Today I will be using up and under bash bash taps.
This morning when I was in the bathroom the toilet got blocked.
All toilets in the States seem to be the siphonic type, you know the ones, when flushed they half fill the lavatory bowl with water and then suck it all down the waste pipe with a whoosh. This morning when I flushed the toilet it started to fill the bowl with water but didn’t stop. The water level just got higher and higher and higher. The higher it got the more uneasy I felt until it eventually reached about three inches from the rim of the bowl. My brain was racing in my half asleep head and I began to panic. What can I do if it overflows? I know, towels. I’ll just get a towel and put it on the floor around the toilet, that’ll help. Of course, if it did overflow, it would have been more sensible to let the water and muck overflow directly on to the tiled floor (much easier to clean up) than get it all over the towels but no, there I was holding the towels and my breath until, remarkably, the water flow stopped.
I stood staring into the toilet bowl still not knowing what to do. The siphonic action hadn’t cut in to drag everything away but at least now the water was very, very slowly seeping away. I know, I thought to myself, I’ll wait until the water level has gone down to normal and I’ll flush it again, the siphonic mechanism’s just got stuck, it’ll work next time. I felt a bit like Frank Spencer in ‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em’, not really knowing what to do for the best but trying to be very responsible and getting things sorted out before Emma, Sophia and Pauline realised there was something wrong.
So I waited until I could see the water level had subsided and I reached out and hesitantly flushed the damn thing again. The water level began to rise… and then rise some more… and then more. The siphonic action still hadn’t cut in and the brown swirling mass of excrement and toilet paper was getting closer and closer to the brim. It reached its previous danger level but didn’t stop. I was hopping up and down, towels in hand, praying for the thing to stop. Why I hadn’t put the towels on the floor by now I don’t know but I hadn’t. Two inches from the rim, one inch from the rim, half an inch from the rim – oh no – I closed my eyes, dropped the towels…and then it stopped. It just bloody stopped. “Thank you God, thank you,” I muttered. Now what to do? The damn toilet was obviously blocked and no amount of flushing was going to clear it. I opened the bathroom door and said, “Don’t come in here, the toilet’s blocked”.
Of course that’s exactly what Emma and Sophia did, they rushed in to have a look.
“Ooh, it’s horrible! Ooh mum, come here and have a look! Ooh, the smell! Mum…mum!
“I’m not going in there,” said Pauline and immediately rang the front desk to report the blockage.
Why didn’t I think of that instead of hopping around in the bathroom like a lunatic for fifteen minutes?
Eventually there was a knock on the door and a little old maintenance man came in armed with a clean white towel and a long-handled plunger, the rubber end of which was the size of a dustbin lid. He’s obviously done this before I thought. He held the towel in front of him and plunged the toilet. It was all over in minutes. After he’d gone Sophia went in to have a look and innocently said, ”Where did he put it all?”
We got up and out reasonably late partly because of the toilet business but partly because we didn’t have any great plans for the day apart from looking around the town of San Luis Obispo before moving on during the afternoon. Off we went for breakfast at Denny’s, it was almost next door so it was easy and convenient. No matter what time of day or night it is, in most American eating establishments you have to wait to be seated. Even if the place is empty you can’t just walk in and go and sit down at an empty table, they have to take you there.
I had a smallish breakfast of sirloin steak, eggs, hash brown, English muffins and coffee but before I got it we had to order......obviously. The waitress had been on her Denny’s customer service course and immediately brought us glasses of iced water and menus.
“Hi, I’m Kathy and I’ll be serving you today. Would you like any beverages? OK, that’s two coffees and two fresh lemonades. I’ll be right back.”
All this is said with eyes wide open and with full-on eye contact that made my eyes water.
“I’d like the steak and eggs meal,” I said pointing to a picture of it on the menu. Practically every meal was pictured in full glossy colour on a plastic coated menu the size of a broadsheet newspaper and with as many pages too.
“OK, how would you like your steak?”
“On the plate please.”
” OK, how would you like your steak cooked?”
“Medium please.”
“OK, how would you like your eggs?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well you can have them fried, boiled, poached or raw. You can have them medium, over medium, under medium, under done, over done, wombling free, over dosed, over there, over medium rare, sunny side up, sunny side down, on the steak, off the steak, up your nose or on your head.”
“Over medium please,” I said. I had no idea what it meant but it was the only one I could remember.
“OK, what additions would you like?”
“Pardon?”
“What additions would you like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well you can have hash brown, grits, biscuit, toast. You can have bacon, fries, tomatoes, ham, chips, beans, peas, onion rings or English muffin.”
“I’ll have the hash brown and the muffin please.”
“OK, can I get you guys more drinks?”
And off she went.
The steak was excellent as was the rest of the breakfast. I cleared the plate, not a morsel was left.
Up came Kathy again.
“How was it guys?” she said.
“It was awful,” I said, “I can’t eat it, especially that English muffin.”
Now this is where we English can totally confuse the Americans isn’t it? Irony is not their strongest point is it? Kathy’s permanent grin began to fade, her wide-open sparkly eyes began to close a little and then she saw my plate.
“Hey, you managed to eat it though,” she said uncertainly.
“Yes I did, it was terrible. I could only manage to eat it all. I want my money back”
The penny dropped and she began to relax again.
