This site has now been retired. I've moved to my new site Silverknife, where you'll find new blog posts and all my latest projects and photos. These pages will remain for at least a while, as I know some of you are still looking through the archives, but I'm reposting my travel journals and many other articles on the new site. Come and check it out.
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By the time we roll into California, I'm alone on the train as far as my original companions go. I'm pretty travel-worn, ready for a wash and not feeling all that sociable anyway, so I don't much mind spending the morning mostly reading or watching the scenery go by. And midmorning we enter the outskirts of LA, on our way into Union Station, which we reach a little before lunch.
There's about an hour's connection time at the station for my train on to San Diego, (from where I hope to be able to hitch relatively easily up Route 101, avoiding having to thumb through LA, which doesn't seem a promising area), but we are running late when we arrive and there's only about twenty minutes left until my outgoing train. I rush to the dramatic, marble-pillared main hall of the station to find the departures board, but discover that the San Diego train is delayed by at least half an hour. I'm waiting with Monique, a law student from San Diego who's been visiting friends in LA. She's small, sweet-faced and impeccably dressed with dark eyes behind D&G glasses.
When we finally get moving I'm on a smaller, more basic commuter train - the Surfliner. It's more like a UK intercity train, except that the carriages are still double-decker with seats above and below. The ride takes a little under three hours, and runs through what I would think of as classic California landscape - on one side for much of the way is the sea, a beautiful blue under a clear sky, with white sand beaches that stretch for miles. On the other side are rolling hills of prairie and forest, scattered with Mediterranean-style cottages and beautiful opulent houses, money being more and more evident as we go south. Monique gives me a fast introduction to the San Diego area and coastline, where strings of little towns stretch along the endless beach to the border.
San Diego downtown is much like the other American cities I've passed through, tall skyscrapers as far as the eye can see casting back the late-afternoon light on all sides, but this is clearly a rich area and it shows in the design philosophy - everything here feels like it matches on a slightly eerie level, from the flowerbeds, planters and palm trees which fill every available space to the elegant decorative streetlights, and the houses and stores seem to fit seamlessly together in a hard-to-place but somehow comforting pseudo-historical style that seems to suggest both the Spanish countryside and colonial America without actually making a definitive statement.
Inside the beautiful and spotless station I'm prepared for the usual search through the Yellow Pages and ringing around to find a hostel, but instead find an information kiosk with two staff ready to advise. In front of me in the queue is another 65-liter rucksack much like my own, which turns out to belong to Katie, an Aussie who is also looking for hostels and actually has one chosen, and is merely consolidating her directions.
We join forces and with a certain amount of wandering around town (we determine we're going to defy the decadent American instructions and walk five blocks there instead of taking the bus) we locate the hostel, which turns out to be a Hostelling International establishment, meaning a reliable standard of service and a discount with my card.
Signed in and with a long-awaited shower and long-delayed laundry out of the way, I contemplate my evening options. Initially I'm looking at tonight's hostel activity, described as a Gaslamp Area Tour, but on asking around I find that it's basically an organised drinking binge with a couple of other hostels and I sign off again - I'm still trying to have a period without drinking to recover a bit.
Instead I have a quiet evening in, just popping across the road for a (really good) meatball calzone. I get an early night, with the intention of being up early in the morning for a good headstart on my hitching toward San Francisco. I have three days to reach The City in good time for Decompression.
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