Half-eaten egg sandwich and cold coffee to hand, a typical blogger tries to conceal his identity

Big Mom gives

us a Toronto blessing

At Toronto we change planes and have a three-hour stopover. We join a slow-moving mass of travelers without thinking where we are heading. I come to after ten minutes of this and approach an information desk staffed by eight uniformed Air Canada people. “Excuse me,” I say in a quiet and polite lost-and-bewildered-Englishman-abroad voice to the red uniform in the middle of the eight. “But can you point me in the direction of the transit lounge?” No answer. She is looking down at something on the desk beside her. “I think I may be a bit lost,” I say encouragingly to her, hoping to arouse a maternal instinct perhaps. I hover uncomfortably. She can’t be deaf surely? Then a hand come up from behind the desk and gestures in a broad sweeping motion. She still doesn’t look up but I hear a voice saying loudly: “It’s IN FRONT of you.”

“Thank you for your advice,” I say. “You are a credit to

Air Kanaydia. I’m sorry if I disturbed your sleep.”

Of course, I don’t say that at all. I’m flustered. I look around and see that the red uniform is right. The transit lounge is indeed in front of me. I redden and slope away.

Later I summon up the spirit of Big Mom and Wendy, the battling belles of Bodega Bay. Big Mom wouldn’t have stood for this. She would have given the red uniform the fright of her life wouldn’t she? Yes, of course she would! With one clunking throw of her mighty fist she would have swept all the eight uniforms to the ground like scattered skittles. And their desk would have been reduced to splinters. Good old Big Mom, I think. I misjudged you. We’d make a great team. I’d be George to your Lennie. OK? You know what’s important. Come back!

As we leave the aircraft at Heathrow a rugged, silver-haired member of the crew who personifies authority and competence is saying his farewells to us travelers. He has the sort of face that can sell insurance. “ It was such a smooth flight. Thank you for piloting us so well and safely,” Jane tells him with her unfailing enthusiasm. “Thanks for that,” says rugged silver hair. “But I’m one of the cabin staff.”

So that’s about it. But what about the lists? I was going to list all the good things and the bad things, wan’t I? The good things would have stuff like pretty irises growing on San Francisco’s pavements and the tram cars. The bad things would have been things like American puddings (don’t go there!) and tissues (they shred at first blow). But I’m not too good at lists. When it comes down to it I just forget things I want to include.

But what I’m going to give you next is something much more useful. I’m going to give you SOME HINTS FOR TRAVELLERS TO THE U.S. I think it’s only fair, since you have been following me so far, that I give you something useful if you happen to be heading in that direction. Stay tuned!

An elephant seal yawns. It's not an otter but it's certainly bigger

Elephant seals and

Californian memories

On Tuesday morning we leave Dragonfly Cottage and the Vaca del Sol in the Santa Cruz mountains. We say our goodbyes to Martin and Mary-Jane. Martin, who Jane decides is a gentle American – so I shall call him GA – tells us that a trailer truck has overturned on route 17 and that the road will be blocked. GA, by the way, doesn’t need Clint Eastwood to play him. He speaks for himself and does all his own stunts.

Again we miss Jolene as we thread our way through country roads that never seem to lead anywhere. Having at first decided not to take the Highway 1 coast road back to San Francisco, we change our minds and are soon careering under a clear sky alongside an iridescent blue Pacific fringed with sparkling-white beaches. We stop at the Ano Nuevo state park, a wildlife reserve on the dunes where a four-mile walk takes us to where elephant seals are lazing on the sand like heaps of steaming tarmac.

Later we drop from a mountain ridge to the airport where we deposit a dusty Elefanta.

We take the Bart train to the Mission area and from then a bus to the Million Fishes. R cooks us a last dinner, a curry with pinto beans, we survey the photos we have taken, we kiss D goodbye and clamber into the Bald Eagle for the journey to our Holiday Express airport hotel. Our bags are packed, the holiday is over, we dry our tears.

The smells and sights of the Mission district blend into other places we have visited, the poetry of the streets is behind us, Mary-Jane of the Santa Cruz hills glows in my mind like a hologram for a while and I wish we had got to know her better. We are now ticketed tourists prepackaged for a return to Heathrow.

Spot the otter competition: ring what you think is an otter in Jane's photo and win a prize!

Jane sees even

more otters

Monday is our last day at Dragonfly Cottage. We head for swish Monterrey past fields of artichokes. Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is now a street of novelty shops with not a cannery in sight, the harbour is a marina and the sardine boats have gone. Dirty industry may have gone but the sea lions and seals have moved in, and the sea is full of them, flapping their flippers, sunbathing, pointing their noses at the sky. And the otters too! For, sure enough, Jane sees something moving in the kelp that floats in sheltered bays. We go through the routine again. It’s a log, I say. The camera comes out and Jane snaps at the log. But then it moves and starts doing otterish things like diving and lying on its back and holding something in its front paws. OK, it IS an otter, I admit – when other people start pointing at it.

We pass Pacific Grove and enter something called the 17-mile Scenic Drive round the Monterrey peninsula. It’s famous, says Jane. It probably is and we have to pay $10 for the privilege. We see a lot of cypresses windblown into odd shapes and even more golf courses, and then Jane sees ANOTHER otter. And suddenly otters are popping up like rabbits on Watership Down. The otter population is rising by the moment. Jane is in seventh heaven.

Jane finds a barn in the Salinas Valley but would Lennie and George recognise it?

Jolene, all is forgiven!

