Welcome to the latest excerpt of the Keen travel blog. If this is your first time, I hope you enjoy reading about our adventures abroad. As always, I am conscious that for some people this is similar to being taken through someone’s holiday photos, so if it’s not for you, let me now, I won’t be offended. If you are really interested, there is a back history of all previous blogs at www.maple3.co.uk/blogs

California Blog – Oct 2023

As I am loading my phone with Netflix movies and Amazon Prime mini-series, Mrs K says to me, "I hope that while we are away, we are going to have some proper two-way conversation?"  "Sure, what do you want talk about?" , It seems my lack of communication might be a starting topic.

Terminal 3 seems serene when we arrive but when we get through security, it is like a zoo.  Every eatery has a 25-metre line of people outside it.  Ridiculous.  Where are all these people going in mid-October?  Shouldn't be allowed.  I know what you are thinking but this will be my first proper 2-week holiday of the year, a contractual requirement of my employer.  Just saying.  I am looking forward to a proper chill and relax - so this might be a short blog.

This is a much more straightforward trip than our road trip last year.  But just before we leave, we discover that we have double booked car hire. Whoops. Perhaps Mrs K and I should have separate cars and do a gumball rally across the desert?

At the gate at Terminal 3 we dive into Pret's for a last coffee before boarding and we meet our first American.  She asks me if Pret's is card-only.  I say "yes".  She says, " you know, they don't even take Euros".  "You don't say!"

We arrive in San Diego and, as usual, our taxi driver from the airport is a character.  Carlos.  He was in London in June as part of a $19k holiday to Europe for him and his family.  How much does a taxi driver make?  The American working class is doing well. Maybe working class doesn't exist in the US.  He insists on going through the photos on his phone (while he's driving) to show us pictures of him and his family at Tottenham Court Road station. Mrs K is holding onto me and the door handle.  Carlos is a Chelsea fan, and he tells us he met Abramowich in the San Diego harbour once and offered to head up his security.  We doubt Roman will be in the US anytime soon but Carlos disagrees, "the US Govt only cares about money, they charged him $5000 per hour to moor his yacht in the harbour"   Carlos seemed to have had a run in with a security person at Heathrow after he was pulled out of a line randomly for a search.  It sounded like he told the chap of Asian origin to go back to where he came from.  "I'm American" he says in a thick Mexican accent.

We arrive at our apartment - 17 hours door to door, extended by an hour waiting in the baggage hall.  We are on the 25th floor with a great view of downtown San Diego.  We were here briefly in 2016 and will spend the next couple of days seeing all the things we missed last time.

Next morning, I am awake at 3am and we go for an early breakfast along the street. My sleep patterns are all over the place and I don't know what day it is.  But on holiday, that's a good thing, right?  We visit a breakfast place called Swami’s.   It is next door to a donut shop which claims to sell the best donuts in the world.  Ha ha.  We sit down to breakfast and soon there is a queue out on the pavement.  Not for breakfast but for the donut shop which opens at 8am.  After a few minutes the owner turns up in a smart red Ferrari.  Seems like the donut business is thriving. They do look good.

We take the 2-hour harbour cruise which takes in the 4 naval bases and the largest flotilla of naval vessels I have ever seen.  The ship pictured below is the USS Midway which is now a floating museum. We visited it last time and it’s a must see if you come to San Diego. Our guide ("Max with an x") tells us the stuff about the bay that we didn't know, didn’t need to know and will have forgotten by the time we get home.  But I do now know the difference between a destroyer and a cruiser.  The most common aircraft used by the US Navy?  The Seahawk helicopter.  The US Navy nearly has as many aircraft as the US Air Force. Max is a particular expert on the Pacific Ocean, and he seems to get quite emotional when talking about it.

We take an Uber to Balboa Park. Nothing to do with Rocky. Paola is our driver, but she drives passed us twice before remembering to stop on the 3^rd pass. She doesn’t seem to be able to follow the satnav either and mounts the pavement as she drops us off. How do we keep getting taxi drivers that don’t know how to drive? Balboa Park is huge, about 1.5x the size of Central Park in New York. It houses the famous San Diego Zoo, several museums, a famous Japanese garden and the Spreckle Organ Pavilion. We are not up to looking round museums but we enjoy a very nice lunch while listening to the weekly organ recital Mrs K is up for visiting the Japanese garden, but the temperature is up around 30C and Mr K is wilting. We head back for a nap.