“OK, you want your money back. I’ll see what I can do,” she said with a laugh and a look that said is he being serious about this or not?
“By the way,” I said, “that English muffin wasn’t an English muffin.”
“No?” she said incredulously.
“No,” I said, “In England they’re called crumpets.”
“Cumpets?” she said sounding surprised.
“No, crumpets,” I said, “so get your bosses to change the menu to say ‘English muffins that are really English crumpets. OK?”
“Right, OK, I didn’t know that.”
By now she’d convinced herself that I was just a mad English person and walked away chuckling and shaking her head. She brought the bill. “You guys have a nice day now,” she said with a smile and rushed off.
As soon as we open our mouths in this country somebody will without fail say, “Hey, where you guys from?” During our meal, a family at the next table suddenly said, “Hey, where you guys from?” and after a few pleasantries they informed us that they were locals and began to tell us about the high spots of San Luis Obispo and what we should look out for when we reached town. The thing they were most excited about was something they called ‘Gum Alley’ and they talked with this rising inflection on the end of every sentence they uttered. It was really annoying.
“Hey, make sure you go visit Gum Alley?” they said.
“Gum Alley?” we said.
“Yeah, Gum Alley, it’s an alley in the centre of town and people stick their gum on the walls?”
“Oh nice,” we said.
“Yeah, it’s fantastic. People see how high they can stick their gum and some gum has writing on it you know? Where people have written on it? It’s great? You should see that? Gee, if you had more time here we could show you round?”
”Well, we’ll certainly look out for that,” we said. Jesus, they know how to enjoy themselves in San Luis Obispo don’t they?
We left Denny’s and Kathy chuckling to herself and repeating things like, “I want my money back, crazy guy” and “Cumpets?” and motored into downtown San Luis Obispo. It was a well-kept town, as nearly all the towns are that we’ve seen so far, and it had a shopping mall and lots of other shops, as nearly all the towns have that we’ve seen so far. Emma and Sophia bought a few things and we moved on. We didn’t get to see Gum Alley I’m pleased to say.
We drove further along the coast to Morro Bay, a pretty and well-maintained fishing resort. At the entrance to the bay is Morro Rock, over 575 feet high and apparently called ‘The Gibraltar of the Pacific’, (in their dreams). Sea otters were swimming in the bay and small squirrel-like creatures were bounding about on the rocks close to the road. It’s a working fishing village and renowned for its seafood restaurants so not surprisingly all along the front were restaurants and cafes advertising fresh fish and most of them also offering ‘fish and chips’. I wasn’t sure whether this was a genuine attempt to copy our fish and chips or whether it meant fish with potato chips. (I’d made this mistake before, thinking I was going to get chips with my meal but instead I got crisps.) . Anyway we went along to a beach-side café and Pauline asked if the fish was fresh. A reasonable enough assumption to make in a fishing town renowned for its seafood you would have thought wouldn’t you? We were told, “Yes it’s freshly frozen.” So we gave the fish a miss and had something else.
The weather hadn’t improved and as we walked around the bay and along the sea front we were getting colder and colder. It was so cold we had to go into a shop and buy ourselves fleeces to survive the rest of the holiday and this atrocious Californian weather. It was a touristy clothes shop selling T-shirts, fleeces, jackets etc and not the most sensible place to buy a fleece, they would be much cheaper elsewhere, but we did end up with ones with Morro Bay California emblazoned across the front so we could show off when we got home. I found myself a reasonably understated fleece and found large and XL were too tight for me so I had to go for an XXL size (all those breakfasts). As I was trying it on I said to Emma, “I must be the fattest person in the shop if I need XXL.” She suddenly nudged me and indicated a huge fat woman standing behind and to my right within ear-shot. Oh dear.
We left Morro Bay and headed for Carmel and Monterey. Our intention was to stay the night at Carmel and then drive to Monterey to visit the Monterey Aquarium. Carmel and Monterey are only about 5 miles apart. By the time we got to Carmel it was getting late and dark but it was such a busy place, expensive and overflowing with rich looking Americans that we decided to carry on to Monterey and stay there. Carmel or to give it its proper name, Carmel-By-The-Sea, was a picture book town. It looked like it had come straight out of one of those Disney family films starring Hayley Mills. Everywhere seemed newly painted, no litter, beautiful shrubbery, manicured lawns, winding tree-lined streets, flower boxes everywhere, outdoor cafes, hidden courtyards, it was all a bit Stepford Wives really.
Didn’t see Clint.
We drove down Highway 101 to Monterey but had trouble finding a room for the night, everywhere seemed to be full up. An Asian motel owner eventually phoned another motel for us and found us a room, probably his brother, but we had to pay 95 dollars for one night. We were soon to find that practically every motel we would come across would be run by Asians.. They seem to have colonised California and taken over the motel business in the same way as they’ve taken over newsagents and opened Indian restaurants in England. Funnily enough we didn’t see any Indian restaurants which was surprising because there seemed to be ethnic food from all races where ever we went.
Our room was cold and draughty and not worth the money at all but we had no choice but to take it, it was getting really late and everyone was tired. The weather to date hadn’t been nice either, dull, overcast, breezy and cold and we were all getting slightly depressed over the lack of sunshine and warmth. Everyone we met kept saying that it was very unusual weather for the time of year. Thanks a bunch California.
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