San Francisco has great light

We've come a long way baby

So it's Monday and that means we're in San Francisco. So many cities now it's become a bit of a blur, other than the fact all the places we've been to have been so different and aren't really blurred at all. Vancouver, (reached last Monday after the epic near-four day trip on The Canadian train across four time zones and millions of trees) is my favourite place so far. Mountains in the distance, a park bigger than New York's Central Park, great bars that play proper music (instead of safe music) and serve cocktails named after Peaches (the singer). Being on the Pacific side, the Oriental and Asian influences are clear to see and it makes for a great mix. People are friendly, open, helpful and have an endearing tick where they say "orsahhhm" at the end of sentences that made me smile. We hired bikes and rode round the park, where the Lions Gate suspension bridge (Douglas Coupland fans should know of this bridge) swoops over past piles of Sulphur at the docks to the north shore. The park's trees, which are second growth, are huge but the stumps of the *original* growth have to be seen to be beleived.

Was sad to leave VA BC- but our rail-pass doesn't last forever, so after a few days there, it was south to Seattle on a strange squashed-looking tilting Amtrak train running the 'Cascades' route. After a glitch at customs (the 'bozo' at JFK had issued us a six month visa on a three month green-card leading their computer to reject all plans to get back into the U.S. Luckily this time, the guy at the desk was pretty civil about it, and the fact all seats are pre-booked meant being last through the 'border' after re-doing the whole shebang didn't mean we had crap seats. Train took four hours and was a bit bumpy. The 'tilt' is of Spanish design and an absence of wheels (two per carriage rather than eight) meant it kept going into a speed-wobble for about half the journey. Jugga-jugga. Ugh. It's a funny train - look it up. The carriages are about half the height of the engine so they've put these crazy 'wings' onto the end carriages to kinda smooth the aesthetic. Like an 80s spoiler on a Cosworth Sierra.

Seattle is a great city too. We met up with an online friend of Jo's who recomended some nice places to go and see/eat (if you're there the tour of the 'Underground City' is fun, as is the SciFi museum. Bit of a whistle-stop visit but I suppose one gets a flavour and there's always a chance we can come back and explore these places further. We took a return ferry out into the bay and watched seagulls hovering the same speed as the ship, begging for treats, and had some local microbeers (as the non-corporate beers seem to be called). Ship was pretty much the same as a cross-channel ferry - busy and well used by people who need it to get around this very coastal area, which kinda looks like the west highlands and islands in a mist. I had a very sad deja-vu moment whilst on the sea-front; I recognised the double-deck freeway that follows the shore, only to be reminded that this in fact must be because the Seattle racing circuit in Gran Turismo 2 is in fact quite accurate. Is computer game deju vu sad? Discuss...

The trip from Seattle to San Francisco was on the Amtrak 'Coastal Starlight' train, (Did Andew Lloyd Weber ever climb aboard?), and our first overnight so far in "coach" class (no upgrade and an experiment in the concept of cheapness. Total Freeness actually). Reclining seats and no meals thrown in seemed like a good idea, but this huge double decker train, heading all the way to L.A. was a bit difficult to sleep on (no blankets and fierce aircon), and the food choices a little limited. It still had a pretty cool observation car though, and I have some amazing pictures of some of the awe inspiring valleys it tip-toed along the edge of at sunset in Oregon. The scale of the geography here is just phenominal. So that gets us to here. It's sunny but with a cool breeze, far too hilly (are grids such a good idea?) Thank god the second hand guide book we picked in the very cool bookshop in Seattle has a topograhic map. You can avoid the hills. We have a few days and might get a camper to drive out to Sacramento or Yosemite, before the trip back to NY via Chicago. What a trip!