Wednesday 18th May 2011

In the Morning we moved round to Star Bucks to send our emails and have breakfast while we waited for the rush hour on the freeway to subside.  We had experienced the traffic yesterday going round Los Angeles, the camper is so out of balance because of the long overhang behind the rear wheels that you can see that the front wheels are lifted.  Steve is constantly struggling to keep the thing in a straight line.  At one point we had an artic with a trailer overtaking on each side with very narrow lanes. (undertaking seems to be the norm here!), it was a nightmare for him .
So we headed for San Diego and arrived at Mission beach. It was very windy, the Pacific Oceon but still people were in swimming, without wet suits!  We had a walk around then chatted to a guy in the car park who suggested that we should head for "Downtown" so we did.  Unfortunately the parking meter bays are about twenty foot long and we are 25 foot long so parking was a bit difficult. We arrived in a quiet lane about three miles from the centre and stopped to plan.  The city looked nice but we are not cafe or resteraunt culture people and both decided to miss out the cities and head for the parks.  So we headed towards Joshua National Park via Palm Springs.
We needed to take on fuel and stopped at a station advertising a very cheap price.  Problem, no Credit Cards, Cash or Debit Card for a fee.  We opted for Debit Card as we are guarding our valuable cash.  Problem, our european Debit Cards do not work because the retail machines only use the magnetic strip so our PIN numbers which are stored on the chip do not work, problem, we were relying on being able to use " Cash-Back" to get cash.  So it looks as if we will have to use atm's which I hope will be set up for our cards and suffer the exorbitant bank charges.  If anybody has more information then please email us from the blog to let us know.
Palm Springs looked really nice but again cafe & resteraunt culture so we took a slow drive through and stopped at the next town.  While going through Palm Springs we stopped again for fuel at a Chevron Garage which had` accepted our Credit Card before.  Problem, have to pay first, but we wanted to fill up.  Steve offered to leave Judy as security again with the Credit Card but the guy said we must pay first so Steve guessed that we needed $200 worth so that is what he took.  He said that he would credit the difference  if we paid the wrong amount.  It only took $168 so back to the cash desk and they produced a credit for $32 so another lesson learned.
We stopped at "Vons" supermarket in Cathedral City which we were told was "Safeways" did a bit of shopping and sure enough our Safeway card did the same magic and produced a %16 discount.  By the time we had finished it was getting a bit late so Steve asked if we could park in their Car Park overnight, "no problem, go ahead" was the answer so we parked on the flattest bit which just happenned to be in reach of McD's wi-fi with Steves super aerial we brought with us.  So the evening spent having dinner and sorting out a few bits of necessary business on the internet.  Then in the morning linked up with Nikki on skype before he left work in the evening in the UK.  The internet really is incredible, here we are on the other side of the Atlantic and still able to carry out our business.
So onwards to Joshua ...............