Day 12: Copper Mountain/Denver/San Diego - 13 April 2005 Awoke early as planned and got my shit together. Did the telephonic check-out – very convenient; I had not accrued any additional charges so they literally just signed me out of their system and asked me to leave my key-cards on the table – and went to go wait for the CME. It was still pitch-black outside, the snow an eerie blue under the moon. Although the snow had stopped falling the previous day – my last day on the slopes had been in blazing sunshine – the air still had that dense muffledness about it. I took the opportunity to snap a few last shots of the place – there were fairy lights in some of the fir trees – and reveled in the crisp smell of the frozen ground. It gives you an appreciation of silence, being out and about in a remote location at the crack of dawn. Bit by bit, a few other people also arrived for the shuttle. It seems the CME’s pick-up spot is right outside the block of rooms I was staying in, and I was able to sit in the lounge area with a view into the car-park area out front and just veg for a bit. For some reason this time I didn’t get a call from home – I forget why, since it has officially been more than a year ago and it has taken that long to get this diary written up properly. Nevertheless, eventually the distant glow of headlights down the road became a white CME van, and we were all ready to go. I have mentioned before that I lived on a diet of decongestants and Vicks VapoRub and this morning was no different, except that I hadn’t yet taken the decongestants. Taking hard drugs on an empty stomach has been known to cause vomiting at least once in my past, and I figured that the 90 minutes to the airport wouldn’t be too much of a hassle, so I hadn’t taken any. I did, as always, have the Vicks mini jar in my hand luggage for just-in-case. Just in case happened, of course, about twenty minutes into the journey. First a headache, then nausea. After a brief period of wondering what to do, I just went ape-shit with the Vicks and splashed it all over my face. That is the inherent problem with Vicks VapoRub – it’s not subtle. Your upper lip and/or forehead (depending on where you put it, you see) shines like a greasy pile of oil, and of course it has that whole medicated mentholated eucalyptus medical smell. But it was either that to clear out the ol’ sinus passages or risk having to ask the driver to stop, climb over everybody and throw up all over the side of the road. I have unfortunately actually had to do that before, several times on two separate occasions - one single and one multiple - but that’s another story. So I went with the Vicks, and proceeded to eat a Disprin as well; empty stomach be buggered, I thought. To reduce the risk of puking up the Disprin (that’s aspirin, for anyone wondering), I proceeded to devour my entire box of those funky flavoured Listerine breath-freshener strips which melt on your tongue. DIA could not arrive on the horizon quickly enough. Eventually, though, it did, and we all got out at our various terminals. In my case, again, United – as it had been at HPN, Dulles and La Guardia ten, nine and five days previously. I got all my stuff and headed to find the nearest bathroom, because I was not feeling anywhere near 100% and felt that puking was indeed imminent. I’ll say right now that the bathrooms in the main terminal at DIA are not near their best at 6am – it was actually quite rancid in all three of the ones I tried. I’ll leave out the details, but for those of you who’ve heard that Star Trek joke about Scotty finding stuff in the toilet, I think you’ll understand what I mean. Anyway, got checked in, as usual not a single emergency exit row available for a big lad like me and went looking for breakfast in Concourse B. I’m pretty sure I ended up at Itza Wrap! Itza Bowl! but it may also have been Cantina Express after wandering around trying to decide what to eat. Either way, I ended up with an awesomely good beef and black bean burrito for breakfast and then waited around for my flight. The food did my gammy stomach a world of good, I should say. Eventually we got called and I moseyed out to the gate to put me onto UA229, non-stop service to SD arriving around 10am Pacific time. It was a nice enough flight on a little 737-500, but I was not overly impressed with the two gentlemen in my row. I had a window seat, and at two hundred plus pounds, or 95kg metric, and 6’3” or 1.92m, I am not exactly pocket sized, and neither were they. All three of us crammed into that row made it look like a South African minibus taxi, which typically are licensed for fourteen passengers but carry around twenty. The two of them – brothers, I think, since they looked so similar but too close in age to be a father and son – were loud and obnoxious and really did moan a lot about everything. And boy can they eat and drink! Each of them ordered a beer and a vodka and coke on takeoff – and it’s only 9am and a two hour flight, and UA do not supply food, so you have to buy it – and moaned about the prices, and let’s not forget that those mini-vodka bottles they give you are doubles essentially, so that’s three units of alcohol already with the beer, as well as coffee when it was offered, and then when they handed out the complimentary snack-pack thingy, which was cinnamon biscuits as opposed to the funky savoury snack mix on the flight to DC, they still insisted on having a glass of milk as well, because “I always have milk with my cookies.” Incidentally, I’m about 40 years old, so perhaps milk and cookies is something I might have grown out of, I don’t know, thirty years ago. Suck it up, already. Anyway, eventually we descended into SAN, or Lindbergh Field or SD International Airport, a little more heavily than the landing at DIA the preceding