yonmei

12:44 pm: The trip: 1

tisme came round to collect keys and be shown stuff. She did not react well to being told the news that I now have a bonsai. She told me she killed plants. "I'm a vegetarian. So do I," I told her. Honestly, I am not really expecting this bonsai to survive: it won't get a name till it's six months old, on the brutal premise that it has a fair chance of survival if it can live for six months.

I left the house about 10 to 11, and caught the 21 to the foot of Leith Walk and then the 22 to Waverley, arriving about 11:20 - but the Caledonian Sleeper was already there. So was my berthmate, an Edinburgh lady with an accent nearer Morningside than Bruntsfield, with either a weak bladder or a secret lover in another berth. (She woke me up at 3am coming back in to the berth, and the cabin had gone cold, and I don't get back to sleep easily at the best of times, and the rest of the night was one of those nights which you recall by saying "I didn't have a wink of sleep" only obviously you did.)


Also, when they brought the morning tea, I discovered to my horror that they've taken to serving it the American way: one cup hot water, one teabag, milk in a separate little carton. One can only say: Argh.

At Euston Station, bought myself a Starbucks hot chocolate to cheer myself up, and rang First Direct. This always pleases me, because it feels so cool to be doing banking stuff from my mobile. (I use my First Direct card to withdraw money when travelling because (a) it has Cirrus, and (b) it's handy having a separate bank account which just has travelling spending money in it.) I was able to extend my First Direct overdraft, and find out where the nearest HSBC bank is (it's the one over the road from King's Cross) and could even have told them I'd moved house, but forgot until I pressed the off button. Then I rang O2 and extended my International Call Roaming service.

Walked to King's Cross, checked when the bank opened, and wandered off to find a cafe to sit in and have breakfast until 9:30. The last time I wandered around here I was with Damian London, oddly enough....

The cafe I found was at the corner of Sandwich St and Hastings St, and I had a toast-and-egg breakfast and two mugs of properly made tea and sat there writing up my journal until banking time.

After dealing with the important part of enough money to live on in the US till 1st April, I walked back to Euston (the Piccadilly Line was out between King's X and Hammersmith, according to the board) and caught the Victoria Line to Green Park and the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow, arriving about 11:20.

I couldn't use the automatic check in. The flight was "too busy". So I queued for the standard check in, got to the head of the line, and discovered that the flight to Phoenix was "very oversold". I wasn't allowed to check my luggage, and I was directed to Customer Services.

Customer Services said nicely that she was sure there wouldn't be a problem, but why didn't I go away and come back in 20 minutes when the flight was closed? (It took off at 13:10.)

Actually, it took more like half an hour, but (the flight was incredibly cheap) it turned out that there was just one person who was going to have to re-route to Phoenix via San Francisco, getting in to Phoenix at 8:40. There were five of us waiting to hear the news, and one of us had to volunteer: two couples, and me.

Um. Yes.

I got a travel voucher to compensate me, plus an upgrade (World Traveller, which is slightly comfier than the basic tourist class, but doesn't have the panache of Club Class). I also urgently rang Julie from the nearest pay phone, because the plan had been that I'd ring her when I got into Phoenix, most likely about 7pm once I'd got through Customs/Immigration, and we'd meet up for dinner. That wasn't going to happen now.


The flight to San Francisco was okay. (It turned out they'd doublebooked me into a seat in World Traveller, and the man who was sitting there got an upgrade into Club Class. I tried not to feel too envious.)

You get free newspapers (choice of Daily Mail or The Times) in World Traveller. The stack was there in the corner where I was standing to be out of the way while they sorted out the double booking. The front page of the Daily Mail had a picture of British soldiers running, with fire - a confused sort of picture. I bent to look at the caption: the soldiers were in Basra, and were running from an Iraqi demonstration against yesterday's assassination of the Hamas leader by the Israelis. The soldiers had had petrol bombs thrown at them: one of them was on fire.

I said out loud "The idiots." And collected a copy of The Times to read about it, as the best option of the two.

Actually what I thought was more complex than that: I wrote it down once I'd got it into shape.

Yes, it is true: Sharon chose this time of all times to order the leader of Hamas to be assassinated by the usual Israeli method of air-to-ground missile without trial. A decision even the Times leader-writer thinks is mad, though they phrase it more carefully - "Israel can limit the losses it is suffering in the international theatre only if Mr Sharon defines how a secure Israel and a stable Palestine can co-exist."

But as Sharon has no plans for a stable Palestine - he is not even, as I understand it, proposing to get rid of the permanent settlements in Gaza, merely to turn them into permanent fortified islands (controlling the water supply), this assassination accomplishes nothing towards the ostensible goals touted by the US (which themselves don't go far enough).

What I believe Sharon's real goal is, is to foment and encourage Palestinian insurrection, hoping (and succeeding, so far) to provoke atrocities committed by the Palestinians against the Israelis, to generate public support in Israel (and in the US) for his own policy - which has always been, for decades, to eliminate all Palestinians from "Greater Israel". And this strike is just another move towards that goal.

All of this I thought, such is the speed of thought, in the few minutes between reading the caption and the man in 19E being upgraded into Club Class because of me.

I felt newsless. I wanted to be online. So I wrote about it in my journal, and I watched the new Looney Tunes movie and watched Master and Commander again, and read, and so the time passed - 11 and a half hours of it. A long, long Tuesday afternoon.

I read Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow as we flew over Denmark, then Greenland, which pleased me.

Am I the only person in the world who finds a small meal shortly after take-off and a smaller meal shortly before landing woefully insufficient?

One unforeseen benefit of being one step above tourist is that I was right at the front of the queues, and got through Immigration and then Customs well ahead of the crowd. I used to hate Immigration, but found Customs okay: but Customs has become more invasive, or else the early passengers get the eager-beavers. My big pack got opened and investigated. "What's this?" he wanted to know, holding up the bagged snacks for the trek into the Canyon. (Little 25g clingfilm packets of salted nuts and dried fruit.) I explained. He evidently thought this was weird. I stood there tired and irritated and just wanting to sit down.

Eventually I got to do just that: hot cocoa with frothed milk in Peet's. Very nice. The plane from San Francisco to Phoenix was America West, and I wish I hadn't been so tired, because this time I got a window seat, and I love looking down on landscape with cities at night.

Arrived Phoenix 9:40 (the BA advisor got caught by the time difference, I suppose: it would have been 8:40 in San Francisco) and it seemed to take forever to get out of the airport.

I got caught by a porter who "helped" me with my bags (for a tip, of course: if I'd thought, I'd have said no - it wasn't worth five bucks, which was what I had to give him, having nothing less). The taxi driver gave me a moment's horror, when he asked if I knew where the hotel was, but he knew roughly the right direction and I remembered enough from MapQuest to be able to tell him the right turn-off.

The Comfort Inn Phoenix is indeed comfortable. I rang Julie from the room, and we chatted a while: I fell asleep about 11pm, woke up about 3:30am, and slept again till 5:30am.


I'm in a cybercafe in Flagstaff, and I've been on a hour, so I think I'll stop here. It's been good so far. I meant to wander round Flagstaff, but they're remodelling the Amtrak station: there are no lockers to leave luggage in. My backpack is really too heavy for casual wandering - so I walked to a restaurant, had lunch, and looked for someplace cool and shady to hang out in till it gets on for 3pm, when I catch the shuttle to the Grand Canyon.

More later, most likely.