The Circus Comes to Santa Cruz

This is a little something I wrote almost a year ago now for the enjoyment of my friends and family.... and, after much nagging from my wife to start an online blog with this as my first entry, I've finally gotten around to it.

Day One

It’s amazing. No matter how carefully you plan ahead and how well things seem to be going on the day, there are always a dozen things still to do when the taxi arrives to take you to the airport. With all the packing done the night before, we should have been in good shape, but no. It’s the little things that get you, like digging out the ground-in cat puke that you find under furniture that you’re moving for the first time in six months in order to vacuum (why now?). Or cleaning up the toxic science experiments at the back of the fridge that would automatically qualify for EPA Superfund status if they ever found out. On the plus side, we had so many bags that I managed to stall the cab driver for a good fifteen minutes by bringing them out one at a time while Linds draped rugs over the worst of the cleaning snafus and rounded up the livestock.

Taxi drivers are a funny bunch. They either talk your ear off with inane drivel for the entire journey, or they stay resolutely silent, deflecting all attempts at casual conversation, and occasionally glaring at you through the rear-view mirror as they plot the best place to dump your body and steal all your valuables (good luck finding any, mate). We got the silent, brooding type this time, and I felt a profound sense of relief when we finally pulled up in front of the terminal at Dulles airport, still in one piece with all valuables intact. Actually, it’s rather amazing that we arrived at all since every half mile or so the taxi coughed and spluttered, freewheeled for a few yards, and then shuddered back to life. I could be wrong, but the freewheeling episodes seemed to be growing longer each time. The taxi looked so old that it probably wasn’t worth fixing, so I expect by now it has become one of those mysteriously abandoned vehicles one sees parked neatly on the shoulder every couple of miles on Washington freeways.

At the airport, the driver and I began unloading the taxi while Linds ran interference with the cats and Cieran. When I say the driver helped unload the bags, what I really mean is that he watched as I hefted all the big cases to the kerb, while he occasionally picked out some trifling item such as a fold-up pushchair weighing all of thirty ounces, and shuffled across the blacktop to deposit it on top of the pile. Not for the first time, I wished we hadn’t forgone the expense of a team of sherpas to haul our loads to the summit.

Instead, I went in search of a cart. After careful study, I have learned the following things about airport baggage carts: (i) charging three dollars to borrow a cart for ten minutes would be grounds to start a revolution in any other country, (ii) airport carts are specially designed to be almost but not quite big enough to fit two suitcases side by side, which leads to (iii) a cart stacked eight feet high with suitcases does not corner well when pushed at jogging speed.

I made the last of these discoveries shortly after loading up the cart and setting off for the United Airlines check in, or what I hoped was the United check in since I could see nothing ahead except through a tiny notch of light between the uppermost tier of suitcases. Navigation mainly involved swinging the cart from side to side in order to read signs through this notch one letter at a time. Poor Linds was laden with two cats, one baby and two bags of her own, so she was in no position to adopt her customary role of making sure I didn’t get hopelessly lost.

Despite this, progress was satisfactory, if somewhat laborious, until I was required to make a sharp right turn in order to enter the terminal building. The cart dutifully went where it was ordered, but the suitcases decided to obey the laws of inertia instead and an avalanche ensued. Startled travellers leapt out of harm’s way as a cascade of bags bounced across the sidewalk while two bemused cops looked on. Apparently, the requirements of homeland security mean that airport police need only worry about those bags that are actually unattended rather than ones that soon will be as a result of bouncing across the roadway into the path of oncoming traffic.

We finally made it to the check-in desk, having worked our way through two lines— the first apparently catering to those passengers travelling without cats, and the second to customers with “special needs”. The woman behind the desk was actually rather helpful, having apparently not taken United’s customer relations training programme recently, and we were soon on our way, minus six bags, leaving a paltry four, plus assorted lifeforms in their various containers.

Then came security, that little joy of modern air travel that never fails to amuse and entertain all concerned. these days of course, one is expected to strip down to one’s undies, disassemble all items of luggage, sort belongings according to their size, weight and elemental composition, and then pass through the metal detectors with cats in one hand, baby in the the other, and boarding pass in another, all while trying one’s hardest not to look suspicious or hold up the line. Actually, it’s hard to imagine a party less likely to consist of terrorists and shoe-bombers, and we were thankfully spared the indignity of “additional screening”.

