I Venture Out

Penngrove/Peteluma

Monday 18 May

Jet Lag! Nah, I wasn’t going to suffer jet lag, that is for wimps. Yeah right! After nearly 12 hours sleep I feel and look like I have been dragged through a hedge backwards. Still, a whole new world is out there to be explored. I need a few things first so Deb and I head out to the shops looking for a new pair of hiking boots for me and some outdoor chairs for Deb. This takes us about 4 hours because there is just so much to choose from and a fair distance between the different places.

REI is an outdoor emporium which makes Kathmandu and Jurkiewicz look like corner shops. The store we went to was huge. I was overjoyed to find a walking boot that is the same brand as the ones that I have been walking in for the past 16 years. The old ones are so comfortable that I cold sleep in them but they are looking all of their 16 years plus many k’s of bushwalking and every day wear. I had tried on some others earlier in the day and they were OK but the Vasque boots that I tried on in REI were just so comfortable - yep I’ll take those thank you. I have to buy some cycling stuff as well but both of us were all shopped out for the day so we decided that those things could wait for another day.

On the way out of the REI Deb said that she would take me to an even bigger REI with much more choice and I just couldn’t believe that there would be such a thing. More about that next time.

On the way home to Petaluma we pondered what to have for dinner and decided on the spur of the moment that eating out was the way to go and there was a great little mexican restaurant just round the corner so Mexican it is. The restaurant was fairly crowded at 6.30 but we were able to get a table. Dinner was great, although again I was a bit sceptical about it before we got there but the food was teriffic and washed down by a quite passable beer called Millers (not the same as our Millers), Corona being the other one on offer I think the Millers was a good choice.

I am a fan of Mexican food already.

Tuesday 19 May

Another slow start but today we are going to break in the walking boots. Once again we had a few errands to do in the morning but after lunch we drove to Olompali State Park and Mt Burdell. The park overlooks the Petaluma River and San Pablo Bay from the east-facing slopes of 1,558 foot Mount Burdell. We walked the trail for about two hours then realised that we would have to get back to the car in a hurry because the gates were due to shut.

On the way I was introduced to stuff that I have only seen in Disney Movies; a doe that looked strait out of Bambi and she was so tame, then there was a cheeky grey squirrel that chased as as we walked and it jumped from branch to branch. There were a million lizards, a small snake so many dragon flies that were all different colours and a fair few butterflies. I was introduced to the charms of Poison Oak although not first hand fortunately. Its bite is a bit like stinging nettle apparently but a fair bit worse.

Wednesday 20 May

Today is a sort of a rest day, my jet lag is catching up with me a bit and I am feeling a tad listless. Deb has gone to work (she works one day a week) and I am free to just do what I want. The most energetic thing I did was go for a short walk down the road and back. I didn’t get too adventurous because my geography is still very suss and I am having trouble working out which way is up. Later in the evening Deb and I did a 'neighbourhood' walk which was about two k around some of the back roads of Penngrove.

Thursday 21 May

Yoga this morning and it was good to have an easy workout. Deb runs a class at a local Yoga centre and is slowly gaining some students. I was there to bolster the numbers as well as to get my weekly Yoga fix. It was a great class and I think Deb will do ok in the future.

After Yoga we did a walk around Petaluma township and had an absolutely fantastic breakfast at a little caf by the river. My choice was pecan waffle dripping with real maple syrup and a big dollop of icecream. Oh how wonderful! We had a bit of a stroll and then headed off to do some more searching for outdoor furniture and some bicycle necessities for me. 

Remember that I doubted the fact that we would go to an even bigger outdoor shop than the one we were at on Monday. This place was huge, and I mean HUGE. Size isn’t everything though and it really didn’t have a huge range of cycling stuff but I did manage to get most of what I needed. The prices are really excellent as well. Now I will have to break in a new bicycle helmet which is never a really happy experience for someone with a head almost totally devoid of thatch.

Enough for now.