week. Unfortunately, there was a westerly wind prevailing, which means we approached from the east into the wind instead of flying out over the bay and flying in over the navy base and the rest of the city, which would have been almightily cool. Bearing in mind that four hours previously I was standing in snow, high up in the mountains, it was odd stepping into the perpetual summer of southern California. My mate Andrew, or Ands as we call him, had been in SD since the Monday I got back to NY, so that was about nine days, and he was at work that morning and coming to meet me at the airport so we could do our SoCal tour. That was Plan A. Plan B was I would realise after x many hours of him not arriving that he was running late and that we would meet at the hotel and work from there. The hotel in this case was the über-trendy and most definitely “hello, vicar!” Dana on Mission Bay, which we got a super rate for through a discount hotel site. It is beautiful, and was not at all bad at $100/night per room, which we reckoned we could afford okay. I mean that’s $50 each for a king-size bed and private bathroom right there on the bay – beautiful! I was hoping it would be Plan A, since we had a busy day planned for Thursday, and wanted to get as much done on Wednesday as possible. That, and I had no idea about anything in SD – we were relying on him picking up a bit of knowledge and the lie of the land during his nine day stay there, and had no clue about buses, or suburbs, or anything. Short of knowing the airport was in the middle of town, and the hotel was on Mission Bay, and that Scripps was somewhere slightly further up the coast, I was lost. This was inherently flawed, of course, since his firm’s offices in SD are not as much in SD as in Carlsbad, probably the equivalent distance from SAN to Scripps in the other direction from Scripps, so expecting him to know too much about SD proper was perhaps a little ambitious on our parts. More on that later. Anyway, I mooched around SAN for about forty minutes or so, debating. Annoyingly, Ands had opted not to get a temporary cell number for his mobile while he was there, so I actually had no way of getting hold of him to find out where the hell he was. To a point, this is typical of Andrew. In short, he is very often not one to spend money un/necessarily. Finally, he arrived. It was still fairly early and we opted to skip lunch by having late second breakfast at Rubio’s there at SAN, because he wanted a seafood burrito. I forget what I had; but I think it was another one along the lines of the beef and black bean one I’d had at DEN sometime earlier. Following that, we decided to go find some wheels. We’d already decided, much to the dismay of my panicking mother, that we would need to hire a car to get around. Had I been on my own, I would have gone for public transport, but we needed to get to many places, including LA two days later and we reckoned having a car would be better than trying to find bus schedules and get another flight, since cost-wise it would be silly to do a 1-way to LA from SD since it is only about a hundred miles, which is a two hour drive. Flying would involve forty minutes in the air plus ninety minutes at the airports and we wouldn’t get to see the coast at all. Not to mention the added cost of getting to SAN and from LAX to the hotels in each city, it was just easier and cooler and faster to be mobile. Unfortunately, cars are muy expensive for foreigners to hire, particularly if you intend to drive them to an alternate delivery spot like LAX instead of SAN, which was our point of origin. Of course, our flights back to Noo Yawk were out of LAX, so that was the way of things. In short, hiring at 12pm (“1200 hours military time, gentlemen”) Wednesday in SD and returning no later than 9pm Saturday (2100 hours, military time) at LAX cost us about $350. And of course that excluded petrol, so we’d need to return the car with a full tank as well. And we were forbidden to drive to Mexico, which was annoying since we’d wanted to go to Tijuana, which is about 20 miles south of SD. That part was fine, though, since we were really pressed for time. Another annoying thing with my friends is the complete lack of respect for time-frames. If Andrew had arrived at SAN at 10am when I did, which was Plan A, instead of after 11, we could have had the car and been settled long in advance. This would prove costly later on, as you will find out later. And unfortunately this sort of annoying casualness continues to this day. Anyway, we eventually convinced Hertz to hire us a car – crikey, what a mission – after having to put up with a lot of uphill from a very bored sales guy there at their stand at the airport. But we got it, in the end, a little blue Kia Rio sedan, not huge but plenty big enough for the two of us and our gigantic luggage. We both are about the same size, but I have about 20kg on Andrew, so it is fortunate nobody had to ride in the back with us because there was no space at all back there. Of course, this was also our first experience with driving in the US. Driving ourselves, I mean, as in not being chauffeured around. We were finally discovering the joy of a left-hand drive, and that whole right-hand-side-of-the-road nonsense everyone over there seems to enjoy so much. And of course trying to read a map hand-drawn by the snotty behind-the-counter guy and being in extremely foreign parts all at the same time – double trouble. Surprisingly we made it to the hotel on our first go that time, unlike later when it would take us two or three wrong turns at a time. Ands kept asking me what I wanted to do that afternoon. We had plans to hit the beach at some stage, either in SD or on the road up to LA – both Black’s Beach, or, to use its proper name, Torrey Pines Municipal, and San