This being America and our’s being an internal flight, we knew better than to expect any kind of sustenance on board the plane beyond a handful of something that once upon a time would have been peanuts and now usually consists of various leftovers swept up off the floor of some potato chip factory. We bought food at the terminal instead, paying twice the street price for every item, and remaining thankful that it wasn’t worse. As you may have noticed, the airlines, the airport operators and Homeland Security have a nice little scam going when it comes to food and drink. Thou shalt not take liquids of any kind through security says the TSA. Food items may also be sub ject to confiscation, depending on whether the current threat level is pink, mauve or lurid orange. Ah, say the airlines, but we can’t stay competitive if we provide anything during the flight beyond stale pretzels and fetid bilge water. As a result, airport food and drink prices have been experiencing a kind of hyperinflation lately that will soon require the Treasury to issue new higher domination banknotes.

Provisions acquired, we were ready to board. There was a time when the airlines thought it might be sensible, not to say helpful, if people with children and pets (those with “special needs”) were allowed to board first, or at least directly after passengers belonging to the silver, gold, platinum, tungsten, rubidium and plutonium programmes had swaggered out of their various lounge clubs and into the cabin. Nowadays, one must join the general throng headed for steerage and that special section at the back of the plane reserved for families, drunkards and other troublemakers. We still retained half an expedition’s worth of luggage, which made maneouvering down the aisle tricky to say the least. Travelling through the cavernous canyon between the first class seats was easy, and the generous passageway between the business-class seats also presented few problems. Entering what the airlines euphemistically refer to as “coach”, the aisle shrank to a tiny crevice, barely wide enough for the barbie-doll flight attendants to shimmy down, and definitely not designed to admit a slightly rotund man clutching two bags and a car seat, or his wife festooned with a pair of cats and a baby doing backflips.

We took our seats, and settled in for six hours of hell. The cats in their carriers were unceremoniously shoved under the seats in front and not unreasonably they began to protest. This attracted the attention of several nearby passengers and one woman in particular sitting directly in front of us. For some reason, the gods of travel (or possibly a deranged booking agent) had decided it would be most amusing to seat a family with felines right next to a passenger with cat allergies. The woman pushed the little yellow button over her head in the hopes of summoning a flight attendant. Before coming to America, I had never actually seen anybody use one of these buttons. In fact, I had assumed they weren’t connected to anything and were merely added by the airlines to make us feel more secure, safe in the knowledge that we could enlist the aid of a flight attendant in the direst of emergencies. We British would never dare use the button otherwise. Here in the States people suffer from no such delusions and happily push the button whenever their coffee cup needs refilling or the colour contrast on the overhead TV needs adjusting. Compared to such trifles, an inflamed pet allergy was ample justification to activate the button and the woman in front showed no hesitation. A game of musical chairs began, with the unfortunate lady first moving two rows forwards, then another two, and finally half a cabin away until the dander distance was sufficient and the allergy was soothed.

Before taking off, we were treated to a jolly piece of baggage caberet as two luggage handlers began unloading the plane next to ours. In an ideal world, and perhaps even in a company manual somewhere, the procedure would go something like this. Baggage handler A (let’s call him Fred) retrieves items from the hold and gently places them on the conveyer belt leading down to the tarmac. At the other end, handler B (Bob if you like) picks the cases off the conveyer and delicately deposits them in neat rows on the ground. Instead, Fred and Bob adopted a different strategy. The conveyor belt spun around and around as it was supposed to, but it never felt the weight of a single suitcase. Perched atop the belt, Fred fished bags out of the hold and tossed them into the abyss, where they landed moments later atop a mountain of baggage that spewed out across the runway. Bob leaned casually against the luggage trolleys and watched the proceedings, looking entirely unconcerned, as if this sort of thing happened all the time, which unfortunately it probably does. I was unable to match his calm demeanor and winced as each bag plummeted to earth and smashed into those below. Any item that wasn’t encased in aircraft grade, reinforced titanium would surely to be turned to mush by the time these two had finished with it. I suddenly thought of all the precious items in our own luggage that would soon be ground into pulp by Fred and Bob’s compatriots in San Francisco.