San Francisco

Sunday 17 May

(8 hours before I left Auckland)

Well I sure hit the ground running - Deb picked me up from the airport and off we went straight to San Francisco downtown (as they say). I was given a whirlwind tour of the SF icons including Nob HIll, the really bendy street with all the gardens in the middle of it (I will get back to you later with its name), the City Centre and a good sampling of the back streets. I also saw one of those rickety old cable car trams. I love the buildings and most of them are so well looked after. The views even from some of the lower houses was incredible.

The food on the plane was pretty good but in thirteen hours we only got two meals and breakfast was like, two thousand kilometres ago. She must have heard the grumbling because Deb drove into a stainless steel and pressed aluminium drive in burger joint that was straight from a Fonz episode. It was even called Mel’s Diner. When in Rome do as the San Franciscans do so I thought I may as well eat like the natives. When I finally, with Deb's help, got my tired brain around ordering a medium rare, quarter pound cheeseburger with three different cheese choices and ‘do you want fries with that’, which I demurred, I soaked up the ambience. I have to say that being in the country that put the words Starbucks and Coffee in the same sentence I was sceptical about the burger but, hunger aside, it was one of the best hamburgers I have ever had. And it came medium rare.

We decided that the best way to work off the calories was to do a walk somewhere. My lovely friend and tour guide suggested The Golden Gate bridge would be a great place to start so I agreed. This bridge is huge and the water is a long way down. They say that quite a few people jump from this bridge but I reckon they get blown off. The Golden Gate bridge is one of those places that has beckoned since primary school geography days and here I was finally walking over it.

Finally we made our way back to Deb’s little yellow house in Petaluma which is about an hour north of the city. The area that she lives in is a rural community and the house nestles at the back of a property that has three other hoses on it and is surrounded by farms. The yard has a collection of beautiful trees, the centrepiece being a huge Californian Redwood that would take three greenies to hug.

En route to Debs we stopped in at a supermarket to buy dinner, some local wine and cheese and a few other essentials like chocolate. I think the supermarkets here deserve a whole blog of their own. This particular supermarket, Whole Foods, was mainly food including a huge assortment of ready to eat hot fare. Apparently people just don’t cook over here, they pop in and buy ready to go it then re-heat it at home.

Eyes hanging out of my head from all the amazing things that I have seen so far as well as the coffee (I use the word loosely) I was ready for bed and a long nights sleep.

PS The name of the steep bendy street is Lombard Street.

Over the Pond

Friday 15 May

It's 4 a.m. in Sydney and where do all these cars come from? My plane leaves Mascot at 9:30 a.m. but I have to check in three hours so the 5:30 a.m. shuttle bus is the one I have to take. Four and a half hours and three cups of coffee later we all stagger, bleary eyed onto the plane.

The trip to Auckland from Sydney is only three hours so in no time at all we arrive and during the dying stages of a deluge. As I write this I am sitting at the airport again waiting to get onto my flight to San Francisco and the heavens have opened up again. It is bucketing down. The last time I was surrounded by this much water I was snorkeling. Nowonder Un Zud is so green. The weather in between has been perfect.

After arriving on Friday I took the shuttle into town and got off at in Queen Street as instructed by the ticket person at the airport. ‘It’s not far from your hotel’ she told me. She was  right, it wasn’t far, about a kilometre but it was up a hill that would challenge a mountain goat. This is where Sir Edmund Hillary did his training. There was a dearth of sherpas and taxis at this time of the day for some reason so I trudged on. Eventually I got to my digs, totally knackered and suffering from altitude sickness.

Leaving Sydney                   Halfway there                First sight of NZ

After settling in and exploring the mysteries of my hotel room (you know, all those little bottles of stuff in the bathroom and the thimble sized containers of ersatz milk) I ventured out for a brief tour and in search of food. I spotted a good sized queue outside an interesting place thinking, ‘if there is a crowd it must be ok’. The Auckland city mission however had a limited menu so I soldiered on. I couldn’t come at Chinese from a restaurant called Wongkok nor did the $150 a plate fare at Skytower temp me so I settled on a little Thai place called, My Thai. My Thai was packed to the rafters so, take away in a bag I fled past the Auckland City Mission clutching my dinner to my hotel (via a grog shop for a bottle of NZ red) where I settle in to watch the hapless Brumbies go down to a Kiwi team. You have gotta love the kiwi sense of humour - within a stones throw if the Auckland City Mission are no less than 4 grog shops and two pubs.

