Miles on Wednesday: 570 by train (and 2 on foot)

Miles on Thursday: About 18 on foot (and 736 by plane)

Miles today: 22 miles by train, 6 by taxi, and 5 on foot

Miles to date: 4448

Where were we on Wednesday? Denver, Colorado

Where were we on Thursday? Salt Lake City, Utah

Where are we now? San Mateo, just outside San Francisco, California

Fun fact: It is a common misconception that California is lovely and warm throughout the year. But in actual fact, even in August, it's bleedin' freezing!

The Past Three Days’ Events: Well, the last three days have so action packed that we haven’t been able to post any updates since Tuesday. So, a quick summary:

On Wednesday morning, we got up early and, since our hotel had reneged on their promise of a shuttle bus, we grabbed a taxi to Denver’s Union Station, in time for the 7.30 registration for the 8.00 train, only to discover that the train was running two hours late! (Normal for trans-continental Amtrak, we discover.) Once on board, our visible pitiful despair motivated the conductor to move a group of ladies who had grabbed six sets of double seats, which meant that we could sit together – which was just as well, as we had signed up for a 15 hour journey to Salt Lake City!

The point, of course, is that, between Denver and Salt Lake City, the train crosses the Rocky Mountains and we have to say that the journey exceeded our expectations several times over. It was fantastic – quite easily our favourite part of this trip to date. Since there are no great rivers flowing out of the Rockies towards the West, the train has to climb out of Denver by way of a series of mile wide loops, where you can look down from some impossibly tall cliff faces and see where you were ten minutes before. The first hour and a half was spent climbing until we reached the Donner Tunnel (over 11,000 feet high). From there, it’s all downhill (literally) for about 500 miles. You start off following the headwaters of the Colorado River, where it’s just a small river flowing through the forests, passing the odd ski resort. Gradually, the trees thin out and you find yourselves heading down the Colorado River Canyon (pictured, and which, we think, is an upstream version of the Grand Canyon). There’s the occasional log cabin and/or shack and the occasional bunch of people white-water rafting or fly-fishing but otherwise, pretty much nothing but a wild landscape of rocks and river. For the last phase, the train turns northwards, away from the river, and basically passes through about 200-300 miles stretch of entirely deserted desert, complete with ghost uranium mining towns from the Cold war period.

We fell asleep in the last bit, after the sun had gone down, but woke up in time to get off at Salt Lake City at 1.30 in the morning (only 2.5 hrs late). The only taxi in attendance wouldn’t take us (he wanted a longer journey), so we had to walk six blocks to our motel. We were a bit scared but SLC is probably the best American city to be walking through deserted downtown streets, across the railroad tracks, and the suchlike. Fortunately the motel had kept our room, so we were in bed and asleep by 2.30!

Thursday, then, we made ourselves get up and out by 9.30 so we could see Salt Lake City’s ‘Number One Tourist Attraction’: Temple Square, the home of the Mormons. As the guidebooks say, as soon as we were through the gates, we were picked up by an ‘Elder’ who assigned two lovely, crazed ‘Sisters’ (pictured) who took us round, sang us a song, and were generally charmingly wholesome, but not too bright. Once they had reassured us (or the other Americans on the tour) that it was the same Jesus Christ (but of the Latter Day Saints), we were trusted to go round by ourselves. So, we went to an organ recital in the famous Mormon Tabernacle, had lunch in one of Brigham Young’s homes, watched all the couples from a group wedding pouring out of the temple (better make that ‘mass’ wedding, but we’re not too sure), watched an hour and half documentary (in the best Hallmark style) on the life of Joseph Smith, etc. There is so much to say: they’re doubly or trebly American, the Temple is like Disneyland (inspired Disneyland?), they have the best marketing in the world, they are incredibly welcoming, in a frighteningly ‘wholesome’ sort of way, and they won’t answer any questions on the content of their religion, only tell you that Jesus, once he was resurrected, came to America (where else?) and that we need a reconstruction of Christianity because we have ‘fallen away’, and so forth. Malcolm had fun in their history museum, after the guide had said that Jesus had come to America to minister to one of lost tribes of Israel that had come to America. He couldn’t stop himself from saying that his grandmother had believed that the British were one of lost tribes of Israel. To her credit, the guide was not thrown by this but, following the logic that there are enough lost tribes of Israel for every nation to be a ‘chosen people’, she simply said that God moves in mysterious ways, and gave Vikki a copy of the book of Mormon.