On Monday, it seems we may have chosen the wrong day to explore the coast and visit the beach at La Jolla (pronounced 'hoya').  We leave downtown San Diego in perfect sunshine but just 5 miles north the sea mist is rolling in.  We pass La Jolla and venture further to Cardiff State beach where we watch the surfers and then find a really nice beach side restaurant called the Pacific Grill.   Only valet parking available and a meal of 2 starters and 2 drinks sets us back $100. I think we can call this place 'upscale'.  However, the setting is amazing.  Surfers are out on the waves which crash down onto the sand.  There’s something about looking at the sea - even on a misty day it is relaxing, and I am chilling. 

Mrs K thinks she spots someone famous on the next table, but we can’t work out who it is. Our use of AI tools is not up to it. [We later realise she is thinking of Max Clifford – he died in prison in 2017]

By the time we get back to La Jolla, the mist has cleared, and we enjoy a walk along the coast to the famous cove, populated by pelicans, seals and noisy sea lions. You can get quite close to the wildlife.

Some people are getting a bit too close!

On Monday evening we take a short walk into the Gaslamp quarter of the city which is where you find the city’s clubs and restaurants. There is a heavy police presence and some streets have been closed off to traffic to accommodate the crowds. There is a big convention in town with 16,000 delegates. It is the IACP – the International Association of Chiefs of Police. A dodgy bunch.

Today (Tuesday) we leave San Diego for Palm Springs where the temperature is likely to be at least 10C hotter. It was supposed to be a bit cooler at this time of year!

Part 2

I'm not sure what's happening.  Something is awry.  I could probably put it down to the heat.  We arrive in Palm Desert (about 15 miles from Palm Springs) and it is pushing 40C.  It is an intensely dry heat which saps you.  But that’s not it. Somehow, I have managed to forget my trainers.  It's not the first time to be honest and Mrs K accuses me of trying to avoid any kind of physical exercise.  That's actually not true, because I did remember to bring my golf shoes.  Anyway, we make an early visit to the outlets to get some trainers and I end up getting some new shoes.  Buy 1 and get 70% off the 2nd pair.  I end up buying a pair of brown shoes.  I know, something is very awry.

Tuesday 17^th - Our drive from San Diego to Palm Desert was spectacular. We chose to avoid the freeway and take the back roads across the desert. Either way, you have to cross the mountain range. We stop to take in the view of the valley which houses the nine cities in the valley - Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Palm Desert, Desert Hot Springs, Rancho Mirage, La Quinta, Indio, Coachella and Indian Wells. Our resort is down there somewhere.

Thursday is our first proper day of rest.  We just sit by the pool all day.  My main task is to address my golfer sun-tan lines.  Brown legs and lily-white feet.  I'll stop there.

Next day, to offset a day of lounging around doing absolutely nothing (except listen to a book about the bankruptcy of FTX), we decide to take a trip on the tramway. I have talked about this before. San Francisco cable cars are trams, the Palm Springs tramway is a cable car. When we reach the top (around 8,000 feet above sea level), the views are amazing. We can see our resort 20 miles along the valley and all the way to a lake called Salton Sea which is 50 miles away.

We have a massively over-priced and painfully slow lunch and Mrs K decides we need to work it off with a hike. We choose a ‘moderately strenuous’ hiking trail. Mrs K describes it as a scramble, which it is in parts, but the scenery is amazing and there are very few people that have ventured this far away from the mountain station. You could say that I found myself – quite literally when we come across a tree called Jeffrey Pine which smells of butterscotch. Sweet, just like me.

Scrabble.  There was some debate about the scrabble score on our last trip in Malta.  I think I pulled it back to a draw on the flight home.  This time I am into an early 4-0 lead.  Mrs K is so upset about her luck with the letters that I am thinking I might have to throw the next game. But the good news is that her luck might even out when we visit the casino on Saturday evening.

No such luck at the casino. Our small budget gets eaten by the slot machines in short order and Mrs K’s mood is not improved by the fact that her phone is playing up. She has spent about 3 hours online with both Apple and Vodafone without a resolution. How will she keep up to date on what is going on in Strictly? Once upon a time, it was only Jeff Keen that was obsessed with being connected. No more. To cheer her up, I take Mrs K down to El Paseo for brunch which is just a few blocks away and is a mini version of LA’s Rodeo Drive. It’s a dangerous move, but I suggest we walk along the street with up market shops after brunch. We come across an Apple shop and Mrs K pours out her troubles to an unsuspecting sales assistant. Within 30 seconds the guy has spotted the problem and fixed it. Wow, faith in Apple restored and a demonstration of the power of face-to-face consumer interaction over and above this online stuff. Mrs K is happy again.

But not for long. Scrabble score is now 5 ½ - ½. Yes, the fifth game was a draw – I couldn’t bring myself to lose it on purpose.

