I’m sitting in a bungalow near a babbling creek surrounded by lush, green fields lined with evergreen oaks and nestled amongst rolling, tree-covered hills. This is California and I love it!

At least, this is part of California at a particularly wet time of year. I’m told that for most of the year the creek dries up, the grass dies back and there’s dust everywhere. But right now, where I’m staying in Dry Creek about 10 miles north of Santa Rosa, it’s really beautiful.

For most of February I was in Whistler with my friend Clare, staying with some other friends who are working out there. We had some good riding & skiing and beautiful weather but not much snow. Then two days before we were planning to leave it started to snow. And it’s didn’t stop. So we stayed on in Whistler a couple more days to take advantage of it.

Then Clare and I took the Greyhound down to Seattle for the weekend. Another friend of ours had put us in touch with a girl he met in Argentina who lived in Seattle. It turned out she was away in Honduras for a year but she put us in touch with a friend of hers who also lived in Seattle. It turned out *she* was away for the weekend in California but she recommended some bars & clubs to check out. We ended up going to a night called "Tits & Brass". The tits were average but the brass was good fun. I was impressed to find that a friend of an acquaintance of a friend had a similar taste in venues to us! There was a good crowd there too though rather more whooping and shouting than one would expect from a British crowd.

Seattle is full of crazy people. Kinda crazy in a good way though. We both took an immediate liking to it. Did a lot of random walking about. Accidentally walked past Starbucks #1 without realising and when we went back to get a coffee there it was shut. Boeing, Microsoft and UPS all started in Seattle too. Also did a little tourist tour where they take you, literally, underneath the streets. In the early days of Seattle there used to be a bad drainage problem in the low area by the sea. Then in the 1870s there was a big fire that burned down most of the city. So when they rebuilt it they built out of brick rather than wood and also raised the streets up to fix the drainage. But while they were raising the streets, the buildings were already going up so they had shops at old ground level which were covered over by the pavement (repeat after me: "sidewalk") when they raised the streets. The 1st floors of the buildings became the new ground floor and the old ground floor became a basement and was mainly abandoned. So anyway this tour took you round the empty spaces that were left underneath the streets and hadn’t been touched for over a century. Quite good.

Last Monday, Clare went home and I got a lift down to California with someone who had advertised in the ride share section on Craigslist. Hitch-hiking is kinda illegal in a lot of states here but the ride share concept seems to be quite popular. It was a girl called Katie who, it turned out, had been up in Seattle breaking up with her boyfriend. She was keeping it together very well until the driver-side windscreen wiper fell off while we were driving over the mountains on the motorway in the dark and the pouring rain. We had half an hour or so of panic and stress while we discovered that her mum had cancelled the AAA cover and no mechanic would come out to help us. Then, with the help of a penny and a quarter we managed to wedge the wiper back on and set off again. Andrew, a friend from school who’s managing a small farm out here, came out to meet me in Williams and drove me back over the mountain in his massive truck (small by local standards).

This past week he’s been showing me around. It’s an everyone-knows-everyone, no-need-to-lock-your-car kind of place and I’m slowly learning the Californian three-fingered wave (if you want to try it at home, stick out your thumb, index and middle fingers, spread them apart and point the palm of your hand towards the person at whom you are waving). I helped a bit in the garden on Friday but I’m just not used to physical labour any more. I’m still aching a bit today. Andrew’s housemate works in the cellar at the winery down the road so I’ve been getting a few lessons in wine too.

This weekend we drove down to San Francisco. Had a great time wandering around the city and admiring the sights. Went a blues club on Saturday night and admired the sounds. And lots of bars and restaurants to admire the tastes. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the good choice of beers available in most bars here. I had this idea that all of America just drank Coors and Budweiser but I’m glad that’s not so.

Tomorrow I’m hiring a car and driving out to Yosemite. The adventure continues.