Anyway, eventually, we were American religion/pioneered/historied out and so set off to the airport in plenty of time to sink some Salt Lake City beer before getting on the plane. Unfortunately, the plane had two aborted attempts at taking off, before we were made to disembark and wait for a plane coming in from San Diego to take us instead. (We’ve given up reporting on the state of Malcolm’s stomach lining.) Eventually, we got to San Francisco, worryingly 2.5 hours late again. (Not counting Pacific Seaside Time or whatever it’s called). Once again, the motel reneged on its promise of a shuttle bus so we got a taxi to the Comfort Inn, San Mateo and were in bed well past midnight again.

Unsurprisingly then, we were in no rush to get up this morning, but, eventually, sometime after midday, we got a taxi to the first station on one of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) metro/underground lines into downtown San Francisco. We have to say that San Francisco has turned out to be our least favourite city to date, and by quite a big margin. The setting is gorgeous, all hills and sea views but there’s pretty much nothing to look at in the town, aside from bougie-bougie midtown complexes, and a million and one tat shops as you approach the ugly, car-park-heavy, pigeon-poop-stained harbour front, known as ‘Fisherman’s Wharf’. The only beautiful thing that we found was the Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, built after some rich woman donated a bunch of money in her will, with the express wish that it be used to make the city look a little prettier. Inside the Coit Tower, we found a huge queue of people waiting to take the elevator to the viewing platform at the top, not one of them paying a blind bit of notice to the wonderful Soviet Realist style murals on every wall, painted during the Depression and depicting the subtle and not-so-subtle afflictions of industrial ‘progress’. We thought these were great, and they more-or-less sustained us during our aborted attempt to get a micro-brew at the (not so micro) brewery on the harbour front, where we were scuppered by the balcony being closed off and the staff there being decidedly uninterested in our presence.

So, we thought, hey, let’s head back towards home via the cable cars, probably one of the most well-known of San Francisco’s offerings and the only trams to be pulled along by a rope underneath the ground outside Llandudno (as far as we know). Looks like fun, we thought. Well, we could have jumped on a flight to Llandudno and used theirs in the time it would have taken to get on a San Francisco cable car. For some reason it took them 15 minutes to start each car going, and the queue was about 8 cable cars full of people deep when we joined it. We can only imagine that the cable car people can get away with a two-hour minimum wait, and a $5 journey price, on account of the fact that it’s a 2 mile walk back to the metro up a 1:2 gradient set of hills. Well you probably thought we weren’t fit enough to even contemplate doing this on foot, but by god we did! So we climbed the hills, beating the cable cars back to the Metro, and got a train and taxi back to the hotel where we sit writing to you now fortified by a six pack of Budweiser (sorry Rod) and a packet of Skittles Sours.

San Francisco, then, was something of a disappointment (although we do concede that it was a lot scarier 30 years ago, when Malcolm was here last). However, we are much more optimistic about tomorrow, when we’ll be picking up another hire car and heading across the bay to snoop around Berkeley and to have lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Richmond that used to be owned by our friend Marco’s grandfather.

The more eagle-eyed among you will no doubt have noticed that we have skipped stop number 12 on our itinerary – Nevada. We hope you're not too disappointed. If you are, it's going to be horrible to have to tell you we're thinking of skipping the Grand Canyon, too, in favour of a few days on a San Diego beach...


Ted’s Photo Blog

A picture of me, Ted, enjoying a view of the Rockies from the train.

A picture of me, Ted, going to San Francisco with some flour in me hair. (Have I got this right?)