Basket cases

For me, Yosemite is a bit like The Beatles. Because so many people insist that The Beatles were the best band ever, eventually everyone just accepts that as fact. People are worried to point out that, actually, while The Beatles were a competent four-piece beat combo with some pleasant songs, the title of "best band ever" is a purely subjective one. Some people might think the same of The Rolling Stones or Queen or Brotherhood Of Man. Possibly. So it is with Yosemite National Park. So many people told us we "just had to go there", "it's an amazing place" or "it'll blow your socks off" that the pressure was on to actually get there and see what all the fuss was about. And while it is a lovely and beautiful place, I'm afraid my socks remained firmly on for my whole time there. Perhaps my expectations were just built up too much – maybe I was expecting rivers of gold and grazing unicorns or something. Instead I got the equivalent of "Octopus's Garden" and "Yellow Submarine". I'm sure that it was once an amazing wilderness, awash with unexplored natural beauty, but now it just seems a bit too manicured. You can walk through the forest on neat tarmac pathways with a little wooden barrier each side. You can drive along immaculate roads to designated view points to look at designated views. It's a bit too neat and tidy and over-managed. There are even rocks with signs nailed to them saying "Keep off the rocks."

Which brings me to the subject of America's obsession with health and safety. The over-protective mollycoddling that goes on here is mind-blowing. I think "Nanny" should be the 51st state. There are warning signs everywhere. There are nearly 40 just on the van we've hired (see attached picture for just a few of them). And sometimes it just makes no sense. For example, you could be hurtling along a road at a quite legitimate 60mph when suddenly you get to a bend and are ordered by a sign to drop your speed to 20 or even 15mph. I can walk faster than that. It must be more dangerous to suddenly have to slam your brakes on – it's like doing an emergency stop every few miles. And yet, weirdly, this is in a country where you don't have to wear a motorcycle helmet in over half the states. Like I said, it makes no sense.

When one thinks of California, "The Golden State", one thinks of sunshine and surfing and The Beach Boys. And yet the California we seem to have been driving through this week could be twinned with Manchester. It's been grey, wet and miserable. We got to the Pacific coast and it was difficult to know whether it was wetter on land or in the ocean itself. We'd come to Año Nuevo State Park, just north of Santa Cruz, to see Elephant Seals, a creature that has no concerns about wetness whatsoever. As with a lot of these nature spotting expeditions, I was expecting there to be a disappointing "no show" from our mammalian friends – but I was very wrong. At first it looked like the beach we'd walked down to was just covered in big boulders. But then some of those boulders started wriggling up the dunes towards us! There were hundreds of them. After giving birth, the female seals all head off out to sea leaving their young pups to fend for themselves and that was what we were seeing – hundreds of bleating pups trying to learn the ways of the world with no parental guidance at all. In amongst these confused little blubber balls were a few big, ugly (and I mean UGLY) bull seals. These randy, lumbering behemoths were hanging around in the vain hope that there might be a few females left to cop off with – a bit like closing time at a nightclub in Swindon. This led to the distressing sight of three ton monsters, not too dissimilar to Jabba The Hutt, trying to mount anything that wriggled past – which was mostly screaming pup seals. It was horrific. We even saw a couple of big males fighting over a pup. There needs to be a social services department set up for Elephant Seal abuse.

We continued up the coast to San Francisco and I instantly fell in love with it. Even in the rain it was everything I'd imagined from seeing films like Bullitt and Dirty Harry. I loved the steep hills and the old trams. I loved driving over the Golden Gate bridge and getting the ferry past Alcatraz Island. I loved walking along Fisherman's Wharf (even though it was bit like a cheesy Blackpool seafront) and I loved Lombard Street with its grammatically incorrect claim to be "the crookedest street in the world". I even loved that we couldn't find Chinatown for a while, despite it apparently being the biggest one outside of Asia. It was all brilliant. And then I met some sports fans...

Claire and I have been wanting to see some sort of big game while we are out here and it just so happened that there was a basketball game on while we were in San Francisco – we managed to get tickets to see The Golden State Warriors take on the Milwaukee Bucks. It turned out to be one of the most confusing nights of my life. We entered the Oracle Arena and almost immediately found ourselves meeting, and getting an autograph from, NBA legend Lenny Wilkens. No, we didn't know who he was either. Then we found our seats. When we bought our tickets there were only a few left, so we ended up in the cheap seats at quite a high altitude within the arena. So, given that it was a sellout, it was a surprise to see just how little the fans actually seemed to care about seeing the game itself. A lot of seats remained empty for a lot of the match – some people didn't turn up until the 3rd quarter, some left early, some didn't come at all. Of those who did turn up, about 90 per cent of them spent the whole match either eating large quantities of food or going to buy large quantities of food. Nobody seemed able to sit still for longer than five minutes or stop eating for longer than three. Some people in the crowd didn't seem to realise there was even a game on, they spent the whole evening texting or talking in groups or playing video games. We even saw one woman knitting!

Then there was the game itself. The match is broken into four 12-minute quarters so by my reckoning, game time should be 48 minutes. And yet the match somehow took two and a half hours. That's not an exaggeration. In between the fleeting moments of basketball, there are all sorts of things happening on on the court. There are cheerleaders jumping around in hotpants (not a bad thing), there was a display of "Filipino martial arts" (kids in pyjamas waving sticks at each other in slow motion), there were acrobats scoring baskets from a trampoline and there was a midget giving away T-shirts. For the the food-obsessed crowd there were some girls randomly distributing pizzas and one whole seating section "won" Jack In The Box vouchers. There was even a marriage proposal at half time. Another confusing element to the evening was fan loyalty. The Warriors had recently traded one of their best players, Monta Ellis, to The Bucks and this was the first time he'd been back playing against his old team. Now, if this was football in England you'd expect that player to have been vilified at every given opportunity, and yet Ellis was getting the biggest cheers of the night – from The Warriors fans. Even when he was scoring against The Warriors! It was weird. In the end The Warriors were beaten 120 to 98 but nobody really seemed to care. In fact half of the crowd had already left before the final klaxon. They'd probably gone to get something to eat.

BURGER OF THE WEEK
This one was nearly as hard to get my head around mentally as it was to get my mouth around physically. I give you the Grilled Cheddar Cheese Sandwich Burger. Nice juicy burger, bacon, grilled onions and a "secret sauce" served between two grilled cheese sandwiches. That's right, instead of a bun, it came between TWO GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICHES! I could feel the wrong it was doing me with every mouthful.