California tbc...

Ok, I finally managed to find time to write a post. Before any of you start complaining about how long it has taken for me to write on here, first understand that the only way that I have made time to do this is by nabbing Liz's laptop before everyone went to bed. I’m now sitting here at 20 past midnight trying to remember everything that we've done over the last 2 weeks, so don’t give me any hassle about it.

Ill start from the beginning and write a long post as it’s been so long since the first one.

I set off for the airport at stupid o'clock in the morning which was not fun and arrived with plenty of time to check my bags and get the flight. However, even though I had already checked in online, they refused to check bags until I produced evidence I was actually leaving the US. This is something which they did not put on the ridiculously patronising and seemedly useless "what to bring along" list, which they included in my check in confirmation. They managed to put in "umbrella" and "infant food", both items which would obviously be of dire importance to me when cruising at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic. Anyway I asked her where the nearest internet cafe was so that I could print my E-ticket to Guatemala, she directed me toward one, waiting until I began to walk away before adding that there was no printing facilities there. She then told me to go to the "United" check in desk as they would be able to print confirmation of my flight details because I was flying with them. This was in another terminal building however so after a 10 minute walk with all my luggage I arrived over at Terminal 1 where I waited in line at the "United" information desk. I say a line, there wasn’t one really, it was just me waiting while this self important old lady and a morbidly obese guy tried to deal with a query from the guy who arrived before me. Obviously it stretched their collective brain power a bit too much because they then called in a third "United Employee". It wasn’t until about 5 minutes later that they twigged and dealt with me. I got the really really fat guy who had an IQ slightly higher than a cheese sandwich. The conversation went a bit like this:

"Are you here to check in"
"No"
"Check in's over there"
"I’m not here to check in"
"Ok"
"I need you to print my E-ticket for my flight to Guatemala on the 14th of September from LAX"
*Typing Typing Typing* "At 2:30pm?"
"No I think it's about 1:35 in the morning"
*Typing Typing Typing* "There is no flight at that time"
"Yes There is"
"No there isn’t"
"Yes there is, if there isn’t why have you taken my money for it"
"There isn’t"
"There is"
*Typing Typing Typing* "Oh hang on, are you sure you don’t mean the flight to Guatemala at 1:35am"
"That’s what I asked for isn’t it"
"Name?"
"Richard Ives" (I’m getting frustrated at this point and thinking that this guy would be far more suited to a job like electric eel juggling food tasting for Russian dissidents, maybe not suited but the customer satisfaction would be very high at least)
"Hmm you aren’t on this flight"
"Yes I am"
"No you aren’t"
"You told me it didn’t exist a minute ago"
"Yes but now I’ve found it and you aren’t on the list"
"Well why did your company E-mail me with my E-ticket'
"I don’t know"
"Try it as Richard Thomas Ives, Virgin attached my middle na...:
"I cant"
"Why"
"We don’t have details of whose on the flight"
(amazingly that answer didn’t really shock me after the rest of the conversation)
"How did you know I’m not on it then"
"How should I know whose on it, we don’t have access to that"
"why"
"we cold share"
"what does that mean?"
"It means that we cold share"
"yes but what does that mean?"
"We cold share"
"I heard the cold share part, what is cold sharing?"
"we cold share with another airline"

I think you get the jist of what the rest of the conversation might have been like, basically it ended in me not getting anything apart from extremely stressed.

I’ve spent ages writing and have yet to leave the airport let alone arrive in the US so I'll skip the part where the pilot arrived 45 minutes late with no excuse, I get pestered every 5 minutes by an air hostess attempting to ply me with cheese wraps, the extremely chatty woman in front and to the right keeps interrupting the women in front from watching sex in the city and gives me a headache and when customs guy refused to explain to me what he meant by "left hand" when I was trying to get through customs (he meant me to scan my finger print but who knew). Ill even leave out the part where my loving girlfriend neglected to met me at the airport (I’m joking, it wasn’t her fault, the traffic in LA was terrible).

So now I have skipped to the Sunday after my arrival and we are having a party at Liz's house with all her family there. I was a bit silly, finding myself on my 6th beer and 2nd Margarita while everyone else I was sat with finished there 3rd beer. We then started to play beer pong (look it up, I can’t be bothered to explain, this post is long enough as it is) I was on a team with Liz's cousin Tyler and we beat everyone. In fact I was undefeated until my last game after Tyler went home (Liz was dragging me down). Needless to say I got very drunk but luckily that didn’t seem to offend any of Liz's family so I was reminded very much of home.

Me and Liz set off for her parent's cabin in the mountains the next day; it was about an hour drive which didn’t bother me. What did bother me was Liz's habits with the radio, I don’t think I heard to the end of one song she flicks back and forth so much. Although she did find it amusing to leave it on all the bible thumping stations just to wind me up. "Gawd neyds yew ta send owl yer muny to the cherch o' the saycred blydn' hart o' Jeyses chriyst" or something to that effect seems to come up on every other station.

Anyway we got to the cabin and it's very nice, there are deer everywhere and amazingly enough there is still plant life up there without any help from the magical orange rope suspended on garden cains (most of you wont get that joke those of you who are familiar enough with my back garden or my Grans gardening habits will). Id try to describe the cabin to you but I don’t think I'm good enough at descriptive pros to get it over to you so you'll have to just rest safe in the knowledge that it's very nice.

On Tuesday we went to a national park called Yosemite (pronounced like the ginger cowboy cartoon character), it’s famous for its waterfalls but they are dry in autumn unfortunately so we didn’t see them. It was still great though, I couldn’t quite persuade Liz to climb a mountain with me but we did walk quite a few of the trails. I've hopefully, by the time you read this, loaded up some photos, if not I got too tired and went to sleep.

Wednesday we went pinecrest lake and went out on a pedelow (no idea how to spell that, you know the boats you peddle and they go at like 2.5mph) we took lunch and stuff out with us so it was pretty cool. I hope all fishermen get swallowed by giant carp now however due to the number of them who sped past are boat and nearly knocked us over in their wake.

Liz's parent arrived that night and in the morning we went to "Big trees" national park, guess what they have there. Incase you didn’t get it, its a park which has sequoias in it, some of the trees were over 100m tall. Basically they were pretty damn tall, ill let the photos do the talking.

That brings us up to a week ago, I’m getting tired now so I’ll post this and do this week tomorrow probably.

To be continued...

PS. I can't work out a way to put photos on the post properly so if they look sloppy or dont show up then it sucks for you i suppose.