We never doubted you

It is Sunday and HaM leave their tree house and Dragonfly Cottage for Yosemite with Jolene now fixed to their windscreen. Without her ever-correct navigational instructions we drive to Salinas, home town of John Steinbeck. The museum devoted to him is stuffed with tricks. Voices of his characters boom out, extracts from films made from his book are shown in cubicles, blown-up photos on walls illustrate his life and the Monterrey canneries, his Nobel prizewinning speech is heard at length, his chair, his pipe, his wives, his belt buckle are all there. Steinbeck is now an industry; the writer is probably unread except as a set text. Extracts from his work on the walls seem portentous and self-regarding. The private man is not there. Sorry John! Perhaps if you returned you would pull it all down, forget about the money, the success, the prizes, Hollywood, the praise, the critics and just get on with writing a book as good as Cannery Row.

Our Steinbeck day doesn’t end there. Jane wants to visit the Gabilan mountains, which figure in Of Mice and Men, and she wants to photograph a farm and a river where Lennie and George might have lived. She has a project in mind: blown-up photos she takes will be pinned up on her school library walls, Steinbeck posters and other material she has collected will illustrate the writer’s life. She must find the right old timber barn and a pool in the river near where his characters would have camped. We pass many barns and farmhouses but none is what Jane has in mind. We must go a little bit farther, she says, past that hill over there, perhaps stop by that bridge.

Oh well, at least we are moving and Elefanta’s music system is happily belting out Broadway hits from the Fifties. And it’s still only four o’clock. In Jolene’s absence, Jane lays out a map in front of her. The map covers the whole of California and it always seem to fold where we want to go, so it becomes creased and torn and difficult to follow. The roads on the map are not so easy to find, we begin to realise. We drive on and dustily on, past huge fields of corn and enough cabbages to create a dark cloud over Europe. We are aiming for a road that will take us up to the Salinas Mountains in a big loop and into the Carmel Valley. None of the turnings off our road are signposted but we go up one or two hoping they will take us to the valley. But they don’t and we then find the road barred and having to turn round and brave farm dogs to ask the farmer where we are. We just don’t know where we are.

Jane disturbs two owls in a barn and the first stars appear. We still haven’t found the road that will takes us to Carmel Valley. If only Jolene were with us! And we begin to regret our cheap jibes about her. She is wasted on HaM, we say defiantly. Wasted! And they will certainly not appreciate her finer points.

But Jane is still thinking of her school “project” and blithely searching for barns and mountains and stuff. She has now developed a new interest: trees. She is going to make an album of interesting ones, she says. She wants to photograph every single one we pass. And we pass a lot of them dripping with lichen in the Carmel Valley. We make a lot of stops and the camera is hauled out of the bag for a picture of a tree.

It is now dark and we have been driving for hours and I’m getting hungry. I have passed into a state of Zombie-like dead-tiredness. But still Jane points her camera at trees, even in the dark. At last she relents when we reach Carmel Valley town, a settlement of smart shops and restaurants and well-dressed people. We collapse into a fish restaurant and lap up a fish stew. Jane says it’s Liza Minelli at the bar. But is so isn’t, I say.

Hours later and still cursing the loss of Jolene we somehow navigate through the fog and sign-less highways with their huge dark trucks that silently fill the rear mirror and, after many wrong turnings, push Elefanta through the redwoods to Dragonfly Cottage.

A happy couple on the beach at Santa Cruz

Hilary and Matthew give Danielle a few hints on how to look through binoculars

Jilly Cooper meets

the Bald Eagle

Saturday is our “family” day. So please switch off now unless you are a fan of the Swiss Family Robinson or just like reading embarrassing home truths about other people’s families. I’ll try to make it as short as possible. The meeting place is to be Lighthouse Point overlooking the sea and an island that local pelicans use as a restroom. (Yes!!! That’s what they call loos in the US! Restful places, lavatories.)

R&D, whom we heard about earlier, lead the convoy in their 6,000-litre white Chevvy truck (“van” doesn’t quite do justice to this gas-guzzling, earth-destroying brute of a vehicle that R&D lovingly call the Bad Eagle). Hilary and Matthew, as befit their respectable stations in life, follow on less obtrusively in a scarlet hire car. HaM, as I shall call them for short – and fun – have been much concerned about the weather, bombarding R&D and us with daily texts and emails about “what to wear”. We have tried to explain that in California – of parts of it – an Arctic wind can blow at one moment, an ice-cold fog can envelop you at the next, and a Saharan heatwave will break out when you least expect it, and then there is that stuff about the cloud menace that follows you wherever you go. Mark Twain’s little joke is repeated too often: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

So, to say the least, we await with interest what all-weather-defying garments HaM have picked from their wardrobes. And we are not disappointed. H is sporting a waxed boilersuit guaranteed to repel wind, ice and water to great depths and heights. That is topped by a khaki corduroy cap as worn by Jilly Cooper at polo matches or Desert Rats, and by “sensible” woollen socks at the other end – in case of a sudden drop in temperature. M, in more streetwise fashion, has gone for a hoody. Grey, of course (do hoodies come in any other colour?). As a back-up he brings a red covering of indeterminate nature. In case he should be called to round up a herd of Andean llamas, perhaps? If all this is still not up to the most unexpected the weather can come up with, round their necks HaM are wearing scarves. Like you do when you are invited to watch some outdoor winter sporting event.

So surely the Californians can show us up? Yes they can! For D goes for the jaunty French boho look, her Jules et Jim cap worn at kooky angle. R, rather oddly – but perhaps this is a complicated joke to which we do not have the key – is wearing a sheepskin jacket a passing tramp gave him. He claims it is not real. But it patently is, and whenever he moves his arms bits of sheep fall off.

Jane, by the way, is perfectly dressed for the seaside in white blouse and blowy skirt. I strike a bravely daring note by just wearing a T-shirt. But we are half-way into our walk when I realise I probably won’t last till lunch and Jane has to go back to get my coat from our car. Poor show, I admit!