The flight itself doesn’t bear repeating except to say that it was trying, tedious, and we’d already seen the movie. Perhaps I can summarize it in a more festive manner as follows (sing along to the tune of Twelve Days of Christmas):

On the first day of travel we had the following:

Twelve hours of packing,
Eleven chores need doing,
Ten bags in total,
Nine things forgotten,
Eighty dollar cab ride,
Seven zippers broken,
Six bags to check in,
Five hour flight time.
Four tired feet,
Three cramped seats,
Two whiny cats,
And a baby who won’t sit still.

We landed at San Francisco airport slightly ahead of schedule and not a moment too soon. After arriving at the gate, it was still a good twenty minutes before we actually got off, or ‘deplaned’ in the new airspeak. As the line of sweaty, thirsty, grumpy passengers inched slowly towards the exit, I began gathering our things, pausing to retrieve toys from every accessible crevice in the airframe, and sheepishly hiding a half-chewed safety card in an overhead bin behind a big stack of blankets. We were last off the plane. Dead last. Even the cabin crew eventually abandoned us, the chief stewardess muttering something about shutting off the lights on our way out.

And so to baggage claim. This time I absolutely refused to shell out another three dollars for one of those lightly too small carts that don’t corner well. It’s not that we didn’t plan to use one, just that I wasn’t going to pay for it. No way, no how. Instead, I began scouring the airport for carts abandoned by less frugal travellers in their haste to be on their way. It soon became obvious that unattended carts at baggage claim are about as precious as perfect analogies, so I ventured further afield. After much searching, I spied a lonely cart perched on the edge of traffic island next to a line of well-to-do types queueing for taxis.

The nearest woman was only six feet away from the cart, and some folks do like to get their twenty five cents back for returning a cart, so I thought it polite to ask whether this one was still required.

Head bowed, I shuffled forward and approached the woman who was barking into her cell phone and gesturing with increasing vigour towards the hapless peon in charge of the taxi rank.

Bowing lower still, I mumbled something like “Begging your pardon Mam, but might I enquire whether this cart belongs to you, that is, whether you will still be needing it any longer, in fact?”

After a very long pause, the woman snapped the cell phone shut and turned to face me with a look of complete distain on her face that must have taken years to perfect.

“Are you utterly retarded?” she asked or words to that effect. “That’s not mine.” She jabbed a finely manicured finger at the cart and quickly pulled it back as if getting any closer to it might lead to an infection.

“Be gone from my sight you odious little man.” she said, flipping open the cell phone and turning away.

Well by rights, that made the cart mine. I thanked the woman profusely for her kindness, seized my prize and fled.

I returned in triumph to the scrum surrounding the baggage carousel, where the glum look on Linds’s face told me she was still waiting for our bags to appear. When waiting for luggage, as the seasoned traveller will know, what matters is not how long it takes the first of your bags to arrive, but when the last one finally shows up. Shortly after I got there, suitcases one through five popped onto the carousel and were duly retrieved. Bag number six, however, had apparently been stored in an entirely different part of the aircraft’s hold, or maybe it had taken an unlucky bounce while descending Fred and Bob’s mountain o’ luggage. In any event, there was a considerable delay before it finally made an entrance. For a while I was tempted to abandon it to its fate, five bags out of six is not bad after all, except that this was one of the three suitcases we had allotted to carry Cieran’s toys, and I would never have heard the last of it.

At this point, we decided that the best course of action was for Linds to stay behind and tend to the bags, cats, babies etc, while I fetched our rental car. There are two kinds of rental car company at the modern airport: the posh, swanky kind that are located five miles away in off-airport lots, and the bargain basement kind, with names like Bill’s Old Bangers and Rent-a-Repo, that are located in off-off-airport lots somewhere in the next county. On our previous expedition, we made the mistake of pinching pennies in the rental-car department and lived to regret it, so on this trip we chose Hertz (so named I believe on account of the sensation most customers experience when they receive the bill).

