The Bells of Saint Francis

This update is brought to you from a greyhound bus somewhere south of San Francisco. Greyhounds have been a bit of a disappointment, if I'm honest. My image of a Greyhound was a rickety old sheet-metal construction made in the 60s, with hippy symbols painted along the sides, cheap uncomfortable plastic seats inside, and the luggage strapped on to the roof. In reality, they are massive modern coaches with soft, suspiciously comfy seats, luggage compartments, air conditioning and reading lights. In other words, the same as English long-distance buses. Still, the comradely atmosphere aboard the buses was very much not English, and did live up to my expectations. The folks on the overnight slog south from Portland were a satisfyingly motley crew, and the chap in front of me even had a real life pirate eye-patch.

Arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area is for me a slightly awkward mix of feeling like I'm home, and feeling like I'm at an exciting theme-park that I only get to go to every few years. I lived in the East Bay for a year-and-a-half when I was six, and still have family living there. Indeed, it was to my grandparents house that I transported myself, even though my grandparents were at that time ironically leaving my house in England to start their holiday in Europe. In the evening I was joined by two fellow British travelers, both of them Old Etonians, and I gave them a dramatic (non-)entry to the house by breaking the latch on the door, making it impossible to get in.

It was about midnight when this happened, and so with the help of my good-natured uncle who lives nearby we set about trying to find an alternative route into the house, where my belongings were already locked away and where soft beds awaited us. As we attempted to prise open windows and back doors, I started imagining having to explain to my grandparents how we had sealed their house from the outside, and I started deciding which was the least expensive thing to break to gain entry. Eventually however, the day was saved at about 1:30 am when we managed to stick a long pole through the letterbox on the garage (which is connected to the main house) and press the inside button on the wall that opened the garage door.

With a roof over our heads and a garage-opening clicker for a house key, we set about exploring all the wonderful (and to me familiar) delights of the area. On day one we went to Berkeley, strolled through the university campus, and marveled at the delights of Telegraph Avenue such as Fat Slice pizza and the two best record stores in the world, Rasputin and Amoeba. We almost went to a film at the movie theatre where I used to work, but decided instead to buy a 50-cent video at Rasputin and watch it at home with a bowl of that traditional American delicacy, Kraft's Macaroni and Cheese. Mmmm. The next day we delved into San Francisco proper, taking trams, eating huge plates of noodles in Chinatown, hiking up Lombard Street, breathing the chocolate-perfumed air of Ghirardelli Square and reveling in the sea-side haunts of Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39.

The grand finale came when we were picked up from the San Francisco docks by my uncle in his huge motorboat, and taken for a whiz round the bay in the sunset. We sailed past foreboding Alcatraz and the millionaires’ homes in Sausalito and Tiburon, as well as under the Golden Gate Bridge itself, with the lit up skyline of San Francisco guiding us all the way. It was an awesome experience, as we took about 75 thousand photos of the Golden Gate framed by a blazing orange and pink sky. San Francisco's bay really is a magical place, and the views from every corner are breath-taking.

We were awake when the sun rose the next morning, too, because we had to catch he early train over to Merced, from which we took a shuttle into Yosemite National Park. This was the first natural wonder I'd seen on the trip, and not because America is short of natural wonders. There were plenty in Washington and Oregon near where I'd been that I'd really wanted to explore. But the issue that's becoming an ever greater problem for my travel plans is transport. I've always thought the situation in Britain was dire - with outrageous train fares and service that pales in comparison to what the Europeans enjoy. But in America, the transport problem is much much worse. The trains are as expensive if not worse than England, the buses are hardly any cheaper, the speed is abysmal, urban transit is patchy at best and most of all, public transport serves almost nowhere. Portland, for example, is only about half-an-hour's drive from what I've heard is the magnificent Columbia river gorge, but if you don't have a car, there is literally no bus or train that will take you there.

So to get to Yosemite, you have to wake up at five in the morning and get home at one in the morning, to be taken on various painfully slow and uber-expensive modes of transport about six hours each way, and finally get to spend a short afternoon in the park. Fortunately for us, therefore, Yosemite was the most fantastic array of natural extremities, with searing mountain sides, dazzling white-water rivers, sumptuous pine forests, insane cliff-faces, psycho waterfalls and delightful little paths through this natural treasure trove, all of which well justified the slog and lightness of wallet.

There were no universities that I needed to look at in San Francisco and around, so it's back on the job when I reach my next destination, infamous Los Angeles.