Well, that’s the fashion story [ AND ABOUT TIME TOO – ED. THE READERS CAN’T TELL THEIR BALMAINS FROM THEIR BALENCIAGAS. GET ON WITH IT!!!]

Er, yes, I suppose so.

Well, there’s not much else to tell. We have a picnic, R catches grapes in his mouth, D looks through the wrong end of a telescope, we look at a sea lion, see a chevron (thank you M!) of pelicans gliding over the waves, and under R’s guidance do funny walks in the car park.

That evening we light a barbecue on the wooden balcony of our mountain cottage with the tops of redwoods in front of us and the blue Pacific horizon beyond. Martin and Mary Jane, our landlords, and John and Monet (I never did ask her how she spelled her name), their friends, join us. R is the barbecue master chef. The wine flows and, amazingly, everybody gets something to eat. R&D roar off into the dark, the Bald Eagle spurting sparks and soot from the exhaust. If only I had the Bald Eagle at Bodega Bay, I think, Wendy and Big Mom would have shown me respect.

There is nowhere to sleep in our mountain shack, so HaM are invited to a treehouse a quarter of a mile down a dark track. They spend a chilly night there, in the redwood forest, and heavy blankets are put to use. One redwood holds up a little shower, another their bedroom.

Next morning we expect them for breakfast back at our shack. But they don’t turn up. I am sent to investigate. The poison oak didn’t get them, however. They are just too cold to get out of bed. They leave for Yosemite, taking Jolene with them, a move that we will regret.

But read the next jaw-dropping episode to find out why

Another odd picture: Jane spots another strange bird, so I have to photograph it

Jane sees an otter

We sleep well beneath a pile of blankets on our first night in Dragonfly Cottage in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I had to lift Jane on to our bed. She was having difficulty trying to get into it, as it towers over the other furniture and there was no handy chair near by. We wake to a layer of mist beneath us and look out over the tops of redwoods as our cottage is perched on the side of a steep slope.

Our washing is lying in a heap so we head for a launderette in Santa Cruz, a seaside town that used to attract the hippy generation. There are few signs now of the flower children; I expect they have all built shacks in the hills. The combination of a chilly wind, finding somewhere to park, losing our way several times, and locating a launderette puts us in a critical mood and I start rewriting Lonely Planet’s glowing account of Santa Cruz. The sun comes out after 1pm and we eat our sandwiches overlooking the sea. Jane says she sees an otter on its back eating something but she is always “seeing” otters – which just happen to be her favourite animal. We can’t go near any bit of water without Jane seeing otters everywhere. I assure her that it is piece of driftwood bobbing about in the waves. Later I hear a bearded passerby, whom I take to be a wise old man of the sea, tell a young boy: “Look son, there be an old dog otter. Seems as if it be eatin’ a crab for his dinner.” Of course, old US seadogs don’t talk like this, but no matter. I decide to revise my opinion and tell Jane that on this occasion she is right and that what she has seen may have been an otter. She is not, however, placated by my late conversion to otter-sighting. I learn later that this is the first otter that she has actually seen in the wild!!!

But even that excitement fails to raise our spirits, so we head for the Nickelodeon, the town’s art cinema. It, at least, has withstood the tide of commercialism that has swept away all trace of alternative living. The Nickelodeon is showing a crop of foreign films, including a Russian-made Chekhov adaptation, but we plump for a safe bet, a French-made cold war thriller called Farewell. Sure enough, it’s a good choice. We give it four ****. Catch it if you can. It contains an amusing portrayal of a Reaganesque US president who spends much of the time watching his old cowboy films.

And that was about it for our first day in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Last morning at Yosemite Rose, home of four generations of soldiers who have fought in foreign wars

Ah’m a simple mountain boy but ah always love you well

We have left the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and we are in the plains heading east to Santa Cruz. Vast acreages of fruit trees give way to parched and yellowing grassland and distant hills. We pass half-empty giant reservoirs supplying the coastal cities. It’s hot outside and Jane ramps up the air-conditioning. Elefanta gives a squeal of climate-change abandon as we speed smoothly down the dry dusty roads. We have got to appreciate the lumbering ways of Elefanta and her wide-ranging music system with its banjo-picking Bluegrass stations from the smoky mountains and pounding Nashville songs: “Ah’m a red-necked woman, ah’m a tailgate woman. Ah’m sittin’ on the porch and I’ve got my Christmas lights on. Ah’m a red-necked woman, ah’m a tailgate woman . . .”

At a cheese factory that has a retail outlet we stop for a bite. Industrial-size vacuum-packed blocks of Californian Cheddar cheese line a long display cabinet. I decide I shall be a Royal duke being attentive to the natives while on a trade mission to a small outpost of the British Empire. I lean over the counter and put on my Prince Charles voice: “That’s very interesting that you make Cheddar cheese. Why do you call it Cheddar? Shouldn’t Cheddar cheese be made only in England.” But this is lost on the big man in a big white hat behind the counter. He seems baffled by the implied criticism. “Have a good day,” he says.

In the afternoon we stop at Watsonville, just short of our cottage in the Santa Cruz mountains. Despite its name Watsonville is overwhelmingly Mexican. We stock up with provisions at a Mexican grocery, because we shall be cooking for ourselves for the next five days. I buy a garlic bulb the size of a large turnip. We pay $12 for a full shopping basket. Dragonfly Cottage is 20 miles from Santa Cruz and as we climb a long narrow road through redwoods we share a sense of foreboding. We are far from anywhere and are surrounded by forest. Then at a fork in the track there is the sign Vaca del Sol and we drop down to our destination as the sun reappears bathing the whole valley with evening light. In the far distance we see the Pacific. I turn off Blue Grass Junction. Ah love you when you smile, ah love you when you cry, a’m a simple mountain boy but ah always love you well, ah love you when you smile.....