The journey to the off-airport lots was made by electric train. How one got to the off-off lots I don’t know—camel train perhaps. The vehicle I took was one of those sleek, silent, modern trains that runs automatically without any need for a driver. At that hour of the evening, I was also the only passenger, and as the train glided through the night, I began to wonder where we were going. The train seemed very sure of its destination, but was that a rendezvous with rentals, or had it decided to call it quits for the day. I had visions of ending up inside the maintenance shed, the train locked and powered down, with me trapped inside, banging on the windows and shouting myself hoarse for three days until some half-potted technician finally returned to work after the New Year’s festivities.

In the event, the train took pity on me and fifteen minutes later I staggered into a gleaming, floodlit building facing a long row of desks, identical except for a different primary-coloured logo, one for each of the posher rental car companies. Behind each desk was a appropriately hued assistant, apparently fresh out of grade school and looking bored to distraction. This was understandable since I was the only customer in sight, and apparently had been since shortly after the building was erected. I began ambling down the line of desks, squinting up at the signs, looking for the yellow one which I was reasonably sure meant Hertz.

As I approached each desk, the company assistant strained forward, putting on his or her sweetest smile, practiced with great care every Monday morning during company training hour. With a twinge of guilt, I watched each smile slide off the owner’s face as I moved past and it became clear that I was headed for the desk of another.

I finally came to rest at the yellow desk and leaning purposefully on the counter. The golden clad assistant shot a look of triumph at her less fortunate peers, a look that said all those hours of smiling at herself in the mirror had finally paid off, so the rest of you losers can go back to sharpening pencils.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“No, I just felt like riding the train for a while to see where it went.” I was tempted to say but didn’t.

“Yes, I have reservation.” I said, proudly handing her my health insurance card, and a moment later replacing it with my driver’s license, which I felt would probably be more useful on this occasion.

The assistant began tapping away on the computer, and I idly consulted the computer printout I had brought with me containing details of our reservation. One sentence struck me as potentially problematic: sub micro mini compact car. Given that we had enough luggage to fill a cargo container, I decided to check the handy laminated card on the desk counter to see how much such a car would accommodate. The answer was a little disconcerting: the capacity of a sub micro mini compact car amounted to enough space for two handbags and a rolled up newspaper (tabloid size).

“Do you have anything larger?” I enquired.

“I can upgrade you at no extra charge.” said the assistant.

“No extra charge...?” I repeated, stumbling over the unfamiliar phrase, one not usually associated with rental car companies. “Are you sure?”

The assistant was quite sure. “Let me see what’s available.”

More tapping on the computer, and then a frown appeared on her face. “There isn’t much I’m afraid. I can offer you the Ford Super Guzzler Land Behemoth, although we generally recommend adding the auxiliary gas tank trailer and it looks like we’re out of those.”

“Don’t you have any cars?” I asked.

“Cars, mmmm.” she pondered for a long moment as if unsure whether a rental company might actually have any of those.

After consulting the computer once more, she said “You’re in luck, we do have one mid size available, but it’s a very silly colour. Would that be okay?”

“I’ll take it,” I said before she had even finished, wondering just how silly the colour could be, and why the company would choose to buy it in the first place.

“Lot XXJP 5754 C,” she said handing me the keys. “You’re all set.”

I headed towards the parking lot, pausing only to pick up a bottle of juice and some nuts from a kindly woman at a refreshment stand hidden behind a row of filing cabinets. (Every single eatery in the terminal had been closed when we arrived, and yet the laws of economics apparently dictated that this place could remain open on the off chance that hungry travellers would stop off at the rental car lot on their way to the taxi stand.)

The parking lot was vast, beyond vast, it seemed to stretch forever. Rows of parking spaces extended in all directions, each one occupied by a car or truck that was ‘unavailable’ as far as the computer was concerned. Who were they all for? Surely there would be no more customers that evening, and possibly none till after New Year. Had all these vehicles been put aside for a rainy day? If so, the storm when it came would be a flood of biblical proportions.

