being fed. they had tunas - did you know they fetch $100,000, just for one tuna, because there is so much demand from the sushi market. wowee. i might go and try to catch one. they had sharks, an octopus, mackerel, barracuda, dorado (aka mahi mahi), a kelp forest, some birds and other things. the jellyfish were incredible, some of them had flashing electric lights going along them, pulsating different colours - blue, green, yellow - it’s kind of mind blowing all that life down there in the oceans, it’s so bizarre some of it. there are there little pipe fish, that are literally just like little bits of pipe cleaner, with a snout. they are related to seahorses. we filled in a survey about the aquarium when we left, and we got a free ticket for the aquarium as a reward. perhaps they could have given us that before we came in, would’ve been more helpful. if anyone would like this free ticket, let me know - it’s worth $30, so it’s a good deal, but i can’t think of anyone i know who has told me they plan on visiting the monterey bay aquarium any time before 31st december 2010.
sunday night we camped at big sur, further south down highway 1. it was a nice campsite in the forest off the highway. we spoke briefly to a danish man who had a westfalia camper, and said he was planning on going over the bering strait in winter when it was frozen up. this sounds interesting, i hope he doesn’t fall in it. if he’d have done it 10,000 years or so ago he would have had an easier time as it was land then as the continents hadn’t split apart. we went to the henry miller library which was nearby, this was a very cool bookshop, and i got a book by italo svevo called zeno’s conscience. i’ve never heard of him, but it’s so far pretty good, a kind of autobiography of a made up person. the author is from trieste where he at one point got english lessons from james joyce who happened to be living there trying to earn a living teaching and writing. they became friends and joyce encouraged svevo to keep writing as he liked his stuff. he only wrote 3 books, all self published, and late in his life people started taking notice of his work. his real name is ettore schmit.
week the fifth, monday 9th november onwards
our last week of work.
we saw a whole load of elephant seals on the beach on the way south from big sur. we talked to a man there about them, an elephant seal volunteer i guess his job title would be. they basically come and lie on the beach for a month, and sleep and don’t eat, and then return to their life in the sea, which involves swimming around catching and eating fish. they have been reported diving down to as far as 5000 feet. they go up to alaska. they have excess haemoglobin in their blood which they use to keep them alive when on their up to 30 minute dives for food, they can’t breathe underwater as such, they just hold their breath and use this haemoglobin. they maybe eat only 2 months of the year, so they must really cram in the food then. they can get to be 5000pounds fat, and can get up to 20mph on land. the babies grow from 30kg to 200kg in 28 days. they are like sealions, but not related, they just look similar. sealions have 4 flipper fin things that they can use more like hands, the elephant seals don’t have these, nor do they have ears. but they do that same sliding around on top of each other thing that we saw the sealions doing in san francisco, and barking and looking like giant sea slug things. they’re not exactly cute, but there is something endearing about them. not the smell though.
we went inland to paso robles, which is wine country too, near san luis Obispo. lots of swanky wineries. this area had a different feel to it, maybe a harder nut to crack business wise. we did get some good contacts here though and had some good meetings so we shall see.
also this week, i have noted down that we got the last tub of coffee ice cream from Albertsons - what a coup; i finished reading space odyssey by arthur c clarke - it was very entertaining, and like i said before, really not geeky star trek nerd kind of stuff, just an interesting escapism bit of reading, and who knows it all could be true? bert bought a toolkit; and a toaster thing you put on the stove, i had been craving toast and honey and now i can make it; we filled up monty’s batteries with water - how strange, but it fixed them, they’d been running out really fast until now. we must have put around a gallon of water in each of the 3 batteries, this seems to be contrary to my physics knowledge, i thought water and electricity didn’t mix, like you shouldn’t put a toaster in the bath? anyway another myth shattered obviously. we bought fuel cans for the roof in case we run out of fuel in the baja in mexico, and sometimes the fuel stations there don’t have fuel in apparently. i tried to prepare bert for life in england - mainly by explaining that sarcasm is not meant to offend, it’s just our sense of humour, and in fact if people are being sarcastic to you it means you have been accepted, i think. it’s a bit like mork and mindy where mindy is trying to teach mork the appropriate ways of behaving on planet earth. they just don’t do sarcasm in america.