It’s often what you half-glimpse out of the corner of your eye as you look away that changes your view, that makes you realise that things are not as you comfortably assumed they were. That suffering takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. . . . . as the poet says. The villagers in the Breugel painting go about their daily lives, leading horses, ploughing the land, sitting down to eat, skating and chasing away a dog and they do not notice the little boy in the corner of the painting falling from the sky. So it was that morning at the House of Flickering Light. We are having our last breakfast in the verandah. Granma has brought us a huge pot of tea that she holds in one hand and she brushes away my offer to take it back to the kitchen. “I’m a big girl now,” she says.

The Brooklyn attorney who speaks too much and his wife, whom I shall call Celeste, are at the next table and she looks expectantly towards us as if she would like us to transport her back to England, away from – well, she can’t quite give a name to what oppresses her.

Henry appears and he is cradling in his arms half a dozen rocks. He tells me to choose one. I ask if they have fallen from the sky in the night. “No,” he says. “They come from an old gold working. They’re quartz and there’s gold in them – not much gold but it’s something a mining company would extract.” I have a sudden illumination. Elinor Brompton-LeFage never introduced Henry as her husband. Henry is not Henry Brompton-LeFage. He is an family friend, an amiable eccentric who potters about the place looking at the stars and giving random rocks to visitors.

Half an hour later as we gather to say our goodbyes in the ample hall with its pianola, military insignia and mementoes of a family of warriors Elinor Brompton-LeFage takes me aside. “You see, Richard is in his seventies now but they still need him. He won’t stop. Most of the satellites up there,” and Mrs Brompton-LeFage gestures vaguely towards the ceiling, “were put up years ago and the young engineers can’t work them. Only Richard knows. That’s why he has to go on. Besides, Richard . . .” And Mrs Brompton-LeFage hesitates as if uncertain how I, rather than any other visitor, would receive such a confidence. “Well, Richard is sometimes ‘politically incorrect’.”

A couple of tourists pose inside a giant sequoia in the Yosemite National Park

Watching the stars with Henry

And so that was the aunts. They had arrived in the States in the 1920s with their mother, by some accounts a harsh woman, and we know where they lived in 1930. Yet after that the trail peters out. On their mother’s death did they continue to cling to the disciplines of the Plymouth Brethren and eke out a living making children’s clothes? I like to think they broke away, changed their lives for ever, started a commune in the desert or created a magic elixir that would make everything beautiful, or met up with a traveling man that their mother would never have countenanced. We are still looking, however, and there may be more to come. The Alameda Historical Society is trying to trace the missing years. Jessie and Martha may yet surprise us!

But now we are in Yosemite National Park, bigger than Wales, not so big as Belgium but big. It’s our first day and we have paid our $20, which allows us to drive around the park for a week. We are walking to a grove of ancient sequoia trees, the largest living objects on earth as the notices proudly proclaim. They are bulkier than redwoods but do not grow so tall – up to 250ft rather than 350ft. It is still morning and rays of light filter through the forest. Jane is emoting like she was making an Academy Award acceptance speech or responding to a Lottery jackpot win. “I can’t BELIEVE this is happening. In a million years I never believed I would see all this! This is so special. I’d just love all my friends to share this moment with me. If my mother could see me now!!! [Don’t worry, Alison, you will. At least in pictures, a lot of them!]” And so on.

As usual I’m taking it a bit more quietly. “Looks a bit like North Wales to me, except with bigger trees,” I say. Later I tell a group of ooohing and aaahing visitors crowding round a viewpoint with their Canons and Nikons that the Dolomites are much grander as a spectacle. But they brush off such talk and return to their cameras. Many Americans we meet have an almost religious fervour about Yosemite and tend to use biblical terms to describe the area as if it was an Eden before the Fall. “Awesome! Totally!!!”

On our second day we visit Yosemite Valley and I have to admit that its scale is pretty impressive. I start recanting. We climb to Glacier Point, 2,000ft or so above the valley floor but the huge mountains still loom around us and stretch to the horizon. Waterfalls tumble many hundreds of feet, even though this is high summer, and the meadows are still blazing with wildflowers though this is August.

Elinor Brompton-LeFage greets us on our return. Behind her is a small woman who silently approaches us. “I’m Glanna,” she says. “Glanna?” says Jane. “Grandma,” she says. “Oh, Grandma. Hello Grandma!” says Jane. Grandma is in her nineties and will later approach us with a coffee pot. She slips silently through the house, her face a quizzical mask. For an old person she doesn’t speak much and when the does it comes in a sibilant croak – a bit like Golum. But it is getting dark and the crickets are packing up. Henry Brompton-LeFage, the stargazer, is about and padding across the dry field outside, binocular round his neck. “Ah yes, the sleep of the unjust,” observes Elinor Brompton-LeFage inconsequentially as if she was referring to her husband’s ascent from his daylight sojourn in a closed coffin. “And that is Henry’s right surely. He always has his head in the stars and last night the stars were plentiful enough.”

Henry has invited me to gaze at the night sky, which will be full of a shower of Perseids. Shower? Yes, it’s the right word! He pulls a comfortable upholstered chair out of the

house and places it facing northeast and a distant mountain. Henry is a great talker and he starts to tell me all about the way he looks at the night sky, and all the cameras he has set up that automatically track movements of stars, and the film he his to load into his cameras and technical stuff like that. Not that the stars move. It’s the world that moves, Henry tells me as if he suspects I’m a rather backward pupil. Every now then, he waves at a point in the sky and says: “There’s one” or “That’s a big one right there.” But I always miss them. It’s a bit like when R and D said, “Look there’s a pelican diving” or “See, that’s another humming bird”, and I’d look around but always miss the interesting thing they were pointing out.

