Miles the day before yesterday: 5 miles by car to LAX, then 88 miles to Oceanside CA by train

Miles yesterday: 0

Miles today: 77 miles, to downtown San Diego and back by train

Miles to date: 5129

Where are we now? Oceanside, California, about thirty-five miles north of San Diego

Fun fact: If everybody had an ocean, across the USA. Then everybody’d be surfin’, like Californ–I–A. You’d see ‘em wearing their baggies. Huarachi sandals too. A bushy bushy blonde hairdo. Surfin’ USA.

The Last Few Day’s Events: Well, when we left you, we were in LA and the next day, by the time we had got up and driven back to the airport to drop off the car (not even on the freeways, but bad enough), we had decided that we were America-ed out, historied out, touristed out, and generally worn out. And, we were getting to feel that LA was an impossible city: it was probably over-extended when they started irrigating the desert for orange groves, long before they built trillions of houses and used fourteen times as much water irrigating the rich people’s gardens, and the freeway embankments (so the plants grow, and they aren’t washed away).

So, after dropping off the car, we got the hire company’s shuttle bus to the airport and, having been advised against our original intention of using the METRO tram system, we caught the Airport Flyer coach into downtown LA – Vikki saw the Hollywood sign in the distance – and were in time to catch the Amtrak ‘Surfliner’ train south. It took more than an hour and a half just to get out of LA, but then we went about half an hour further down the coast to our destination: the town of Oceanside (which we had picked on the basis that there were low priced motels within a couple of blocks of the beach). We popped down for an afternoon on the beach, which turned out to be ok, and so we have decided to stay put.

Yesterday we spent the day roasting ourselves on the beach (quite literally, unfortunately), where we got to watch the lifeguards, watching over a whole host of brave souls attempt to swim and body surf in a very choppy sea, and periodically doing the Baywatch sprint into the sea. At luchtime, we had two ground beef tacos and a pint of genuine Mexican 'Dos Equis' beer. A couple of hours more on the beach and, from there, we took two gyros pitas and a six pack of Dos Equis back to the motel room for a night in front of the telly and a dozen or so applications of aloe vera to our more tender bits. It was very much like being in Greece (mainly in that we went to bed looking like lobsters), and we feel we are beginning to chill out Californian style after rushing around this country at such a breakneck speed..

Still embarrassingly red today, we figured we couldn’t really go back to the beach yet, so we took a local train to the 'Old Town' in San Diego. This turned out to be one genuine hacienda, several re-located old buildings, and a series of re-constructions, all selling grand collectiones de tat. This didn't do it for us, so we negotiated the local trolley bus system into downtown San Diego. This has a financial district of modern skyscrapers and an historic 'Gaslight District', full of expensive bijou restaurants - so we bought ourselves something to read ( Douglas Coupland's J-Pod and Steven Fry's book on poetics), had a leisurely carmel iced coffee at Starbucks, and hopped on the train back to Oceanside.

Our intention, then, is to spend our remaining couple of days here in Oceanside, tidying up our tans, eating cheap food, and drinking cheap beer, before heading down to San Diego airport on Sunday. Well, we reckon you haven't experienced America till you've hung out in a Southern Californian beach town for a few days!

We'll do another posting if something unusually exciting happens - otherwise, see most of you in a week or so!

Ted’s Photo Blog

A picture of me, Ted, downing a pint of the local brew.












A picture of me, Ted, on the beach at Oceanside CA, sporting a very fetching bushy bushy blonde hairdo, dontcha think?