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.