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Published: March 30th 2014
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A particularly early start to the day, up at 4:30 am as we were to be picked up by a neighbour to take us to the airport for our 8:00 am flight to San Francisco. I had heard it raining during the night and as well as it being pitch dark, it was still raining heavy when it was time to leave. Just getting our cases and us into their car was a mission.
The traffic was relatively heavy, what with it raining, being peak morning traffic on a working day, and it was traffic for the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. Despite all this we arrived in plenty of time which was just as well as we tried going through security in several places and each time we were turned away and sent off in another direction and eventually we were processed as per normal at the third attempt. Apparently I was the issue, we still do not know why to this day. Susan had booked the tickets prior to my arrival in the States and wasn't able to book us seats together on-line. Weird as the plane was not full, just making it another of those frustrations of
flying and airports. I persuaded a guy who was to be seated next to me to swap so that we could sit together. With the two hour time difference between Minneapolis and San Francisco it was still only 10:40 am when we landed.
Misleading advertising lead us to believe that we were to pick up our rental car at the airport. Not so - we had to walk quite a long way, then take the air train to a rental car depot, then we were taken by van to get our car at their depot a few streets away.
Finally we had a car, a small Nissan, and with limited information of how to get out of the city and a GPS we were on our way. Now not being particularly mechanically minded either of us, when I put the window down and couldn't get it up again, we had a dilemma.
The drive down highway1 was really pretty, and with Halloween a few weeks off we continually passed areas where there were huge piles of pumpkins for sale. We eventually reached the coastline and it was nice to be able to see the ocean again and to see lovely white sanded beaches,
breakers and the odd surfer in action.
Santa Cruz was to be our lunch stop. We hadn't solved our window problem but chose to ignore that issue until we had satisfied our hunger pangs. We had decided on Mexican and said that the first Mexican restaurant we saw, we were stopping at. There were plenty of people coming and going from the first restaurant so we thought it would probably be great. It served it's purpose and once fed we needed to solve the window issue by ringing the rental car company, only to discover the lock on the drivers side was stopping my window from going up. Duh! We laughed and so did they.
It was just after two-thirty by time we reached Monterey, our destination for the night, we decided to go to the famous Monterey aquarium before checking into our hotel. The jelly fish were amazing and i spent ages watching them drifting passed. The photographs I took do not do justice to the actual sight. We also took a walk along Cannery Row.
Once we had checked into our accommodation; not normally a beer drinker, i had the urge to have a cold beer. Neither of us knew the
area so we chose to go for a walk and see what we came across. Just one block away we came to Grandma's Kitchen which had a Corona sign outside. Two Corona later and for me a bowl of Tortilla soup and a banana split, complete satisfaction!
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