Our car, when I found it, was an unusual colour and possibly uniquely so. The colour arose, I’m sure, when a bright young exec at the car company noticed some leftover tins of paint in assorted colours sitting in a dusty corner and decided to put them to good use. By mixing all the tins together there was just enough paint for a single vehicle. The result was disappointing, but the marketing department no doubt rose to the challenge and christened it Olympic Bronze or Oriental Sunset or some such nonsense. In the harsh lights of the rental car parking lot, it reminded me of the colour of an orange that has been left forgotten on the kitchen countertop behind a stack of recipe books, and has gradually shrivelled to the size of a walnut. The car itself had apparently shrivelled too: it looked awfully small for a mid size, let alone a car that would accommodate the Chambers expedition.

Back at the terminal, the cats and Cieran were hollering in unison, and Linds was about ready to announce open season on the smaller members of our party. Linds womanhandled the suitcases to the kerbside one by one, and I began the game of car tetris. The rules differ slightly from the better known version: babies must be placed inside car seats for example, and no more than two heavy suitcases can be stacked atop a soft-sided cat carrier, but otherwise the game is the same. Each item must be slotted into the available space in the order in which they arrive, leaving as little empty room as possible, and things get increasingly difficult as you approach the ceiling. In car tetris, time pressure comes not from the decreasing interval between the arrival of new suitcases, but the increasing frequency with which an irate traffic cop glares at you and makes threatening gestures with his nightstick.

My doubts about the true size of our ‘mid size’ were soon confirmed, especially as it had apparently been designed by the same company that made luggage carts. The trunk was exactly three inches too small to fit any of the big suitcases side by side or one above another. The misspent years of my graduate school education finally paid dividends however, and I succeeded in getting all the blocks in place (even the annoying asymmetrical ones that come in two mirror image versions). Thirty minutes later, we pulled away from the airport on the road to Santa Cruz.

Day Two

The next day was hectic, crazy and insane, in that order. The rental car was ours for most of the day but Mr Hertz wanted it back by five o’clock in the afternoon, on the dot, with hideous penalties to apply for every second it was late thereafter. Even allowing for an early start, courtesy of the world’s most effective alarm clock (an irate baby who wants his breakfast), we still had barely enough time to get everything done before we joined that tiny and inexplicable portion of population that somehow manages to live without at least one automobile, preferably several.

First order of business was groceries, lots of them. Linds, Cieran and I set off for Safeway, leaving the cats behind to begin the important business of exploring the house and leaving malodorous deposits of freshly ground cat vomit in hard-to-find places. Safeway was surprisingly busy. Hordes of students who would normally be safely tucked up in bed at that hour, or slumped comatose over somebody’s toilet, were out in force, stocking up on cheap champagne and jumbo-sized packets of pretzels. As we approached the entrance, I smiled with satisfaction on seeing the rows of shopping carts lined up outside the door, all of them free of charge and adequately proportioned. Clearly, grocery stores are behind the curve compared to airports when it comes to maximizing the economic return from their shopping trolleys. I suppose it is only a matter of time before Smart Cart, or Pay ’n’ Push, or some other company makes the transition and we have to pay five dollars for the privilege of carting around our own groceries.

We started at the east end of the store, and gradually worked our way westward, trundling up and down each aisle and shovelling obscene amounts of stuff into the shopping cart, the adequacy of whose proportions soon came into question. Linds at least had a plan, and even a list, and was both choosy and methodical when it came to selecting items for the cart. I adopted my usual approach of grabbing anything that looked like it might come in handy at some point, especially if it contained soap or chocolate. Most of these purchases seemed essential at the time, although with hindsight I must admit that more than a few seem destined to lie at the back of some cupboard, gathering dust, until they are rediscovered in the frantic hours before we depart for Washington again.

Cieran, ever eager to pull his weight, added several items of his own choosing to the cart. These he selected on the grounds that they were (a) colourfully packaged, (b) expensive and fragile, and (c) within arms reach during a careless moment when mom or dad wasn’t paying close attention. A few of these weren’t discovered until after we got home from the store, and they now seem destined to join my own questionable purchases at the back of the cupboard.