So Henry goes on and soon he tires a bit and doesn’t actually say anything but just waves his hand in the general direction of a passing bit of heavenly rock burning out in the Earth’s atmosphere. But still I don’t see them. Then I also tire and shut my eyes tight. And soon I start to see things. Little pinpoints of light start darting through the dark. I’m seeing so many. They must be the showers. “I see them,” I tell Henry. But there is no word from Henry. Perhaps he does not believe me for he just goes on sitting there gazing up at the night sky.

The aunts remembered: Jane puts a pot of rosemary on the porch for the new tenants who are moving in to the flat at 1309 Santa Clara Avenue, Alameda, once occupied by Jane Bishop, her great grandmother, and Jane Bishop's unmarried daughters Jessie, born in 1878, and Martha. Robert Bishop, Jane's husband, killed himself in 1904 after his bankruptcy. Santa Clara Avenue is a broad and quiet street lined with camphor trees. Lavender, rosemary and Livingstone daisies adorn the front gardens. The centre of Alameda with its market, many churches and places of worship would have been a ten-minute walk away for the sisters.

The house of

flickering light

It’s just after 6 in the morning and I’m sitting in the porch of Yosemite Rose, a large wooden, white-painted house surrounded by American oaks and tall pine trees. The American flag hangs over the front door. Expectations about America are often dashed. We had thought the approaches to Yosemite National Park would be like the Peak District on an August Bank Holiday. But we drive through miles and miles of California and hardly see another vehicle or house. It’s that big and that open: you could make your own atom bomb and blow it up here and no one would notice.

Soon after we arrived at Yosemite Rose yesterday evening Jane rushes up all excited and asks me: Do you know what a thread count is? I never like admitting not knowing things – and I know that’s a fault too – so I say: “Well it’s something to do with the quality of cotton or linen, isn’t it?” And she says: “You’ve got it! And do you know what the count of the sheets we’ll be sleeping in is?” I say cautiously: “I’m not sure.” And she says: “Seven thousand!” Or it may have been 700 but it’s a figure, I get to understand, so out of the way of normal human thinking that one could meet such a thing only in a dream. Women are funny about things like that. I think about what Jane has said and I then say: “Awesome!” Because that’s how young people hereabouts speak and I like imitating their voices. But that strikes a wrong note with my wife and she looks at me as if I don’t really understand.

But Yosemite Rose is a dream. And I’m sorry if you find it tiring this cornpoke style of mine – you know, like I was speaking with a straw in my mouth all of the time. Because it’s not really right for Yosemite Rose. I’ll tell you what I mean.

When Mrs Elinor Brompton-LeFage greeted us last night she gave me a special look and said I just want to tell you one thing. If you want to get in to the house after dark you need to key in this number 1-7-7-6. And she pointed to a lock on the door. Now, that number meant something to me because that was the date they threw us out of this country. I better mind my manners.

In the polished wooden hall many portraits hung on the walls. “All my boys. They served in foreign wars,” says Mrs Elinor Brompton-LeFage. "That’s my great granddaddy there. He was on the Western Front. Uncle Jim he was at Guadacanal. That’s my Pa. He was also in the Pacific. Served in the ambulance corps. Never the same again. My bother Ned was in Korea. And that one’s Jim too. He’s my grandson. He’s just come back from Afghanistan. He went there when he was 19. He was too young. They should never have sent him there at that age. It’s affected him badly too.” We are speechless.

Mrs Elinor Brompton-LeFage shows us the dining room. Crystal glasses pick up the flickering light from candles grouped on the long polished redwood table. On the way through another room heavy with damask and old velvet I notice a portrait of a young woman of such startling boldness that I want to inquire who she was. Last night did I dream of Manderley? I start moving Mrs Elinor Brompton-LeFage away from the world of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Was this a portrait of the first Mrs Brompton-LeFage. But her husband is not Max de Winter, the man with a terrible secret. He is a scientist who spends much of his time looking at the stars. His particular assignment is to stop satellites crashing into each other. He invites us to join him that night to spend an hour or two looking at the Perseids. The sky over us is so black that we will pick up every single sliver of darting light.

What of the aunts of Alameda? Yes, we did find their house at 1309 Santa Clara Avenue. The same wooden building, put up before the 1906 earthquake, is still standing. An electrician working in the house shows us around and we imagine how Jane Bishop and her daughters, Jessie and Martha, lived their lives there. We drive round Alameda and it seems to me a pretty God-fearing place. Within a short distance we pass the First Presbyterian Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the United Methodist Church, a building devoted to Christian Science, and a Masonic Temple. Jane Bishop and her daughters were Plymouth Brethren apparently. Perhaps they would have been at home in Alameda and happy at times to look across the bay to the bustling city of San Francisco ever embracing waves of people seeking a fresh life.

A turkey ranger at Skyline Wilderness Park near Napa returns empty-handed

Two countries divided by a common language

Good wine never gives you a headache. That must be true because this morning we awoke early tufty-tailed and clear-headed ready to tackle the second course. But something stayed our hand. How could we top our day with Ted and Nancy? A second helping without their good advice might dull that first exhilarating experience. So we put thoughts of wine aside and headed for the hills.

