Round The World Part Three

So far we have completed the San Diego - Hawaii - San Diego leg of the trip. Once ensconced in San Diego for a short overnight leg we celebrated by hitting the treadmill in the motel gym (me) and doing laundry (Mary). Now, I know what you're thinking - I get to exercise to work the kinks out while Mary does my laundry. I wish. I did mine the last day in Hawaii while she lounged around at the pool. I offered to do hers, but she has an issue with my laundry skills. She feels I lack any. I might, strictly for efficiency's sake, throw different fabrics together in the washer, but I always pick the middle wash cycle. And I haven't actually mixed whites and colors together unless I needed to get enough stuff for a full load. Very few laundry accidents have occurred under my watch. Well, unless you include the two or three hundred times I've absent mindedly forgotten to check my pockets before loading the clothes into the washer. But none of those incidents are really critical: I'm pretty sure we can get another marriage certificate, and the signed copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass - well those are a dime a dozen, aren't they?

Anyway, we got in late and just decided to chill at the Homewood Suites near the San Diego airport. We didn't even bother getting anything to eat (well, we did have dinner of sorts on the plane from Hawaii). We had a bite in the morning at the sumptuous buffet breakfast served in the hotel. If sumptuous means a coffee, and an English muffin. They seemed to be all out of Eggs Benedict and I desired to make my dismay known to the staff, but Mary deterred me.

Back to the airport and a mid-morning flight on United to San Francisco. Mary had rechecked the flight times (the airlines aren't going to fake us out again) and found out that our flight had been moved up considerably, but this time we were ready for them. For a change, since it was a short flight, we went cattle class. As is usually the case I went to sleep shortly after we boarded and woke up when we landed in San Francisco. I often do this, even if I'm not especially tired, because I enjoy bugging Mary, who has a hard time sleeping on planes. And it makes the time spent with my knees pushed up into my chest go faster.

We arrived at San Francisco on time, a virtual miracle in this day and age. A quick and expensive taxi to the Four Seasons downtown and we were soon checked in and relaxing in the rather sumptuous room. Since the Four Seasons was booked through the American Express FHR (Fine Hotels and Resorts) program, we were to receive a complimentary breakfast as well as a $100 credit for lunch. This isn't as big a sum as one would assume: it is a Four Seasons, after all. We wandered down and got some lunch (Crab Louis salad and Anchor Steam for me - whee!) and then Mary went up to the room to do some work on her laptop while I went out and picked up a few things. As is usually the case, after starting out on the trip, there were a couple of items that needed replacement or that we discovered we needed. We decided it was good that we spent the first ten days or so still in the US, so we could shake down and see what needed replacement before going overseas.

For instance, we bought some luggage locks before leaving home. By the time we arrived back in San Diego, the printing on the tumbler wheels had worn off, which made figuring out the combination a bit of a crapshoot. And since I was carrying the new laptop around in a small duffle bag, I needed to get something to cushion it. Turns out there was a CompUSA right across the street from the hotel and they were going out of business - score!

Also, something like a year ago I had bought a recharger tip for the iGo that was supposed to fit my iPod and allow me to recharge it. However, apparently I had never actually tried to recharge the iPod on the road. It turns out that I have a Paleolithic iPod with an interface that does not accommodate the newer charger tip. And to top it off, there were iPod docks in the room at both of the hotels in Hawaii, but my iPod didn't fit in them. So I took a rather quixotic trip to the nearby Apple store.

Our arrival in San Francisco came a day after this year's MacWorld came to a close. Apparently the San Francisco police hadn't quite completed sweeping the city to remove the last remaining vestiges of Steve's Kids. When I entered the Apple Store (which by the way doesn't use anything as common as a sign to announce its presence on the street - I guess if you're tuned into the Apple vibe you'll just know where the mother ship is), I was immediately surrounded by the ones Mary and I call the Kool Aid drinkers. They sounded like those three eyed aliens in Toy Story - "ooooohhhh!" I was a little creeped out and managed to snag my new iPod and leave before they were able to entice me to join the cult. Yes, I know, by buying an iPod I am a pledge in the Apple fraternity and I'm sure they have their plans for inducting me fully into their cult, but I'm pretty sure this will be as far as I will go. I will not be tempted by the new ultra thin laptop. Definitely not.

We had dinner at Zuni Cafe downtown with a friend who lives in San Francisco. It was our first time at this restaurant and it was quite good. One element that did somewhat detract from our enjoying the restaurant to the max was that we were seated next to a very large group of firefighters who were celebrating something that required large quantities of alcohol. By the end of our meal we were somewhat deaf from all the shouting and goings-on, and they did not show any indication that they were going anywhere. Management did apologize and offer to switch us to a different table, but by that time we were almost done with our entrees. We decided to skip dessert even though the management was going to comp us -- at least that's what we thought, since our hearing was pretty much gone and much of the communications had to be made with hand signals and signal flares. We decided instead to go back to the Four Seasons and have dessert there which turned out to be much quieter.

Along the way we got a real retro taxi driver, an unrepentant hippie, and the taxi had that faint yet strangely familiar tang of the weed. Which of course I only recognize the smell of from those movies they used to show us in Health about the dangers of smoking the evil weed. I don't think this particular species of humanity can be found outside of San Francisco, except possibly in Boulder, Colorado. He spent the 15 minutes or so of our drive to the hotel regaling us with his theories on what was wrong with the fuzz in San Francisco. It was cool to meet someone from the Summer of Love who hasn't started a major multi-national corporation and gotten filthy rich.

We did have time for a leisurely breakfast in the hotel before starting off for the airport for our flight to New York. This would mark the beginning leg of the actual Round-the-World (RTW) trip tickets. We decided to use curbside check in since the taxi dropped us right there and there was no one in line. This was a mistake. The skycap took the tickets (which are actually handwritten, by the way) and disappeared inside when he couldn't figure out how to process them. About the time we had just started suspecting that our skycap had taken the tickets and started off on the RTW trip on his own he reappeared, apologizing since no one in this generation has ever seen paper tickets. That will be the last time we'll try curbside with these tickets.

The flight to New York on American Airlines was uneventful. We were originally scheduled to fly on a three class aircraft configuration but sometime after we bought the tickets they changed it to a two class configuration. On the other hand they did have the newer "lie flat" First class seats which were slightly better than the old style. The food of course was as bland and indifferent as usual, but American's slogan is - "Hey, at least you're getting something to eat - look at the people in the back - they're scavenging in the seats for pretzel crumbs." Actually there was one improvement, in that they gave you a choice of two different salad dressings, but that was pretty much it.

We arrived at JFK without a clue where the Hilton Garden Inn was located, except than it was near the airport. We found out that the airport shuttle van didn't actually run to the terminal and that we'd have to take a train to some other location and then they'd send the van to get us. This seemed unduly complicated so we opted for a taxi to the hotel. This turned out to cause quite a bit of confusion on the driver's part as he apparently had never heard of the Hilton Garden Inn. We finally got there after a scenic drive through a substantial amount of Queens or perhaps Albany. Upon arrival the driver shocked us by declaring he'd made a wrong turn and that he'd cut the fare by one third in compensation. I immediately suspected some sort of trap. I threw the money at him and ran inside the hotel.

We settled in for the night and decided to take advantage of this last chance to have a genuine New York pizza, or perhaps more correctly a genuine Queens pizza. It pretty much lived up to advance billing. It was better than Japanese pizza, and that's as far as I'm going to go.