Seattle, USA

No prizes for guessing the inspiration for the title of this entry! Coincidentally (or not) the hostel here will be screening the above film on Saturday evening.

I would have written sooner, only internet access - like most things in the USA - is eye-wateringly expensive. Nevertheless, Seattle, being the capital of coffee culture as well as the headquarters of Microsoft and amazon.com, boasts lots of coffee shops with internet access... a winning combination!

San Francisco was a nice city, and if it weren't for the weird feelings of déja vu that seemed to stalk my every move, I would have been right back into the swing of hostel travel. Nevertheless, pounding the streets felt reminiscent of several cities I've been to already: perhaps a combination of Sydney (the harbour and the bridge), Melbourne (the trendy atmosphere and the trams) and maybe Auckland (the hills). After an all-too-brief stay, on Saturday morning I was booked to return to Los Angeles by way of Bakersfield, on a different and faster route through California. Because of the geography of the Bay Area, no railways run to San Francisco itself, but rather stop across the bay in Oakland, from where buses run across the Bay Bridge to several drop offs in Frisco itself. My ticket was from the last stop on the outbound route at 9.35 - as the stop near the hostel was the first stop I planned to get there about half an hour earlier. So, dragging myself out of bed at 8.30 I stumbled down to the lobby, gulped down a free cup of "coffee" and walked down the street to the bus stop. Of course, when I got there I discovered that the bus had, in fact, left 10 minutes previously. (Why I hadn't deigned to find this out before is beyond me.) Since I had half an hour till the bus was due to leave its last stop, the decision to hot-foot it up Market Street to the Ferry Building seemed obvious, not to mention necessary. Fifteen sweaty minutes later, I reached the end of the road at the Embarcadero boulevard that runs past all the wharfs in the harbour. At this point I'm supposed to casually stroll to the bus stop at the Ferry Building, wait for the bus to arrive and step on, correct? That's what I'd planned on doing at any rate, but of course I couldn't actually find the Ferry Building. I looked at the big building that said PORT OF SAN FRANCISCO on, and seemed to remember the bus stop being on the left. So I walked left... and left... and before I knew it I was 15 wharfs up the street with 5 minutes to go. Obviously this was the wrong way, so I made a swift u-turn (despite signs prohibiting it - I'm a rebel at heart) and walked slightly faster in the opposite direction. 9.33... 9.34... where's that bus stop? Finally, when I'd got back to the PORT building, I saw the bus waiting at the stop, one building in the other direction. Now sprinting, I abandoned most caution in crossing the road (jaywalking being a favourite activity of mine) and tried to signal to the bus driver who probably wasn't even looking in my direction that I wanted to catch the bus too.

Well, he didn't see me, and pulled off, leaving me looking rather exhausted and annoyed in the central reservation of the Embarcadero. Hey, at least it isn't a freeway any more. (The '89 'quake took care of that.) Now I was more than slightly worried about catching my train, having just missed it twice. Still, there was one more chance: the BART light-rail system which goes across the bay to a station in Richmond where once can connect to Amtrak. By the time I'd run to the BART station a few block away it was 9.45, and you can imagine my feelings when I saw that the first Richmond train left at 10.13! Without any option but to wait, I sat on the platform checking my watch every 30 seconds, and I can confirm that doing so definitely does not make time pass any more quickly. Well, 10.13 rolled round at last and I jumped on the train along with a few other people for the journey. I had no idea how long it would take; I could only hope that it would beat the Amtrak train to Richmond. Hey, Amtrak are usually late anyway aren't they? Half an hour of anxious waiting later the train finally got to Richmond. There it is! The Amtrak train was sat two platforms away, disgorging and accepting passengers. Standing at the door, I burst out of them the second they finally opened, jumped down the steps 3 at a time, sprinted through the concourse, bounded up the steps 4 at a time (this is carrying all my possessions on my back you will recall) and whew! The train was still there! Only... the doors are closed... I knock on the closest set of doors, and look round for a helpful conductor to wish me a nice day and open the doors. Not finding any such person, I start running down the train, banging on doors as I pass and really, really, wanting to catch this train! Then, silently and calmly, the train pulled out of the station, and disappeared off into the distance.

Obviously, I was not especially amused, and looked around for any objects that I could kick or otherwise destroy to assuage my frustration. In the end, I caught a train to Sacramento instead, followed by a bus to Stockton where I picked up the next train (to avoid waiting in Richmond for 3 hours, you understand), and arrived back in LA just before 10pm.

Going back to LA for the weekend wasn't originally what I'd planned to do, but then 500 miles doesn't seem too far to travel when there's a free lunch on offer! This offer came from a family at the church where my new friend John goes, who invited about 20 people to their house for Easter lunch. Presumably this is an American tradition, but the food making the tables groan seemed sufficient to feed the 5000, if not the whole of Southern California! Lunch provided an ideal opportunity for me to repeatedly insert my foot in my mouth, regarding such things as alcohol (don't touch it), guns (they're the answer to all our problems) and politics (Bush is the best thing since sliced bread). Oh well, it was educational at least!

On Monday morning I headed back north, passing through the Central Valley, where California gets its money from. (Apparently, if it were a country it would have the 5th biggest economy in the world - that's about the same as Britain's.) You can almost smell the money coming off the fields... even the railway sleepers are made of mahogany. After recovering from the shock that the train to Oakland arrived on time and the shock that the northbound train I was transferring to was 2 hours late, I wandered around Jack London Square, which very obviously was an industrial area until quite recently. The railroad tracks still run along the main street. (Can you imagine the West Coast Main Line running through the Bull Ring in Birmingham? Actually, forget that example; that would be an improvement.) Close to midnight, the Coast Starlight arrived (the same train that I'd caught the previous week, and I started my journey to Portland, Oregon, where I'd decided to stay the night before getting to Seattle. Well, as usual I didn't sleep more than about an hour on the train, so all I'd planned to do in Portland was sleep. Don't worry though, I'm going back this weekend, when I might see something of the city. (First impression: it's nice!) Seattle also seems nice, despite suffering the blight of most port-side cities in America, as well as Sydney, which is to have a double-decked freeway running above the harbourside road, which means that any pleasant stroll there is accompanied by the continual drone of traffic and the clack-clack of tyres passing over cracks in the concrete.

Never mind, tomorrow I shall visit the Space Needle (straight out of The Jetsons), attempt to find the first Starbucks, and then on Friday I'm off to Canada for a day!

A belated Happy Easter to you all. Christ is risen!