USA 2001 - Day 19

We had breakfast which was organised by the motel owner who was from Lancashire and looked more like a pool attendant than a motel proprietor.

Checked out, it cost us £106 for the two nights and drove into downtown Palm Springs for a final look before moving on. We’re driving to San Diego today so we can go to Sea World tomorrow.

On the outskirts of Palm Springs we stopped at a petrol station with two rows of pumps, one signed as self-serve, the other as full-serve. I stopped at the full-serve by mistake and was told it would be 30 cents a gallon more if I wanted someone to serve me so I reversed out and over to the self-serve and saved myself six dollars. We headed south for San Diego which is very close to the Mexican border, it was freeway all the way and looked an easy journey on the map. The journey was easy but the freeway leading into San Diego was the busiest we’d ever seen. Six lanes of speeding cars, inter-sections, junctions and more inter-sections, cars entering the freeway from your left and from your right, exits going right and exits going left and cars overtaking on the inside and outside. It was so busy I had to really concentrate on where I wanted to be at any particular time. Should I be in the sixth lane or the first lane? Do I need to turn right up here? If so what am I doing in the outermost lane on the left then? I was a nervous wreck. The traffic just kept on coming at me.

And then I took a wrong exit.

And we got totally and horribly lost.

We ended up in some seedy part of San Diego. Pauline couldn’t find out where we were on the map, there were no signs and we had no idea how to get back on the freeway again. I stopped and Pauline got out and went into KFC to ask for directions. She came out and said, “It’s a waste of time. They hardly spoke English and I couldn’t make them understand what I wanted.” The more we saw of this area the more worried we became. The place was run-down, people were walking about with dazed expressions on their faces and nobody seemed to understand us. Let’s get out of here fast. We drove on slowly, trying to see any meaningful road signs and hoping we’d see somebody we could ask about our direction but everyone we saw looked liked a serial killer on the loose so we just kept on driving. Eventually we saw a post woman. She won’t be on drugs plotting her next victim, I thought, or will she? Anyway, Pauline asked her how to get back on the freeway in the direction we wanted to go. Do you know what happened? This post woman who you would have thought had a fairly good sense of direction and a bit of knowledge about local road signs, road names and addresses, sent us off and on to the freeway but in the totally opposite direction to that which we wanted. Again, we had to turn off the freeway and try and get back going the other way and after many worrying and frustrating journeys which included driving around areas of San Diego that didn’t take us anywhere and an interesting journey across the Coronada toll bridge and back again, we finally stumbled back on the freeway in the right direction.

So that was our day. A pleasant morning in Palm Springs and a tour of San Diego’s low-life in the afternoon. It was late by the time we reached a motel and the weather was grey and dismal again. We went out to eat and went to bed.