The Skyline Wilderness Park lies just outside Napa and consists of various trails that lead through dry savanna country and indigenous forests to high ground. We had read so many warnings to expect mountain lions and rattle snakes but we are disappointed again. We do see wild turkeys – surprisingly plump black birds looking very like their domestic cousins – and hundreds of small squirrels, which unlike their English counterparts have very unbushy tails and look more like rats.

I must report that on the s-word front controversy continues to rage.

Senor MP from Spain comments: “I agree with D. about the English abuse of the s-word. What fun to barge into people in Boot’s the chemist and continue silently and blithely on.” Thank you Senor P for that observation.

From Somerset, England, “Angela”, of Elspeth Close, comments rather acerbically that not apologising is in fact a Californian affectation! She adds: “My best apology of all times was in John Lewis. I was bending down looking at the Molton Brown stuff when a woman dropped a wodge of about £250 next to me and I found myself saying ‘I'm sorry but you dropped this.’ So useful in awkward situations!” Yes, indeed, Angela!

Back at the Californian coalface, however, D counters that her friends “will stubbornly reserve the phrase ‘I'm sorry’ for those rare thoughtful moments when we want to let someone know that we did something wrong and feel remorseful about it.” D, we admire your stand!

Sticky isn’t it? As Oscar Wilde said: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.”

Tomorrow: Jolene will direct us to 1309-and-a-half Santa Clara Avenue, Alameda, the last known address of those aunts. Read the next heart-warming episode!

Cable car descent from Sterling winery: Jane and Nancy are going downhill rapidly

A day of wine and roses

I expect you noticed how that last posting tailed off and ended with a dull whimper as if I was too tired and couldn’t be bothered any more and just wanted to go to bed. The reason it was like that was that I started writing it early and then couldn’t finish it before Ted and Nancy arrived. And between starting it and finishing it in that dull way at the end of the day a lot happened. And I mean a lot. A lot of going places, a lot of talk, a lot of wine and a lot of loving.

I was going to tell you about my father and about the journal he kept of his train trip across Canada in 1923. And I was going to say more about Jack London and other writers – like Mr Sam Clemens, Ambrose Bierce (who crossed the Mexican border and was never seen again), and John Steinbeck – because I’ve always thought writers were the best thing you could be. All of them, by the way, were not true Californians but they all worked and wrote here. I like thinking about them. The way they wrote affects how I’m writing now, I also expect you’ve noticed. I hope it’s not too tiresome. I do other voices, like Holden Caulfield’s, and I expect you’ve noticed that too. I can’t do the big modern ones very well. I appreciate Norman Mailer, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malumud all right. But I’ll never get up there, never stand with them above the clouds and plant a flag on their high mountains.

Ah yes, just remind me, it was the Napa Valley tour I was going to tell you about, wasn’t it? But, Ted, I just want to make something clear. You remember at the end of the day, just after I had collapsed on the table, when I took out that black notebook and asked you to tell me what we had done that day so that I could write it down? And you looked a bit pie-eyed and started telling me the names of the wineries we had been to, and the places we had visited and the wines we had drunk, and Nancy at times cut in and corrected your memory? It’s just a small point but you said the first winery stop was at V. Sattui. But it wasn’t was it? There was another very beautiful one, perhaps the most fabulous of all, that we first stopped at. Do you remember? We may have been answering the call of nature and that’s why you never mentioned it to me. Anyway, there was a large fountain and a garden full of English flowers divided into four quarters. Groves of oak shaded us from a hot sun. It was a perfect start to an even more perfect day but I just wanted to make it clear that I can’t put a name to that heavenly place. Just a small thing and I hope you don't mind that I mention it.

I had done some googling the night before and had identified the V. Sattui winery as the maker of a “Madeira” wine. So we soon found it and the whole world and their friends seemed to have descended there at the same time. So it when I had finally managed to get the attention of one of their staff it was not the best time for a cross-examination. Why should an Italian family from Genoa, with no known connection to the island of Madeira or Portugal, who started making wine in California in the 1880s, make “Madeira” wine. The question came over a bit loaded and he started blustering and I argued a bit and the exchange frustratingly got nowhere. Later, I was tooling around in the car park admiring all the Japanese cars when I noticed a tall man in a big hat who looked like Jimmy Stewart. He spoke haltingly like Jimmy Stewart too and he looked straight at me and heard me out when I told him I too had trod a few Madeira grapes. Their first “Madeiras”, he said, were made in the 1930s when they decided to make a “light” tawny Port. It was a marketing decision then to call it “Madeira”, I asked. He agreed with a hesitant smile. Nowadays, he added, Californian winemakers had more confidence and did not feel the need to look over their shoulders to Europe. Did the Portuguese authorities never complain about this appropriation of the name Madeira? Well yes, a Portuguese finance minister had once visited the V. Sattui winery, Jimmy Stewart said. “We gave him a tasting of our best vintages and then he had our Madeira. At the end of the day he went away happy!”

At the small and delightful Cuvaison winery we plunge in to more tastings and catch the full attention of an amusing young man who was plying us with varieties of intoxicating nectar. He and Ted slug it away on the rise and fall of this or that wine, the pernicious habit of over-oaking, and the odd ways of wine drinkers while Jane and I lap it all up in blissful contentment. Nancy seems to know almost as much though.

At the Rombauer winery Ted pulls out a huge cold box and we spread a picnic table with food we had bought on the way from a special organic grocery store. Ted brings out a perfectly chilled white and a lusty red and we settled down. The setting is perfect. We are on a wooded slope overlooking the winery house and a valley. There is an aroma of dry herbs and faint wood smoke. We talk a lot and the bottles empty. It’s not just the wine but I really fancy Nancy – she’s such a lovely and witty person, you must meet her – and I burst in to tears. Although that’s not quite the story. It never is.

