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.

USA 2001 - Day 20

Up earlyish and drove to Sea World. It was easy enough to find, just 30 minutes along Sea World Drive. The entrance price was exorbitant. They charged full adult price for kids of 11 years upwards and there were no family concessions. We had to buy four adult tickets at $42 apiece. 120 quid for a day out and that was just the entrance, we still had to buy food and drink and pay $7 for parking. Nowhere in England is that expensive is it? Still, having said all that, Sea World was a good day out and worth seeing.

Guess what I heard an American say. Remember the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the “Hey some fish, let’s go see ‘em” man? This time it was, “Hey, some dolphins, let’s go touch ‘em.” Wasn’t even the same bloke.

With all the exotic and interesting marine life in the park all Sophia had to say was, “Oh look, there’s a duck.”

Sea World has a theatre showing a 4D film called ‘Pirates’. 4D is 3D plus physical sensations. It starred Leslie Nielson as the crooked captain of the pirates and Eric Idle as the mate. Eric seems to have these novelty 4D films sewn up over here, he was the star of Disney’s ‘Honey I Shrunk The Audience’ in Disneyland too. These 4D films, watched with 3D specs on, are very entertaining. During this one the film effects were constantly bombarding you with visual and physical sensations. Bees appeared to fly out of the screen at you while your seat vibrated as they buzzed. Guns and muskets were fired straight out of the screen at you and you felt a blast of air in your face as they went off. As bats flew at you, you felt the flapping of their wings blowing air in your face. As bird poo rained down on Eric Idle’s head you received drip-drops of liquid dripping on your own head and right at the end after Leslie Nielson had been made to walk the plank, he surfaced from the depths of the ocean, looked straight at the camera and spat out a huge mouthful of water at which point we all got a fairly hefty dose of water squirted in our faces. It was all very well done and I came out of the cinema absolutely drenched.

Our last proper day of the holiday and a good one to end it with.

Tomorrow we have to drive up the coast back to Los Angeles to catch our plane home.