Pacific Coast Explorer

Archers Direct, May-June 2011

Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

This is my second published bus tour. The guys on this trip were demanding I publish this a little quicker than last year (still not finished!) so I'm trying. [Very - Di] This was another tour with my usual bus tour tour operator, Archers Direct, the cheaper, online/telephone-booking version of Cosmos Tours.

On this tour we planned to cover three states (California, Oregon and Washington), or four, if you count Newark Airport, New Jersey! The tour covered a period of fifteen days.

Map Copyright © Archers Direct


DAY 1: UK to San Diego, California

We had an early start at 5am to get to Birmingham Airport for our Continental flight to San Diego, via Newark. We had a five-hour stopover - although fortunately it was in the President's Club (I have a Continental Gold Elite pass). Another six hour flight and we landed at (according to a TV show I'd been watching just the week before) the world's tenth most extreme airport - something about mountains and a multi-storey car park! (More on that car park later.)

Unfortunately, there was no excitement as we landed safely and proceeded to Baggage Claim to pick up the bags and meet the Archers Rep (even though they never bother to tell you that's what you have to do.) She put us on the Super Shuttle, a shared bus to local hotels (they have them at several airports and I've used them a few times). The journey to the hotel was really short, which was nice, it had been a long day.

As we entered the hotel, we met Jose for the first time. He would be our tour guide (our official one) for the next two weeks. This was a surprise, it's usually all a bit vague on the first night...but he was there to meet and greet, and give us our instructions for the next day, not to mention to prepare us for deciding on tomorrow's optional tours. We had news for him, we already had it all figured out - he wasn't messing with amateur tourists here!

He also gave us directions to our rooms, unfortunately, he didn't send us to the correct tower first, but hey, we found 'em eventually.

The rooms at the Holiday Inn On The Bay, San Diego were nice enough, large, with two queen beds, a 36" flatscreen TV, coffee maker and a balcony with a bay view, not that we could see much at night, but we could see the lights. We could even see that airport I was writing about.

   

We decided to get some dinner at the restaurant in the lobby - The Elephant and Castle. They have traditional British Fare, they even have vinegar on the table (not normal for America). They even had a veggie burger for Di (for those of you new to this website, you should know that my assistant, Di, is a vegetarian...sometimes she's hard to feed!)

The British fries were a little dry, but the vinegar took care of that. I nearly pocketed the bottle of vinegar as I didn't expect to see any again this trip. Wine here was $24 a bottle, which wasn't bad. We had no room, or inclination for dessert so we retired for what was left of the evening. They were slow to seat us, then slow to serve us and to clear (and we kind of wanted to go to bed!) so, they only got the three Teds.



Go to next day