So it goes. Sterling winery, our next call, is owned by Diageo, who own everything from Guinness to Coca-Cola (probably not!). We take a cable car to the top of their vineyards to where four London bells hang from two towers. There we sit and sip and talk again.

The side of Jane’s face seems to be slipping. The redwoods seem to be moving and I see blue horses on the horizon. With a huge effort we drag ourselves away.

Thanks Ted and Nancy! Let's do it again!

Our friend White Fang from our Noe Valley AirBnB. But Morris called him Shanu

We give Moira the chop

Then the lure of adventure began to grip us. Why not start at once? We’d never be any younger, any of us.......Jack London

Just read those few sentences from Jack London’s The Cruise of the Snark. Simple, everyday words that tumble onto the page and glisten like jewels. Just plain speaking. It’s what Americans do best.

We will meet up with Jack London later. But first, I’m going to say what happened when we left Bodega Bay Inn yesterday morning. And before that, a word about Jane – because this blog is meant to be all about her and not just me. Well, Jane is not so all sugar and spice and all things nice as she might seem. Of course, she is Miss Congeniality a lot of the time, always being helpful and thoughtful and stuff, and introducing herself to strangers and offering to take their picture and picking up litter when she really doesn’t have to. And that often makes me cringe and go a bit mad and want to shout.

No, it’s the other side of her that I admire. The James Cagney side. Here’s what I mean.

On our second day in Bodega Bsy, the evening before yesterday morning, Jane is sick of there not being a plug in our basin so she goes up to Kathy Bates’s big sister, looks up and says firmly: “May I have a plug for the basin? I want to wash some underclothes.” Kathy Bates’s big sister glares at her as might a buffalo be irritated by a fly. But Jane doesn’t waver. “No one’s never asked for a plug before this day,” says Kathy Bates’s big sister emphasizing each word very slowly. Jane holds her gaze. Kathy Bates’s big sister scratches her leg for a bit and then trundles off. Later she returns with a round bit of black plastic that was probably part of a hose outlet from one of the wrecked cars that litter her backyard. Of course, it doesn’t do the job. But Jane has won a victory and it’s the sort of thing I admire her for.

I’m quite different, as I expect you’ve guessed and I shall give you an example if you care to read on.

Yesterday morning we make a quick getaway after raiding “Wendy’s” kitchen and pinching a sickly-sweet cereal full of brown sugar and maple syrup. As we get into our Hyundai Elefanta automatic hire car I notice that “Wendy’s” Big Mom, alias Kathy Bates’s big sister, has hung some washing on the line in her backyard. It’s probably part of an under-garment from somewhere beneath her waist and it hangs like a damp grey parachute on the line. Big Mom herself, now not wearing the black body stocking I mentioned earlier, is standing on a broken step leading down from her kitchen. She has her arms on her hips and she is giving us a baleful look. If she had a gun I expect she’d be holding it. Behind her I see “Wendy” through a torn curtain.

We mount Elefanta, I put the automatic gear stick into Sport mode, give a nonchalant wave and a smirk in the direction of the harpies and step hard on the accelerator. My intention is to gun the car, to send the back wheels spinning like crazy so they send a cloud of dust over Kathy Bates’s big sister’s ballooning underwear. But Elefanta is no souped-up Gran Torino – and I’m no James Dean or Cliff Eastwood. The car gives a complaining bellow and a light on the dashboard starts flashing. The engine then cuts out.

Kathy Bates’s big sister and “Wendy” have disappeared by the time I’ve regained my composure and got Elefanta going again. We glide off silently with no departing gesture of defiance, because that is the only thing Elefanta allows itself to do. I start composing in my head what I’m going to write in Trip Advisor about Kathy Bates’s big sister and “Wendy”. And I tell you I can be pretty mean.

We head for Sonoma and Jack London’s home, which is now a historic state park. We soon leave the overcast coastal road and climb through mist to the ridge that stretches down much of California and forms a climatic divide. On the way we pass a troop of vintage Porsches, more than 20 of them in varied pastel colours and all looking strangely under-powered – less like powerful iconic sports cars than what a child might create if asked to draw a sports car. We stop at a little town called Occidental with well-equipped grocery stores and cafes, a white, painted wooden church and a wooded parking area. The sky is clear and the sun is now blazing down.

We switch on Moira, the name we have given to the English-English-voiced satnav. We call her Moira because she sounds like Moira Stuart, the television newsreader the BBC sacked because she was too old. Moira takes us safely to Jack London’s home, which is one of the places I most wanted to visit in California. We marvel at the care and attention that has been put in to preserving a writer’s home. Despite that it has few visitors – and we learn from the curator that most visitors are from abroad.

My father must have read London’s two big-sellers, White Fang and Call of the Wild, because I have copies of both books with his name inside them. London, from a poor background, is an inspiring figure. He was an adventurer, a stowaway, he rode the rails, he panned for gold, he was a sailor, fur trapper, hobo, war correspondent, early socialist and required reading for millions of Soviet children. He wrote 1,000 words a day and became a successful farmer, using traditional farming methods to rescue worn-out land. He died in 1916 aged 40. I sort of knew all that. What I didn’t know was how well he did for himself or the style of life he had in his last few years. The schooner Snark that he had built cost $30,000, large houses were put up and lavishly furnished, visitors included William Randolph Hearst no less, and his farm labourers were underpaid, so the curator hinted. But Jack, we honour you still and your rugged individualism. Walt Whitman led the way, Herman Melville inspired you, and in your wake came John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.

Pondering on his life we rejoin Moira and head for our Travelodge in Napa. On the way we tire of Moira and her inability to pronounce names properly. We decide that the BBC was right to sack her, so we disconnect her in favour of Jolene, her American-English colleague.

