(...whoever you are) So is my New Year Resolution to write more travel blog entries? Errm... [View Full Entry]

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Yes, Merry Christmas from Mexico! After some persuading, I agreed to K's suggestion that we travel to Baja California for the Christmas holiday. We went to Los Cabos, which comprises two towns 30km apart at the southern tip of the peninsula, San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas. It's almost 1,000 miles by road from San Diego so we didn't drive! Quiet We stayed in the old town of San Jose del Cabo, which is much quieter than Cabo San Lucas and mercifully free of timeshare touts. (Well, except for two Londoners we overheard at a restaurant on our last [View Full Entry]

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We're living a few miles north of downtown San Diego, so I occasionally use the local bus service to get around. You always find some, errm, unusual characters on buses but Southern California has to outdo most. Here are a couple of the more notable ones I managed to capture using my phone camera... The Preacher You can't see his face, but he caught my attention at the bus stop with his full beard, wraparound sunglasses and overflowing shopping trolley. To give an idea of where I am coming from, the shopping trolley is to the American homeless person what a [View Full Entry]

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It could only happen in La Jolla... I'm not saying it's an expensive place to live, but how many towns or cities do you know with a used Bugatti showroom? For those of you not in the know, the Bugatti Veyron is probably the fastest, most expensive commercially produced car ever made. I haven't checked out the exact price but we're talking around 2 MILLION dollars for a new one! No, I didn't ask for a test drive. Budget If you can't afford the Bugatti, the dealer does have some budget cars [View Full Entry]

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Did I say on Saturday that it would be mid-70s this week? Sun Well it isn't. Yesterday saw the highest temperatures for October, ever. It was 94F in downtown San Diego and 110F inland. I stayed at home. Wind The weather forecasters are now predicting Santa Ana winds at weekend. These are often associated with Wildfires. These caused serious damage in 2007, so the authorities are right to be concerned. It's gone very clou [View Full Entry]

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That's how my pocket feels after a trip to the drug store. It was only a cold sore. And my old tube of Zovirax was empty, so off I went to get a new one. Except you can't over here, because it is prescription only. For those of you that don't know how getting a prescription written in the USA works, here's what happens: [] You book an appointment with your physician - minimum 2 weeks notice for non-urgent appointments [] When you get there, you hand over $25 for just walking through the door [] You then find out that [View Full Entry]

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Ok, so I'm still actually in SoCal (see, learning the language). I was getting fed up of choosing the same location each time so thought I would have a change. My heart was in Blackburn this morning though. Or at least my football team. (That's football as in socccrrrr, as some would say over here). The game was live on Fox Sports Soccer at 9.30am, an almost sensible time compared to the UK lunchtime kick-offs. Oddly, for the second weekend running the 'football alarm' in my head woke me up at 7.02am, just in time to tune in for the live [View Full Entry]

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Most of you won't have heard of HIPAA. It stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, passed by the US Congress in 1996 to protect workers when they lose healthcare benefits on changing jobs. What's that got to do with us I hear you ask? (No? Well I'm going to tell you anyway.) Concerned One of our main concerns in being in the US for so long is the availability of proper health care. It's ok having travel insurance - which we do, with AIG (oops) - but what happens if you need a flu jab or get a [View Full Entry]

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I didn't actually want to go to Mexico you understand. It's just that there is a large outlet shopping mall right next to the border in San Ysidro and K & me thought we should look for some cheap clothes. Tijuana Trolley So we paid our $5 each for a day transit pass and got on the 'Tijuana Trolley', or Blue Line as the San Diego Metropolitan Transit Authority now call it. From the trolley stop it's a 2 minute walk to the Mexico border. The outlet mall is across the road - except there are no signs telling you how [View Full Entry]

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Above: The national anthem Well I had to didn't I? Near the top of my To Do List was 'see a Chargers game'. K thought I should wait until we found some local people we could go with, but with only 8 home games a season I wasn't so sure. There was nothing planned this weekend, the opening weekend of the season, so I thought I should go for it. One of the tips for getting good seats - especially if you only want one ticket - is to show up at the stadium box office a few days beforehand, when [View Full Entry]

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