Saturday 16 May

Today after a slow start I walked the town exploring and blowing a bit of cash on some new duds at Kathmandu and a T- shirt with a motif that says ‘I’m not forgetful I’m just having a senior moment’. The treat for the day was a three hour ferry ride that did a slow loop of the Harbour.  What a beautiful place it is and it reminded me a lot of Rabaul where I lived as a child - volcanos and all. There were so many sailing boats on the water so it is easy to see why Auckland is called the city of sails.

I checked out the Skytower Jump and decided that it was a bit over the top to pay nearly $200 for about five seconds plummeting earthwards on a wispy thin cable from nearly 200 metres up. I only had one pair of dry trousers anyway. The Skytower though, is rather an imposing sight in a city that doesn't boast too many sky-scrapers. It is a bit lost on me why the first habitable room in buildings like this are on the ground floor and the next habitable room is somewhere in the stratosphere with tons of concrete and steel separating the two.

I had walked about 10k's today so I  headed off home to leftover Massaman Curry and yet another game of Rugby on the tele (pronounce Tili apparently). The NZ Cab Merlot wasn't bad so I finished of the bottle.

Sunday 17 May

I had to be out of my hotel by 10 a.m. so I had to scurry around to fix breakfast, do all the morning stuff, repack and cart my worldly possessions into the Tardis like lift for check out. All of which I did just in time. I spent the rest of the morning looking around the waterfront and drinking coffee.

Time to head out to the Airport for my flight to San Francisco. After collecting my bags from the hotel I had to walk back down to Queen Street to meet the airport shuttle which was the reverse of my uphill trudge on Friday. Let me tell you, taking two bags with a combined weight of 40+ kilos down a hill is like walking a bull mastiff on caffeine.

I had a few hours to kill before I had to board the plane, walking outside was out of the question because the heavens had opened up. I found a decent coffee shop so spent a while there, reading and drinking coffee. The duty free shops were a real treat so that filled in a couple of hours. I bought a few things that I convinced myself that I needed and went to the departure lounge for the call on board. 

Alas the flight is delayed because there is something (hopefully innocuous) wrong with the plane. Finally we are called on about ten minutes late but then had to wait in the plane (sans cooling system) for an hour and a half. While we waited the cabin staff kept offering glasses of water, so you can imagine the stampede when we finally got airborne and the seat belt went out. We lifted off sometime after 9 p.m. My biggest problems during the flight were, how the hell do I go to sleep and how do I pick a movie to watch from the 76 on offer.

City of Sails

Off on My Odyssey

Thursday 14 May

Pandering to the little boy in me, yet again, I decided that my odyssey to the US would begin with a train trip to Sydney. Why? Why not, the station is just down the hill and trains are comfy. My mate Terry even saved me the drama of wheeling my suitcase the 500 metres to Queanbeyan railway station - thanks TB. As I contemplated how I was going to cart my suitcase around for the next three days (it weighs roughly the same as my car) Terry set about making friends will all the people at the station - he does that.

Finally, and on time, the train arrived.

My trip began at 6.45am in the pre-dawn cool of late Autumn. Sydney is a bit of a jolt. The countryside quickly gives way to car yards, bare factory walls and all manner of streetscapes. At Warwick Farm, home of Sydney’s equine F1 industry I spied a long series of stables, each home to a Shetland Pony, not much bigger than your average labrador dog, munching happily on the gourmet fodder. Is this yet another austerity measure in the uncertain economic climate - out with the full sized grass guzzling steed. Will the next Cox plate be sponsored by Mattell?

Central Station and my journey is over, for the day at least. I had fully half a day to kill in Sydney, so what to do; shopping - no there is no room left in the suitcase. Ah, I know, I will  be a total tourist dag for the afternoon so after entrusting most of my worldly possessions to the baggage person at Central it was off to ‘The Quay’ to find a ferry. Meat pie and ginger beer in hand I set off on the 12.35 Manly Ferry, for the ultimate tourist treat. A couple of miles from Sydney - a thousand miles from care.

