DAY TWELVE - Tuesday 26 April 2011 - Return car and return to looking for a place to stay

Car was due to be returned today so Neal got up early to clear it out and get it back to San Diego before 10am - then we realised that as we'd picked it up earlier than anticipated in San Francisco, they'd changed the drop off time to 8am!  Don't panic!  No... do panic because they'll charge an extra day.  He got it back a couple of minutes after 8 and they did try to charge the extra day but he argued with them and they relented in the end.

My job was to go to the hotel next door to see if they had an ocean front room and have a look at it - if the price was right.  The price was okay but the room was dark and even though the view of the ocean was amazing, it just wasn't what we had in mind.

Off to the Catamaran Hotel - we'd been hassling them the day before and had looked at a couple of rooms but the prices were high.  Anyway, I found a decent price on the internet and returned back to book it on their own web page even though we were standing in the lobby of the hotel just minutes before being quoted over $100 extra per night. That 10 minute walk saved us $500.

We finally got into the room we would be living in for the next five days and it was perfect.  Ground floor, so you can walk straight out to the sand and the bay, but just a few minutes walk to the ocean and the restaurants, bars etc.



Two big beds!  I can snore to my heart's content now...



Why would you put a tv inside this? But... it does slide out and swivel..

We walked around the bay and through some lovely, flowery avenues to the ocean. There are stunning properties all around, a lot of which are vacation rentals, which makes me wonder why we found it so hard to find one!

That is one cool cat!

Lunch at the Green Flash http://www.greenflashrestaurant.com/3.html - sitting in the sun and drinking a green flash cocktail - heaven!

 I'd never heard about it before but, apparently, the "Green Flash" is a rarely-viewed optical phenomenon which occurs at sunset at the instant that the upper rim of the sun is in coincidence with the horizon. The "Green Flash" is caused by a combination of optical effects called light scattering and light dispersion - so there!  I got that from the restaurant website. It's also a bloody good cocktail,


Then we staggered into Ralph's supermarket on the way back and the magnitude of the whole operation is mind boggling. Nobody needs that much food surely!  They even had moving walkways so the trolley pushers didn't have to push trollies. I suppose because the loads are so heavy.  It has to be said though that the fruit and vegetables are so fresh and nothing like the poor old wizened brown things we get back at home.