In the produce section of the store, Cieran was more discerning. He helped himself to at least two apples, which he carefully taste-tested and found wanting, to be returned to the top of the pile for the benefit of other customers. After witnessing this spectacle, I judged that even in a town as progressive as Santa Cruz, most shoppers would probably prefer not to buy their apples with rows of bite marks and a fresh sheen of baby drool, so these also went into the cart.

Cart number one was filled to capacity and took on the steering properties of a fully laden supertanker. One assumes, although sadly this remains untested, that it would not have cornered well at speed. I secured a second trolley and this was filled even faster than the first as Linds abandoned the list and embraced the advantages of her husband’s shopping strategy. We could have easily moved onto trolley number three, but Cieran made it clear that he wouldn’t be the one to push it, and to reinforce the point, he began shouting at the top of his surprisingly capacious lungs to any passers by who would listen.

We decided to call it a day and aimed the pair of supertankers towards the checkout. Now an interesting thing happened. Most of the customers, as I have mentioned, were studenty types buying two or three items at most, along with a few haggard looking moms, kids in tow, with baskets containing half a dozen tv dinners and a bottle of vodka. I wondered how this provincial little store and its mild mannered clerks would cope with the mighty armada of trolleys bearing down on the checkout stands.

I needn’t have worried. On seeing our approach, the store manager went to his office safe and retrieved an emergency plan with our name on it, concocted during a lengthy brainstorming session at company headquarters on worst-case shopping scenarios. The staff had apparently practiced regularly for just this situation and the whole operation proceeded like clockwork. We were immediately ushered to a new check out stand manned by the store’s most seasoned operator, the kind who can identify every item in the produce department by touch alone, who knows all the tricks for scanning items with barcodes obscured by plastic wrapping, tin foil, or globs of baby drool, and who can do all this while maintaining a jaunty conversation along whatever lines the customer fancies.

As the stack of scanned items grew, the manager clicked his fingers and an underling hastened to the back of the store. Word went out on the company radio: baggers were needed. Effective immediately, all leave was cancelled for baggers within a ten mile radius.

Minutes later, a hastily chartered school bus pulled up outside and disgorged an army of tired but professional baggers who lined up behind our check out stand and set to work. Dividing into pairs, each team bagged items and stacked them in trolleys until they were exhausted and signalled for another team to take over. In less than half an hour, everything was scanned, bagged and neatly stacked, albeit in several more shopping carts than we had started with. Now all that remained was to pay.

Credit cards are a wonderful thing. They make shopping quick, easy and guilt free (for a month anyway), and they avoid all that grubbing around with nearly worthless coins destined for the penny jar, and tatty dollar bills that have been in circulation since Abraham Lincoln’s day. But on this occasion, Mastercard let me down. Apparently, moving all the way across the country and spending five hundred dollars on groceries wasn’t compatible with my security profile, which is to say that it’s not something I made a habit of doing on a regular, statistically meaningful basis. My card was declined, politely but firmly. I tried again, sliding my card forwards, backwards, and even with my eyes closed and fingers crossed, but the result was the same. I was on the point of despair. There wasn’t enough cash in my wallet to pay for even one cart’s worth of groceries, and I couldn’t face the prospect of asking those nice baggers to spend the rest of their vacation putting everything back on the shelves (not to mention the thorny question of whether Safeway would accept the return of the pre-chewed apples). Thankfully, luck was on our side that day, and I remembered my other credit card, bright, shiny and unused in the dustiest section of my wallet. I thanked my lucky stars for the day I had decided to fill in a second one of those infernal credit-card applications that arrive by the van load every day instead of adding it to the pile destined for shredding.

Back home, the bags of groceries covered the entire ground floor of our town house, while the bill extended right across the living room from one wall to the other. Strangely though, the empty fridge absorbed the grocery onslaught without much difficulty and even seemed ready for more. The volumetric capacity of modern American refrigerators is staggering. The truly bizarre thing is that our fridge in Maryland is invariably full to the brim, yet it never contains anything worth eating. Either geometry behaves differently here on the west coast, or our new fridge will soon begin building up deposits of inedible detritus and gradually lose volume, like the one in Maryland (and rather like modern American arteries). Unloading and putting away the groceries took at least an hour. One of the quirks of our house (and there are many) is that the architect clearly didn’t believe in wasting valuable kitchen space on cupboards, except for a few narrow crevices between the appliances. These gaps he disguised as cupboards for purely cosmetic purposes. To any future tenants out there, I heartily recommend acquiring a set of square plates before moving in. Plates, you see, have to be stored sideways in all but one of the cupboards, and round plates have a
tendency to roll...

