Days 22 - 24

So now my SO has decided to change the format and confuse me, so instead of daily blogs we are now doing a couple of days at a time

Saturday 26th May 2007<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

Despite our arrival at our Paso Robles destination, the traveling isn’t over.  I write this in Mr Bill’s living room, to the soundtrack of hundreds of starlings, reinforced by recent immigrants, Common Grackles, that are currently experiencing a population explosion across America.  We met a lot of them in Florida but have encountered them virtually everywhere we have been (I first met them in Trinidad, but that’s another story).  These birds have taken up residence in Mrs Bill’s sycamore tree, and feed on next door’s Rottweiler’s food.  Mrs Bill is properly known as Colleen and applies the same loving care to her garden that Bill applies to his record collection, so these birds pooping everywhere are not welcome visitors.

 

Yesterday, we toured Sequoia National Park, which is about two and a half hours drive from here, in the Sierra Nevada.  It’s a stunningly beautiful but relatively unsung paradise on uninhabited mountains and magnificent trees.  The sequoias themselves are astounding: massively permanent-seeming extensions of the mountains, stretching high wide and handsome up into the blue sky.  They grow in “groves” in valleys at about 7,000 feet above sea level, where the conditions seem to be perfect for them.  I visited the biggest of them all, the Sherman Tree, but couldn’t get a picture as the batteries in the camera had died, despite being replaced earlier in the day.  The Sherman Tree is described as the largest living thing on earth despite not having the widest diameter or circumference, nor being the tallest, nor even being completely alive (its top is dead).  Its trunk has the greatest calculated volume of any known tree, at something like 55,600 cubic feet.  One of the noticeboards explained that if you could fill this volume with water and use it to bath your average American family, it would keep them in baths for 3.5 years.  Naturally I question how many people in an average American family, how often they bath, and how much water they use, but it’s an impressive “statistic” nonetheless.  Anyway, Sherman is 36 feet in diameter at the bottom and expanding at the rate of a “good-sized tree” every year.  He’s about 215 feet, so not nearly as tall as the tallest redwoods, which are found north of San Francisco somewhere.  The widest tree was said to be the Grant Tree, I think, at 40 feet diameter.

 

I got some good exercise walking down the hill from the car park to the base of the tree and, particularly, back up again.  The air is considerably thinner at 7,000 feet than one is used to, so frequent stops to gather my breath and composure were required.  Mary didn’t risk the walk as her asthma is exacerbated by the pine forests and we were surrounded, not only by sequoias, but by ponderosa pines and umpteen other pines.  There were plentiful woodpeckers, chipmunks and squirrels to keep us company and, all in all, it was a wonderful place.

 

We had stayed overnight in Oakhurst, a small town between Yosemite and Fresno, where we stayed in a Days Inn and ate in an “American-Italian-Mediterranean” restaurant called Mio Amore, attached to a Best Western. This restaurant served up excellent food at a very reasonable price, made better by its policy of reducing prices if we ordered things that they couldn’t supply.   Thus we got our wine cheap and our dessert free, without even having to complain.  The waitress struggled with her fancy bottle opener, so I used the brute force and ignorance method of sticking the bottle between my feet and yanking on the corkscrew.  That let off a satisfying pop that would have delighted my grandson Marcus.  Our dining pleasure was somewhat diminished by being sat next to a speaker dispensing piped music that did battle with the discordant sound of a duo singing to a nearly empty bar next door.  The piped music was tuneful but blandly irritating, the live music was out of tune but enthusiastic.

 

No such troubles in the car, where we listened to CDs of some recent radio shows that Bill and Drew have done on the local radio: a Jethro Tull special, when they were joined by two friends; a “dueling decks” themed show where Bill chose 1971 as his favourite year and Drew chose 1973.  Songs from each year were played alternately and we the listeners left to judge which was the better year.  As ever, the choices were eclectic and varied, with due deference to the classics, so Bill had choices from Meddle, Bless the Weather, From the Wychwood, Lifemask, The Man Who Sold the World, Sticky Fingers etc, Drew had Dark Side of the Moon, Solid Air, Goats Head Soup etc..  At the end of the day, it was a great show and I couldn’t come down off the fence.

 

At breakfast, one of our fellow guests asked whether we’d been attacked by the birds yet.  We hadn’t, but I was grateful for the warning when, emerging from our bedroom I was mobbed by a female Brewer’s Blackbird, who parted my incipient bald patch with her feet.  She has nested in the eaves of the hotel and takes exception to hotel guests approaching too close.  She mobbed me all the way to the car and later got Mary as well.

 

The previous day, we had traveled from Mountain View in Silicon Valley, where we had stayed overnight with Mary’s former employee Sameera, a Christian Pakistani, who is now teaching, to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and then across via various congested freeways and local highways to Yosemite NP, where we were slightly underwhelmed, though we had some excellent views of wonderful scenery.  I think we were really too tired at that point to appreciate it and were put off by the hordes of campers in the valley bottom.  After Zion, Yosemite is somewhat lacking in vibrant colours, its primary assets being vast granite cliffs and waterfalls, whereas Zion is a symphony of rich reds and greens, the rocks being equally grandiose. Still, we did see Yosemite at sunset, which was striking, and we did enjoy our descent into the valley.

 

Our adventures with American plumbing deserve a whole blog to themselves, which will be forthcoming once the regular travelogue is over, but we ought to share with you our success in wrecking Mr Bill’s shower.  On our first morning, after my shower, it switched off perfectly normally, but, after Mary’s, we couldn’t stop the water from flowing whatever we did to the shower knob: push, pull, twist or turn, it kept gushing into the bath at an ever increasing rate.  Amid visions of floods and disasters, we sought help from a neighbour who was watering her lawn over the road and located the stopcock under the front lawn.  Turning this off at least abated the spate but didn’t solve the problem of what to do about the shower.  Fortunately, Bill was home at lunchtime for us to confess our sins, when we were told that they’ve been having problems with the shower on and off for two years, so it wasn’t our fault.  Bill left a note for Colleen advising her of the problem but not indicating that anything had been done about it.  Later he called to explain that he had called a plumber and where I could find the money to pay him.  The plumbers duly arrived and, after much sucking of teeth and scratching of heads, replaced the valve and greased the ball-joint and all was fixed within half an hour.  Bill arrived back while they were here and was able to negotiate the billing etc himself, so I was spared that ordeal.

 

Bill has taken Olivia with him to collect Dylan from college in Santa Rosa and is expected back some time late this afternoon.  Mary is reading (as well as tackling another mound of washing) and Colleen is pottering about house and garden.  Domestic bliss reigns and we have an afternoon of mischief awaiting us….