Manly never changes, it was a seething mass of people; aren’t they supposed to be at work or something. Manly seems to have become an enclave or the nouveau riche, dark brown, leather skinned people wearing the minimum, even with the temp down in the mid to late teens. I have never seen so much mutton dressed as lamb and some of the women were just as bad.

After the obligatory beer at The Steyne Pub and a walk to the beach it was back to the Ferry and eventually Central Station where my suitcase waited. I am staying at the Holiday Inn at Mascot so it made sense to go by train again. When told that the ticket was nearly $15 (roughly a $ a minute) I said to the bloke at the counter, ‘hey I only want to borrow the train not buy it’, oh dear he was not amused. Mogadon I think!

Well here I sit at the window of my digs writing to you while watching planes take off and land and wondering why I am sitting here when I have to be up at 4am. Night then, and I will see you in Un Zud.

Trains - it’s a male kind of thing.

Computer courses in Canberra are a bit like Leprechauns, hard to find and if you do find one you have to be lucky if it is any good to you. So where do I go to learn - Sydney of course. Well I could have gone to Melbourne but I have trouble with the language down there so Sydney was the logical choice. My course runs from Wednesday early am till Friday in the mid afternoon and is in North Sydney. I am offered free digs by a lovely friend who lives in Ryde which, in Colonial days was just a leisurely coach ride from Sydney Cove but now is a journey fraught with danger. Do I take my car? The answer to that one is a resounding NO! 

My friend in Ryde lives right on Victoria Road so there is nowhere to park at home; parking at North Sydney starts at $50 a day if you can get it and my heart is in no condition to drive the equivalent of three F1 races, twice a day for three days. So, do I fly or do I take a bus? The answer of course is, I will go by train.

Trains bring out the little boy in me.

Booking a train ticket to Sydney on the web should be a piece of cake even for a techno-bimbo like me and it was, at least for the trip up, but when it came to booking a return … let me just say after an hour I gave up and just booked another single trip from in the opposite direction. Sigh, I hate it when I get beaten around the head by an inanimate object!

During the process I was asked if I wanted First Class or Economy, like, you know, ‘do you want to upsize that’. Well of course I liked the idea of first class so I was given to wonder, what is the difference and how much. The how much was easy, First Class is $55 and some change while economy is $39 and a bit. Hey that’s only $16 but what do I get. Well here it is folks, for your extra $16 you get 50mm extra foot room and a seat that reclines, not 38^o but 40^o this is incredible value but I decided to go with the cheap route until my eye was caught by a piece of information that clinched the deal. First class arrives in Central, fully three minutes before economy. Whoa this is a bargain (click), first class thanks.

Autumn in Canberra and Chocolate

Not from today but  you get the idea.

What do Autumn in Canberra and chocolate have in common? Probably not a lot really except that today they both loomed large in my life.

Nagged by a friend to stop talking about getting on my bike and to - 'just do it' - I bit the bullet, packed the treadly into the back of my car and met other Pedal Power bicycle tragics at Dickson College car park; the launching pad for the Sunday Wanderers bike ride.

When asked why I love cycling my usual answer is, 'chocolate'. Yes folks I am a chocoholic, albiet ever increasingly on the wagon because of my burgeoning wasteline. So, bring on my saviour - cycling. 60k's on a bike gives me a free ticket to a the cornucopia of delights that Mr Cadbury temps me with daily and I am often weak but after a bike ride rarely remorseful; today was no exception.

The first 15 k's of our trip today was through long established suburbs that date back to when the exotic, deciduous tree was the drug of choice for avid gardeners and government. Some of these trees are nearly one hundred year old behemoths. 

The Newer suburbs boast smaller specimens of these wonderful trees and have a charm of their own. Against a backdrop of azure skies Canberra is cloaked with a mantle of a million shades of gold, red, orange and any other colour you associate with autumn (chocolate is a colour too) and is simply picture perfect.

This is bliss.