Dear Aaron

Do you know the way to San Jose? Dionne Warwick once sang. A song that was clearly written in the days before Satnavs because now you would never need to ask. You just plug the address in and Boom! next thing you know you are there. Even if you take a detour to go to the toilet or stop for lunch at Denny's it doesn't faze the Satnav, it just takes a couple of seconds to recalculate and off you go again. The only problem with our one is that the voice who sternly tells us where to go cannot say 'route' properly. She pronounces it 'rout' which is thoroughly annoying, especially as she says that word an awful lot of times. We have to shout the correct pronunciation at her every time but she never listens to us.

Oh well, when she is talking, at least it drowns out the radio. American radio stations fall into three distinct categories. About 50% of them are dedicated to Jesus, a quarter of them are in Spanish and the rest tend to only play country music. Personally, I quite like the Jesus rock. I don't agree with their sentiment but those Christians sure can write a good power ballad. Therefore, you would have thought it was a relief when on approaching San Francisco, we found Bolly, 92.3FM The Bay area's only Bollywood station but the novelty soon wore off and the music was quite jarring. We swiftly went back to Jesus rock, feeling that one Bollywood station in the Bay area might be one too many.

A road trip gives you lots of time to think, to ponder some of life's great mysteries like is there any point in your life that has such an equal amount of relief and disgust as that moment when you discover that lump on your neck that you were a bit worried might be cancerous turns out to be the biggest spot in the world. And how exactly do you spell San Fransisco? Is it one 'c' and two 's's or the other way around?

When not listening to the radio, we have been lucky enough to have Donna's CD collection she acquired in Las Vegas from two very sincere singers peddling their wares on the street. We now have the choice between a completely blank CD and one where the singer just repeats 'b****' a lot.

Has anyone ever been to a Denny's? It is like a American diner with a very big menu. It took us ages to decide what to have. The problem is that the menu tells you the calories for everything on it in quite minute detail. So for example, I chose the salmon which was 562 cal, but then I have a choice of two sides so I also went for the mashed potato at 200 cal and the wholegrain rice at 80 cal. I would have liked to have gone for the cheesy mashed potato instead but at 230 cal this would have meant that my meal was more than my mum's caesar salad at 861 cal and it was a competition to see who could go lower. It didn't really make much difference in the end as we both ended up eating all of Donna's chips dipped in Ranch dressing which probably meant that Donna won.

I have also been thinking about toilets a lot. Why is it that different countries have different types of toilet? American toilets tend to have slightly bigger bowls than English ones. This is noticeable in that everything can be seen floating around a lot more clearly. They also tend to have a lower or no back than English ones so you have to get nearer the bowl to flush it afterwards. Is there any reason why they are different? Was there a customer survey done at some point in time whose results said that Americans prefer to see what they have done? Or did it just evolve that way over time? Anyone know?

And so we arrived in San Francisco. Don't worry, we weren't planning on going to San Jose so we are not lost. San Francisco has possibly the greatest approaches of any city in the world. As you come over the San Fran - Oakland bridge and under the tunnel and there you see the city skyline with the Golden Gate shining over the Bay in the background, it is certainly more impressive than most places.

And our epic road journey comes to an end. From LA to Vegas to San Fran, across some of the most amazing scenery in the world, staying in some quirky fun backwater towns. No longer will we have to put up with all those crazy dangerous drivers you find over here who insist on driving on the wrong side of the road.

Lots of love

Jim and Donna

PS I still have a long list of people to thank and I am worried I am going to run out of blogs before I run out of recipients so even though I have not thanked you for anything Aaron, I am dedicating this blog to you.