we walked on pismo beach and saw lots of sandpipers, those cute little birds that run towards the sea, then a the tide comes in and they run back up the beach. like howcome they don’t learn that that’s going to happen? bert cooked turkey spaghetti which was really nice; we got moved along by the long arm of the law, for trying to overnight camp in walmart - normally you can, but this one you couldn’t, and as we were driving off we realised we had parked right by a big sign saying no overnight parking. we watched most of a film called the brothers bloom, which was weird but almost really good but i discovered on being interrupted by the police that i didn‘t actually care what happened so we returned it to the $1 rental machine they have in walmarts; we heard more strange carpark hovering in k-mart where we slept instead of walmart. we took our first tree wrap order, hooray, from a small nursery in newman, near where we had got into a dust storm and smelt a skunk. thursday we headed to los angeles, aka la, and went to the hilton hotel to pick up the duty free drinks we had left there accidentally on arriving there back in august via mexico. it was a bottle of kahlua and one of tequila. this made things kind of full circle which is always satisfying. we picked up the drinks from security in the hilton, from a big fat man, poor man having to sit in that lifeless little security office/cell all day every day. we peered at his cctv screens to see if he could see the spot we’d parked monty in, at the back of the hotel. we couldn’t see her there, and fat security man said we ought to get back to her as we’re not meant to park there. we spent the night there, right next to a sign saying you will be towed if you park here without authorization, this parking is for administration only. we ate re-heated turkey spaghetti by the light of a little tea light candle. nothing happened to us, we had a really good night’s sleep yet again. i must point out that bert had found some memory foam for monty’s bed, the walmart version, which is basically still memory foam but much cheaper than if you get it from a proper sleep shop called sleep center or something like that. if i had a bed shop i’d call it sleepy dust. anyway the memory foam is really good and you sleep really well on it.
friday we met up with a friend of bert’s called vic love. he is a 3d film maker, we met him in Burbank which is the area in la where all the film studios are. he film studio he works at is called 3ality. he and bert did 2 weeks of filming in hawaii a few years ago, and he had made this into 3d film now, so we got to go and watch it in the 3ality theater. it was really cool, especially one bit where bert flies right up to a cliff and does a big bank to the right, and at the end there is a dolphin jumping out of the water - a real one too not a fake one. vic is working on a project in jamaica at the moment, making a documentary about bob marley’s cousin, he is working with bob’s son ziggy marley on this. pretty cool. they showed us some other 3d stuff they’re working on, they had some english 3d film people visiting from London - one of them is the guy that made a bug’s life in 3d. he had made a short 3d film about the london eye that you get to see when you go on the london eye, when you’re waiting in the queue. so we got a sneak preview of that, it’s showing already. bert hasn’t been to england since years ago, so i’ll take him on the london eye and we’ll be able to see that film again and say we’ve already seen it in la. after all this, we went to see a christmas carol at the 3d cinema - wow, seems like 3d films are really taking off at the moment, what an exciting thing to be involved in right now. hopefully bert will do some more filming with these guys and make more flying films. there’s a 3d alice in wonderland film coming out soon, which looks awesome, and the new james cameron one called avatar - it’s been 10 years in the making apparently and looks pretty spectacular and crazy. i’m not sure my weird wonky vision lets me get the whole 3d thing as well as people who have 2 eyes that work properly, but this isn’t something i’d be able to quantify because how can i experience what someone else is seeing, you can’t it’s impossible. all i know is that i can’t do those magic eye pictures, no matter how long i try. bert says he can teach me and that i’m just not doing it properly, but my optician said i can’t.
we also whilst in burbank got to look round the hollywood hot rods studio, which is where they do up old cars, which is what a hot rod is. they have been on tv lots and in magazines and car shows, i guess if we watched tv we might have heard of them more, but we don’t. still it was pretty cool to see this. also we visited a hang gliding site at a beach in la called dockweiler beach, bert used to hang glide here, jumping off the sand dunes and soaring around. there was no one flying that morning yet.
we listened to my ipod on shuffle and amusingly we got a beethoven string quartet movement, followed paradoxically by the beatles roll over beethoven. this made me laugh. we danced to it in monty as we sat in traffic in la. we listened to hurricane by bob dylan which is a great song, and i hadn’t heard it before, i have stuff on my ipod i don’t even know is there. friday night we slept in a large car park by the road in san diego, rather inconspicuously, but there were a few other campers in there so we figured it must be ok. it was next to a golf course and there was a sign warning you not to get too close to the course in case a ball hit you.
the next day we crossed over to mexico, so i will finish this blog here, as it has been rather a long one, for which i apologise.
