Can’t Resist a Free Coffee

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We sleep restlessly and the alarm goes off at 3am. Surely we’re the only people in the whole town who’re awake now. There’s a message waiting for us from the airline to say that our flight’s been delayed by two and a half hours. We’d like to go back to bed, but Issy had to hold a knife to a taxi driver’s throat to get her to agree to pick us up this early, and I think the knife might get turned back on us if we ring her back now and ask her to come a bit later.

Airport security’s intense. “No baby powder” we’re told - it seems that that’s where your modern day drug runner hides his or her cocaine. I wonder what you’re supposed to do if you‘ve actually got a baby … and my iPad gets drug swabbed. Huh?

Our airline’s called French Bee, which I’d never heard of until we went looking for a direct flight from here to San Francisco. The delay’s so long that we’re all given vouchers to buy coffee at the terminal’s only coffee shop. And it seems that no one can resist the offer of free coffee - the queue‘s almost out the door and is moving at glacial pace - there’s no way the people near the end are going to get their coffee before the flight leaves. French Bee seems to have a real fixation with vouchers today. Shortly after we take off the flight attendants come around and give everyone small paper bags with headphones in them … and meal vouchers. When it comes meal time we have to give them the vouchers back before we can get fed …. but absolutely everyone’s got a voucher, which would rather seem to make the whole exercise a bit pointless. I think I must be missing something here.

We land in San Francisco and walk out of the terminal into temperatures that would give mid-winter Melbourne a run for its money. We’d been warned to not necessarily expect it to be roasting hot here in summer, but this….

It’s dark, but we still manage to notice the exit to Candlestick Park. That sounds familiar. Yeah, I remember now; it’s where The Beatles played their last ever concert (aside from the brief gig on the roof of their London studio) back in 1965.

The taxi driver points out a few driverless cars, and sure enough they’re herbing along with passengers in the back seat and no one at the steering wheel. It seems passengers just climb in, type an address into a screen, and then sit back and enjoy the ride. It looks more than a bit freaky to our very unaccustomed eyes. I didn’t think we’d quite got there yet with the technology, but it seems maybe we have. Our driver tells us that they’ve only recently changed the rules to let them loose on the road other than in the middle of the night, and there have been quite a few accidents. OK so maybe the technology isn’t quite there yet after all - for the time being at least I think we might stick to cabs with actual people at the wheel.

It’s late and the hotel restaurant’s closed, so we head out into the backstreets in search of dinner. We’d been warned that this area around Fisherman’s Wharf is a bit dodgy, so we don’t want to venture too far and risk getting mugged … or knifed … or shot. It’s slim pickings. There’s a very dodgy looking pizza joint with no menu, and nowhere to sit …. well there would have been if one particular gentleman, who looks like he probably eats half a dozen pizzas every day, wasn’t taking up an entire table that was supposed to seat four. We resort to chips and peanuts from an equally dodgy looking liquor store (for readers back home, that seems to be American for “bottle shop”), and munch on them back in our room. Hmmm.

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[D MJ Binkley]

San Francisco
One of our favorite cities.!