Today we learnt two things about the US – it can be both as frustrating and as boring as the UK when it really puts its mind to it.
Today we had intended to travel up via Highway One to the Big Sur and take in the views over the Pacific. Unfortunately the Pfeiffer Canyon bridge is being rebuilt and mud slides have closed other parts of the road making it impassable. This meant travelling along bigger freeways which were, quite frankly, pretty dull.
We also had to fill the fuel tank in the car for the first time today and what a faf that was. When buying “gas” you have to either pay by credit card or go in and pre-pay to the cashier. This is presumably to prevent you driving off without paying. No trust here.
The credit card route never seems to work for us, mainly as it seems to need to be US registered so we have to go the pre-pay route. Problem with this is that you need to know how much fuel you need (in dollars) in order to be able to pre-pay.
This in means that you need to know how big the fuel tank is in your hire car (in gallons) and roughly how much is left in the tank. To help I have created the following formula that you can use to help work it out:
$required = (1 - amount left in tank) * capacity of tank * price per gallon
To make matters more interesting the colours of the hoses for diesel and unleaded are the reverse of what they are in the UK.
On the way to San Fran we stopped at Carmel-by-the-sea, best known for having Clint Eastwood as its mayor at one point. Again it was a very pretty and neat and tidy town full of up-market boutiques. How anyone that lives there does any day to day shopping I don’t know.
We arrived at San Francisco late afternoon and did a small walk away from our hotel to orient ourselves before the big sightseeing day tomorrow.
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