Tomorrow: We do the wine country with Ted and Nancy. Read the next intoxicating instalment!

Walking with giants, sleeping with girls

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..... Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Did you read that Alcatraz post? A bit off key, wasn't it? Nonsense really. Do I really feel anything like that about Alcatraz? Was my bleeding heart taking over in a mindless way? How can one compare a state prison in a democratic country with the truly evil? And then the e c cummings poem. At one time I thought it was terribly clever and I used to quote it a lot to girls. They were often quite impressed and would let me sleep with them. This did not happen often, I should add. Am I still trying to impress girls? Because that famous poem no longer seems either clever or funny or important.

But San Francisco is a bit like that. The city is full of poetry, on the sidewalks, in buses, on menus – in the air. Some of it may be cheap or secondhand but it gets into your soul and you want to celebrate that atmosphere. The last week or so, you see, has been like a dream, from which we are only now waking.

The awakening came when we got to Bodega Bay yesterday evening.

[I forgot to say that after our memorable day in the city library on Monday looking for The Aunts and finding them we met R to see a film together that D had recommended. It was called The Kids are All Right, abut a lesbian couple and their children, and you should catch it some time. It’s clever and it’s funny and its real. Then we picked up D and they took us to a Japanese restaurant – where we didn’t eat dolphin or whale of anything but it was still all right. And on Tuesday after the Alcatraz trip we went to the Rincon centre. That is a stupendously breathtaking piece of architecture inside the shell of what I guess is an art deco landmark. If you’re ever in San Francisco you must see it. I’m sorry to be going back for things I didn’t say earlier. They may not be very interesting but this blog doubles up as a sort of record of what we did and when. You know – just like a real travel diary that you can read at home later, nod wisely over and even bore your grandchildren with. While I’m about it, D has said I shouldn’t apologise so much. I think she feels it is just such an English affectation and that anyway the English never mean it when they say sorry. She’s probably right. The lovely D knows what she is talking about, I can tell you. ]

But back to that awakening, rude awakening perhaps. R, our technical overseer, San Francisco explainer, general entertainer and adopted man of the city, was round early at our Noe Valley Airbnb. He quickly took me through how to upload pictures to my blog, we gave White Fang and Morris a goodbye hug, and we piled in to the Golden Eagle on our way to Costco to buy a satnav. R had found that it would cost us $150 to rent one for our hire car but only $100 to buy one. Useful guy is R, I can tell you. Sort of person to be with in a tight spot.

And then, satnav stuck to the windscreen we speed towards the airport and the hire car depot. Except that Joylene, the voice of the satnav, has a will of her own and takes us to places we did not want to go to. A lot of screaming and yelling and wasted time and frustration later we disconnect Joylene and get to the car hire place. (We later reinstate Joylene and have to apologise abjectly to her because we realise that we had misspelt the car hire road, and that she was only doing her job as she knew best).

And I still have not got to the rude awakening. That comes after our very scenic drive north up Highway 1, through Muir Woods with its giant redwoods, and along the windy (and either way you pronounce windy will fit) coast.

We reach Bodega Bay Inn red-eyed, shivering and hungry. A woman called Jenny (although I decide to call her Wendy – she looks such a Wendy) shows us our room. It is without decoration except for a huge television set facing the double bed. The floor is concrete, there is no carpet, there is no hanging space and nowhere to put clothes, and one tiny window is ten feet above the ground. The bathroom we will soon learn has no plug to the basin, and the shower, I will learn in the morning, doesn’t do warm and certainly not hot.

The dream is over. So what do we do? Argue, of course. And that argument will continue till the morning. Jane says she’s not spending a moment longer in this hellhole and starts googling feverishly for alternatives. I say that moving elsewhere will be too unsettling and that we may end up in an even worse hole. Anyway, this is what travel is all about and that we should embrace and treasure these little discomforts.

I then give in, realise we’ll never get our money back and start wondering how we can unscrew the TV set from the wall so that we can sell it in Napa. I rehearse my little speech to “Wendy”, deciding that I shall use my very correct international hotel inspector voice and that I will firmly enumerate every deficiency in this establishment I can think of. So it goes on.

Jane then decides to confront Wendy. But it’s not Wendy that she is facing but Wendy’s MOM. This is a bit like that moment in Alien when Sigourney Weaver realises that the monster’s parent is her real foe. Wendy’s mom is a large woman and is wearing a black body stocking that stretches to her ankles. She looks like Kathy Bates’s ugly sister after being interrupted while trying to digest three supersize Big Macs. It is at this moment that I reconsider my role in life. “Everything fine?” Big Mom grunts at me. “Oh yes,” I blurt. “We love it here. You have such a nice place.”

It’s now 10pm local time and we’re still here, in the seaside village where Hitchcock filmed The Birds. As usual, food and sunshine have come to our rescue. And we’ve had one of our best days yet. We walked for miles along a fabulous beach, saw a lot of birds we’d never seen before, and then climbed a headland and looked down on the Pacific. From there we see glossy black shapes, less than 300 hundred feet from the rocks below, pushing through the sea and occasionally sending up plumes of spray.

A group of finback whales had been seen, we had been told earlier – an unusual sighting for this time of year but then it has been the coldest summer on record for the west coast. And now we have a front-seat view of them.

Here we are at Sausalit0. A member of our party, pictured top after consuming a cigar or two with a double rye, amusingly said he would let me take his photo if I would lend him $7. I sportingly agreed. I took the photo and he then proceeded to hold on to the dollar bills! Poor show! We were setting up the second photo when a very pleasant couple we had been talking to asked if they could be included in our group picture. Odd request, but of course we agreed! Here they are – next to Jane and to me