While on the subject, I should describe a few of the other special features of our new abode. First, and most iritating for the family dish faerie (that would be yours truly, no jokes please), the dishwasher doesn’t work. It wants to, indeed it makes all the whirring and grinding noises that dishwashers usually make to let you know they are busy making your dishware gleam. Alas, one all important ingredient is missing: no water takes part in the process. Unless this is some new-fangled, fluidless dishcleaning gizmo, I have to conclude that it’s buggered. Maintenance has been called and is due to arrive some time in April.

Another friendly house feature also has to do with plumbing. The hot water tank is just about big enough to supply three minutes of tepid showering before icicles start to form on the shower head, but we’ll let that one pass on the grounds of saving the planet. No, the real joy is that the shower moans, groans and shrieks like a set of highland bagpipes played at full throttle with all the musical harmony of an American Idol contender. Still, this sort of thing is probably in the ear of the beholder, and after several wee drams it might be just the thing to warm the cockles of a Scotsman’s heart (although that’s about all this particular shower will warm).

Back in the kitchen, the lack of anything that could usefully be called a cupboard is compounded by the designer’s miserliness when it comes to counter space, although the few square inches that were installed are of a rather nice granite kind. The shortage of storage space made it hard to find room for all those essential soap and chocolate-filled goodies from Safeway, and this gave rise to the second tetris challenge of the week (three if you count stuffing all Cieran’s toys into a mere three suitcases). To add to the fun, Chambers Junior decided now was a good time to loose forty eight hours worth of poop in one go. We’re talking the mother of all blow-outs here folks, the biggest blast since Krakatoa, and almost as deadly.

Once the clean up crew had done its work it was time to hit the road again. The clock was ticking and we had a date with Walmart (or Hellmart as I have taken to calling it lately). Enlightened towns like Santa Cruz have chosen to shun Hellmart in favour of stores where the shop assistants actually speak English and have some idea of where things are, like the checkouts. Watsonville, just down the coast, has no such pretensions, and indeed is a bargain shopper’s paradise. There we journied, using up the last few hours of time remaining before Mr Hertz sent the repo-boys round. When we got there, it proved surprisingly difficult to find Walmart. Indeed, it is quite possible that Watsonville doesn’t even have one, it just seems like it ought to. We had to settle for Kmart instead, which is similar to Walmart but with fewer letters.

Our shopping complete, we set off for home with the car groaning under the weight of numerous appliances, pieces of furniture, and a bag of cat litter the size of Manhattan. The car was probably glad to be heading home too. In just a few hours it would return to Mr Hertz’s warm embrace, in the hope that the next customer would show more appreciation for the loading constraints of its tender chassis, if not for the colour of its bodywork. With some justification, I was rather proud of just how much stuff we had managed to fit inside the wannabe mid size for this final journey. Almost every cubic inch in the interior had been pressed into service save for a narrow tunnel between the driver’s head and the windshield, and what we hoped was an adequate air pocket surrounding Cieran’s car seat.

That evening as we settled into bed, all the chores complete, Linds and I congratulated each other on surviving the most hectic two days of our lives, and promised we would never do it again, except of course for the return journey three months from now. Before turning out the light, I glanced at the clock. It was nine thirty pm. Seconds later, I was fast asleep...

Epilogue

...we were awoken in the middle of the night by a series of loud explosions apparently made by some adolescent miscreants letting of fire crackers under our window. I began to launch into a tirade about living in a neighbourhood full of ‘bloody students’ when Linds hushed me and pointed to the clock. It was two thirty in the morning.

“So what?” I said. “It’s the middle of the bloody night and they’re letting off bottle rockets.”

I took a deep breath, getting ready to start on the students again. Then I saw Linds smiling and it finally dawned on me.

“Happy New Year!” we said in unison.