Onofre are on the road between the two, and they are supposed to be the two best surf spots in North America – or something similar, but we had four days to do it in so I wasn’t particularly worried. I was really just happy to be there and had the meeting at Scripps the next day and just wanted to make the most of my time there. Ands was quite keen to get out to Seaport Village, a sort-of touristy shopping spot offering some curios and local souvenirs and stuff. I’ll admit that that sort of thing isn’t my scene, but hey, we did it anyway. Seaport Village is quite near the airport, and near the Padres’ baseball ground on Coronado Bay. SD has a lot of bays – it’s actually quite waterlogged, really. There are quite a few battleships and stuff parked there, and this particular neck of the woods is called the Gaslamp Quarter, and has a lot of old buildings and businesses and stuff there. One particularly impressive spot right there on the waterfront is the Manchester Grand Hyatt, two fairly tall towers of super-larney hotel splendour, with a rooftop bar which we immediately made plans to pull in for sundowners at on our way out later. We did the Village in the early afternoon and took pictures of the battleships and a smallish aircraft carrier – one of 4 routinely there, no less – and tried to decide where to go for supper. Ands had picked up a Let’s Go California travel guide from a local retailer back in Cpt before we left, and it was quite handy with maps and places to go and things to see and do and stuff like that for both LA and SD, so we were quite grateful for it. We had earmarked a few places as potential eateries and night-spots and Ands was really keen to stay in the Gaslamp that night. We agreed to think about the beaches and stuff on Thursday and planned to hit World Curry and Pacific Beach (a suburb, not only a beach), which is kinda bohemian/nightclub/dive-bar paradise, on Thursday evening. Some of the people at Ands’ office out in Vista near Carlsbad had pointed out a few spots to him as well, so Thursday was kinda sorted. We ended up at a pizzeria recommended to us in the Gaslamp, and it turned out to be quite a larney one which took quite a nasty chunk out of our budgets, it must be said. But before that, we started at the Top of the Hyatt – the bar is on the 40th floor of the rear tower. It has gigantic bay windows so you can see the airport and Coronado Bay and the naval base and all the way out to everywhere. We had a couple of Heinekens there – none of our usual fare, which is Carling Black Label (as voted Best Bottled Lager in the World 1994 at the big beer competition held in Burton-on-Trent in England) and either Amstel or a Windhoek draught for Ands. I loathe and detest Windhoek; he regards a Label as much too common and slutty for his taste. Admittedly, Label is the UCT undergrad beer of choice, so I learned to love it some years ago and have never really gone beyond it unnecessarily. But Amstel and Heineken both will do in a pinch, so we did the Heinies. I took a good few pictures of everything, of course, and enjoyed watching the planes come in to land at SAN because you can see it all from up top there. Should you find yourself in SD, I suggest and recommend it. Following the drinks and the expensive dinner, we just moseyed around. First, we got lost. It took an age to get back to the Dana, like it had coming back from Seaport Village, and by now it was around 10pm and thus, you know, night. We did have a very interesting conversation while touring about aimlessly in the car about various things – sex and religion both featuring quite prominently – but since we both agreed never to divulge the exact contents of what was said and by whom, that is about all I can tell you. I think I was driving and Ands was navigating – this little point will also prove important later on. He had driven to the hotel from SAN, but I had done most of the driving since. For those of you who’ve never had your comfort zone ripped from around you – and I for one tend to enjoy having mine removed temporarily from time to time, since a change is as good as a holiday – I’ll tell you this: it’s particularly odd driving on the wrong side of a car, on the wrong side of the road, in a foreign place, in the middle of the night. Everything about it is completely fucked up, and there is no other way to describe it. Even driving in parts of Cape Town, which sprawls about 20km by 40km all things considered, in bits of town which I don’t know that well, there are landmarks which you can use to at least generate a sense of direction. A big fuck-off mountain, for a start. The Caltex/Chevron refinery is another handy set of lights and towers. And at least the sea is only in one place – SD is a multitude of water and in some places the sea is both left and right of you and you have no idea which way to go. To cut a longish story short – well, shorter, since I have already harped on at length about it – we got back to the hotel too late to go to the Tropical Pool spa and bar which is open only till 11pm weeknights and it was already about 10:52 by the time we got back to the Dana. Instead we went to bed and continued the earlier discussion; however, it was in more general terms this time around and far less embarrassing and direct than it was in the car. Also, the focus was shifted more from sex and religion to morality and likewise issues. Not that religion is a big thing for me – I attend church only for weddings and funerals, to be completely honest, and resist all attempts to change that, for various reasons – but it is important among my friends, to a lesser or greater degree depending on which friend, and so we chat about it from time to time. Anyway, we eventually went to sleep and were all primed and ready for the big day which was looming. -d-