Last night we visited a neighbouring resort. Mrs K was admiring the palm trees, I was admiring the golf course. We discover that the hotel offers a boat ride around its lakes which border the golf course, so we book ourselves on it. $5 each as we aren’t hotel guests – the cheapest bit of entertainment we have enjoyed since we arrived. Our boat captain is Dan, and he offers to play some music as we drift around the lakes and watch the black swans. “Some easy listening”, says Mrs K. Dan picks some Sinatra and before long is belting out ‘My Way’ at the top of his lungs. Not what we expected and probably not what the diners expected as we cruise passed the quiet restaurants in the hotel. Funny guy.

As you can tell, this holiday has been one of long periods of inactivity – just as we planned it. We do have a trip to the Joshua National Park planned for tomorrow (Wednesday) now that the temperature has plummeted to below 30C. Yesterday was very chilly at 26C which meant we were able to eat dinner comfortably on the veranda in the evening. Sounds like we should make the most of our last few days given what we hear about the weather in the UK.

Part 3

Mrs K is on the lookout for a concert. We see that Ed Sheeran was in LA recently, along with “Echo and the Bunnymen”. Remember them? The other idea was Adele in Vegas. I point out that it’s a 4-hour drive, not to mention $1,000 per ticket. So we settle for a rive into the Joshua Tree National Park. On the way there, Mrs K is wobbling. Maybe we should drive into LA and visit the Getti mansion? The temperature has plummeted to a chilly 25C these last few days which has made it very pleasant and so we decide to make a trip to the desert. Mrs K’s phone is on the blink again. But it’s because we are 5000 ft altitude. I wasn’t expecting to see all that much but funnily enough they have a lot of Joshua trees there. They are not strictly trees but probably better described as giant yukka plants and you won’t find them in these numbers anywhere else in the world. They have been struggling in the intense heat of recent years and the park ranger (Shianne) says they will likely die out in the next 150 years, so just as well we made the 2-hour drive around the mountain, along the valley and up the mountain trail.

We head for the cactus garden which sounds like a small shop where you can buy a cute cactus in a pot. Instead, it is a vast valley which contains 200,000 cacti. They have an eerie glow when the sun shines on the flowers, particularly apparent at sunset. We also stop at Skull rock for a quick photo before heading to the free ranger talk by Shianne. She is supposed to do it as we walk the trail but the group is too big so we do it in the shade of an old and large Joshua tree.

We are both stunned by the scenery up here and make several stops to take pictures of the outcrops of rocks. We take the Hidden Valley nature walk which involves some modest climbing. We stay to watch the sunset.

Back in Palm Springs, we enjoy another really nice meal on El Paseo – just like Rodeo Drive. On this trip there have been no themed T-shirts for Mr K. But I did see one I thought looked interesting.

It’s our last evening and we take in the top-rated attraction on TripAdvisor which is Marvin’s Magic Theatre. Marvin was a magician on TV in the late 1960’s who was famous for lighting up an electric bulb without electricity. He passed away just a couple of years ago, but his small theatre continues thanks to Jeff Hobson. It’s a slightly odd setting in a small shopping centre between a bakery and a Thai food restaurant. We are met at the door by Jeff himself. He has a look of Liberace (apparently he used to work with him) with his sequin jacket and slightly camp style. We guess he has made a career out of performing at Vegas and on cruises. Before the show starts there is an opportunity to be fleeced at the bar and listen to a bit of live music in the foyer. It’s a small crowd in a small theatre and there is a lot of audience participation. In the 3^rd row we spend most of the time making sure we don’t make eye contact. He is a funny guy and very clever with the magic including the last act in which he manages to get a lady’s watch off her wrist without her or the audience noticing during a trick in which an egg keeps disappearing and reappearing from a small cloth bag. I was impressed anyway.

We are flying home from San Diego and it’s our last chance to view the windfarm at the end of the valley. An Uber driver in San Diego described Palm Springs as windy but it hasn’t been so. More of a breeze would have been a relief. But as you drive along the valley and it narrows between the mountains on the way to the LA, this acts a funnel and the wind does blow here. A good spot for 200+ wind turbines. We decide to drive to the airport via a place called Carlsbad so we can have a last lunch overlooking the Pacific. It’s a beautiful day, blue sky, calm ocean. The temperature is supposed to be 20C but sitting in the sun, it feels like 25C. We have really enjoyed this trip. It has been probably the most chilled holiday I have had in years and although the US has become an expensive place to come to, we still love it, especially the California coast. We’ll be back.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

Unsubscribe