Day 1: Larrington Towers - Stockton CA

Hours 04:00 is no time for a Mr Larrington to be up and around, these days.  Such things are, however, necessary that the said Mr Larrington might get to exotic LHR in good time to board the Shiny Metal Birb to San Francisco.  At least it wasn't raining when I left home, and the enormous queue at the bus stop was serenaded by a couple of urban foxes having a difference of opinion somewhere down St Andrews Road.  Wafted by new-fangled electric W15 bus to 'stow Central, change at Finsbury Park for the Piccalilli Line and watch the world go by.  I now know that Transport for London has its own fleet of bin lorries, and that they live in Acton.

Consigned The Luggage to the maw of Terminal 5; hopefully it'll emerge unscathed at the other end and without having eaten anyone en route.  Security.  They keep changing the rules.  Do I have to take my laptop out of its nest?  "Yes" say the signs.  "NO!" says Nice Security Lady.  Sit around until The Man deigns to tell us whence departeth the Shiny Metal Birb until he does, take the Toytown Train out to the C gates, more waiting and wondering why self-entitled pricks insist on blocking the aisle past the gate e'en while LHR staff are trying to ferry folks around in their little electric carts that go "BEEP" a lot.  Which get ignored.  Board the æroplane, wot is one of they new-fangled double-decker Airbus A380 jobs.  Seat K23 offers a magnificent view of the bloody great right wing and, by leaning forward and peering backwards, a rain-soaked stretch of West Londonton.  No  lovely views of the BRITONS' England and the Severn Bridges this year chiz¹.

You have to offer up at least one kudo to the chaps at Airbus, though.  The A380 is bigger than anything those colonial upstarts in Seattle have ever put into the sky and, moreover, has seats approximately 87.32% less comfortable than those to be found on for e.g. a Boeing 787.  Exactly what's need on an eleven hour flight.  I managed to drop off from time to time in spite of this and did some proper zeds between Greenland and Idaho.  Pass over San Francisco Bay on final approach.  "Oh goodie, not much traffic on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge!" sa Mr Larrington, optimistically.

Immigration much better than two years ago, when Russell Bridge, Barney Townsend and I stood in line for ninety minutes before being admitted to the country.  I though the plane driver told us they'd installed passport robots, but perhaps I misheard and they're not for us FOREIGN riff-raff yet.  Long wait for The Luggage but it eventually showed up and, on cursory inspection, appeared not to have et anyone.  Toytown Train v2.0 to the Rental Car Center where, amazingly, the online pre-check-in wossname actually worked and some prodding of my phone allowed me to bypass the queueueue and head straight to bay 299, there to take possession of his year's wheels.

It's a Kia Sportage: a Korean SUV-lite contraption m'lud.

Likes: Quiet, huge boot, cunning auto-stop/start.

Dislikes: Nasty digital instruments, stupid stereo that doesn't grok m3u playlists like that Shitbox Dodge from 2018, utterly refuses to magically disappear the foul traffic that has sprung up all the way from the airport exit to Stockton.

Anyway, Stockton is where I is now is and while officially Stinking Hot at 39 C it is a tad less Stinkingly Hot than the BBC forecast, viz. 41 C.  However, because second dislike above the first thing I have to do is to generate scripts to rename all the .mp3 files on the USB memory wossname with a numerical prefix and move them into the same folder.  And then wonder what the script that originally copied them has against Volume 16 of His Bobness' Bootleg Series.  This is now at the "remove empty folders" stage at which point I can take some pills and go to bed², that I might have a certain amount of energy in the morning to tackle the gert big mountains that lie between here and Battle Mountain.  Nighty-night!

1. A chiz is still a swiz or swindle, as any fule kno
2. Award yourself ten house points if you recognised this as a reference to "Screwed Up", from The Deviants' 1977 EP of the same name.