The Blog: in case you wanted to know how it all came about, b-l-o-g according to Wikipedia, is a truncation of the expression weblog. It is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries, or posts. Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. In this, I have failed dismally since my last posting, so I trust you haven’t been holding your breath!

However, I’m back! And since the last one, we’ve travelled from Hawaii to Heathrow and beyond.  ANZAC day was celebrated in grand style  on board, with a very moving service on deck around the pool at sunrise over the north Pacific. Hawaii, and we left our friends in Hilo, the Big Island of Hawaii, after spending a lovely day with them going to lunch and shopping. Kilauea had been grumbling for a while and the day after we left, we heard news of the beginning of its massive eruption, the lava flow from which has now devastated swathes of property and land it its path. Our friends live on the ‘safe’ side of the island, but the onset earthquake had items jumping from shelves in their home. They are, thankfully, safe.

We were safely away as the eruption continued, visiting Maui and Oahu. Maui was as last time we visited, so not much shopping was done this time round, but we had a nice lunch overlooking the ocean before finding a post box for yet another postcard to our grandchildren. The end of the cruise was looming, just one more night before arriving in Honolulu, and disembarkation to spend two nights at Waikiki beach, interspersed with trips out finding shops and restaurants where I admit to slightly naughty indulgences, and of course, Peter just had to swim in the ocean. We do love Honolulu, a bustling city by the ocean, a resort with a famous beach, and shops and restaurants to tempt you to spend far too much money. We resisted to a point.

But two days on and we were leaving to fly to San Francisco, to spend four days there trying to remember the last time we went, about twenty years ago. En route to Honolulu airport, in the outer, not-so-salubrious suburbs, we questioned our driver on what appeared to be makeshift shacks scattered along pavements. Some very well-equipped, it seemed, with camping stoves and the like. Further out towards the airport, the makeshift shacks became more permanent wooden ‘sheds’ placed in rows, with services and off-road access. The driver told us, to our utter disbelief, that these shack people were the homeless who had been scooped off pavements in any other state on the mainland, and flown out to Hawaii, and the Hawaiian government is paid to take them…

Can you imagine their difficult decision – er… freezing snow-covered street vs wall-to-wall sunshine, surfing, coconuts and pineapples. Here you have a layabout in Chicago, sleeping rough in midwinter and he’s offered a home in warm and sunny Hawaii – a no-brainer, don’t you think. So much for America First, and the supposed most powerful and richest nation on earth.

Onward, and armed with this knowledge to occupy our conversation on the five-hour flight to San Fran, where I’d ordered assistance at the airport, and we landed in the Golden City where the Flower People invented flower power in 1967, in that infamous summer of love. We were met by a pre-booked driver, John, with his limousine, who not only pushed me in a wheelchair for what seemed like miles, from one terminal to another, but gathered our luggage off the carousel, loaded it onto a cart, pushed it to a rendezvous point whilst he went to get the car, and then loaded it all into the car. (If you’re ever there, ‘Five-Star Limos’ is the company).

Our guest house was in a quiet, and by that time, very dark suburb. The office was closed and we had been given the code to get into the house. We also knew that there were steep steps to climb in this lovely old listed building. However, undaunted, driver John took all our luggage up to our room for us, then let himself out.

The next three days, we hooked up with our old friend who’d driven up from Fresno, took a tour bus around the city sights, and out to the iconic Golden Gate bridge, and were confronted once again by homeless people basking on pavements. We saw one spreadeagled, almost naked, in a street not far from downtown San Francisco – another eye-opener for tourists. The following day we headed out of town, over the Golden Gate bridge, on a small group tour to the wineries of Napa Valley and Sonoma, where we played sommelier and picnicked on gourmet food. It was a great day out in the Californian sunshine.

And then it was all over – with one last ride on the Mason Street tram cars, up and down the switchback hills, we were on our way to the airport, with John again, for our ten-hour overnight flight to London Heathrow, winging excitedly to our waiting family and little ones.

 

 

 

  Ding, ding, ding, went the trolley…