Excursion (part 1)

As we still have honored guests, we decided to take a trip out somewhere exciting at the weekend. We don't all fit in our car, and those nice people at Enterprise were doing a half price car hire deal at the weekend. So we hired a car, and had two cars.

The problem (I always have) with hiring a car is that you book your car on the phone or web or whatever, and then you go to the car hire place. They say that if you cough up only a small amount of money more, you can have a slightly nicer car. That seems like very little more, and worth it. But then they say, for only 5 dollars more, you can have a car that's slightly nicer than the one you've upgraded to. And so on, until you find yourself driving a Ferrari home. Actually, it wasn't that bad, but we did end up with a Dodge Charger.

We picked up the boys from German school, ran around looking for my camera for about an hour (unsuccessfully, hence no pictures here) and set off. We had booked a room at a Motel 6, which I had carefully selected as being somewhere close to where we wanted to be, in a place called Indio.

First stop though was Palm Springs, which we decided to go to because (a) we'd heard of it, and (b) it was on the way. We went to the Palm Springs Visitor Centre, and saw a leaflet for the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway ("World's largest 360 degree rotating cars). Which sounded interesting, so we went there.

Now to me, a tramway is a bit like a railway - it goes along a flat bit of ground for a while. So an aerial tramway would be like that, but lifted into the air. (Like the cable cars at Alton Towers). But they weren't. By the time we got to the place it was dark, but the trams were running.

We parked the car, and went in. Oma and Opa declined a ride on the aerial tramway, so I bought the 4 tickets. (Children under 4 were free, when they asked how old the boys were, A and D shouted "Four!" and held up 4 fingers, just to be clear, before I'd even considered lying.

It turns out that my definition of tramway was wrong (I had a brief debate with Opa about exactly what a cable car was - he claimed that it was a tram that runs along the street pulled by a cable. We have occasional debates about the meaning of English words, and he is always convinced he is right. It's usually easier to let him continue in that belief.) This was a cable car, which went up a mountain. A really, really big mountain. Oma and Opa were sent running back to the car to fetch jumpers while we waited for the next car. The cable car rises 2 miles, in about 11 minutes. That's high. And fast. And made your ears hurt. Poor A and D didn't know why their ears felt funny, and couldn't understand the concept of swallowing (or, on the way down, of holding their nose and blowing).

Their were 4 towers, from which the cables were suspended. S said it was lucky it was dark, because it was very, very high (the highest was 227 feet) and the car swung slightly alarmingly as it passed over the towers. The floor in the car rotated, so you had a view, but this confused A and D, who were trying to hold on to the rail on the wall (which didn't rotate). After falling over a couple of times, they got the hang of it though.

At the top was a large building (which got their by helicopter and cable car). Everything there has to come up by cable car - even the water to flush the toilets. There was a restaurant and a bar, a shop and a museum, and a mountain outside. Trouble was, we were coming to the desert, so weren't really dressed for going outside in 5 degree weather. It did look quite exciting - there were 54 miles of hiking trails up there, and other stuff to do. So we ate in the restaurant, bought two bags of magnets in the shop, and went back down, to where O and O were waiting. (When I got home, I read the Wikipedia entry which lists all the gruesome accidents that have happened there - glad I didn't do that before we went).

We got back in the cars, and went to find our Motel. Motel 6 is renowned as being the cheapest chain of hotels in the USA. We paid $60 per room for two rooms, each of which had two double beds and so could sleep 4 people (that's 32 pounds a room, or 8 pounds a person). Motel 6 is a bit like a Travelodge, only without all those luxurous frills you get in Travelodges. In traditional American style, it had a neon MOTEL sign, with the M flickering. (We did get towels, and soap, and there was a pool, and despite it being November, it was warm enough to swim). There were cigarette burns in the blankets, and an upside down ashtray with a no smoking sign on it. (I thought that they'd be better not putting the ashtray there, but S said at least there was an ashtray when people ignored the signs).

The room had cards to open the doors. Opa was very unhappy about this - he said he wanted a key. He couldn't work the card, and I had to help him the first few times. (It was typical that the next day his card really did stop working, thus confirming his prejudice.)

Opa thought it was very expensive. he kept trying to suggest that they had actually wanted us to buy the hotel. Hotels in Germany are MUCH cheaper than that, he said. However, he also said that they all have keys to open the door, so it's a while since he stayed in a hotel in Germany. S thought that they had room service, because there was a picture of a pizza on the card. But it just said "Phone Dominos to get a pizza".

We had to eat in shifts. so that someone stayed with A and D. Opa and Oma were going to go first, but S was worried about them, so I went too. The only place to eat anywhere nearby was "Casa Martinez 24 hour Mexican and American Restaurant / Truck Stop". Seventy five percent (I later learned) of the population of Indio is Latino / Hispanic, and so there's an awful lot of people with English as a second language. This made communication difficult for me, and close to impossible for Opa.

I asked what sort of beer they had, and the waitress asked if I wanted light beer, or dark beer. This is a common distinction in Germany - dark beer being more like bitter, light beer more like lager (of course in Germany, it's all lager). I asked what light beer they had, and they said Bud Light, Miller Light - this meaning of "Light" is low alcohol, and that wasn't any good. I didn't know what to say to get something like lager, so we got dark beer - called Negra Modelo. Opa asked (way too loudly for comfort) if that was "The beer for the black niggers".

Now Opa is quite conservative (I was recounting this story to someone here, and said "Conservative with a small c. " They, of course, didn't know what that meant, and by the time I'd explained, and then finished the story, they wished they hadn't asked what I'd done at the weekend.) He doesn't, for example, eat pizza. Not eating pizza is a challenge when we're out with A and D, because the only thing we can usually guarantee that they will eat is pizza. So eating in a Mexican-American restaurant, where a lot of the menu was in Spanish, presented a challenge. He ordered steak, which I thought was safe. It was, relatively, except it came with refried beans and rice.

It was S and my wedding anniversary, so we felt we should go out and celebrate in some way. We asked at reception if there were a bar somewhere, where we could get a drink. The two women at reception looked at each other nervously. Eventually they suggested we go to the Indian Casino down the road. We had the map lady, so we asked her instead, and then we realized why the receptionists looked nervous. The bars all looked a bit like that scene from The Blues Brothers where they turn up at Bob's Country Bunker, except that all the clientele was Hispanic.

We tried a couple, and gave up. We went back to Casa Martinez and had a drink there. Then we went back to the hotel, to sleep to the dulcet tones of freight trains going past the other side of the road. As I tried to explain to Opa in the morning, freight trains in America go very slowly, so it wasn't as bad as if they had gone fast. They also have really, really loud horns (I've learned).

We slept (as we always have to) with one twin and one parent in each bed. Which always the twins very happy - they wake up in the morning, and smile. But makes for unhappy parents, as they wriggle, kick (me, the wall), demand their blanket gets put back, shout and snore and sweat, all night long.