Rosie, Saturday 23rd - ped xing, wigwams and ballgames

The drive to San Bernadino was beautiful if fairly uneventful, we had a couple entertaining toilet breaks, excuse me, restroom stops. The first at a campground lake, where the first lot of toilets were locked so we had to drive around to the other side of the lake. These were clean but basically a seat over a really deep hole in the ground. The second visit was at a tiny petrol station in the middle of nowhere where the owner was sitting chatting to his friends outsirde and swatting bees, before reccomending I use the end portaloo as he had just opened it and it would be "fairly clean" he complained about the bees. "I don't know what's going on but we've got all these honey bees at the moment and they don't go away if you swat them, they come back and sting you". We made sympathetic noises, managing to avoid the obvious comeback of "don't swat at them then"...

At some point in the drive George shouted that he finally got it, when I asked what he got he replied to my busement "Ped X-ing!" it turned out there had been all these signs with a walking man on with 'ped xing' written underneath. The clever ones of you out there would realise that this sign proceded a zebra crossing and it meant pedestrian crossing.. In our defence it hadn't come up often and it had taken a while to get used to being on the wrong side of the road.

On that note, George's driving has been very impressive with only one moment where he tried to drive on the wrong, wrong side of the road and that was deep in the desert with no one else around so it barely counted. And the only hairy moments were on the Yosemite drive when a few times (don't tell George) I nearly cried I was so scared of the drops. But you know, in a cool, brave kind of way.

The drive again was spectacular, lovely roads, big hills and mountains with funny ruins of houses abandonned presumably because they were out in the arse-end of nowehere and only a loony would live there.

We pulled into San Bernadino, expecting a nice little town, and finding a sprawling area of equal portions fast food chains, discount shoe shops and slightly shabby housing. We got to the Wigwam Motel at about 4:30 ish and it was all we had dreamed of and more. Set ever so slightly off Route 66, it was a plot with 20 concrete wigwams built onto it. We were told by the nice man on the desk that as we were staying two nights we had been upgraded to the deluxewam as I've just decided to call it. This meant that on top of the air con, wifi, flatscreen tv, bed, shower, fridge etc we had a sofa! He also asked in a genuinely confused way why were staying for two nights ans what we were planning to do whilst we were here. Luckily George had done some research, because I hadn't got past staying in a concrete wigwam and said some stuff we might do and the man looked reasurred that we weren't complete mentals. We asked if he could reccomend anywhere to eat, aftwr swearing at my choice of eating habits he reccomended a Mexican place which was delicious and had super hot, fresh, home made salsa. I was pretty set to move in but George had his heart set on going to watch the baseball and so as a dutiful wife I had to do as he said.

We were going to watch the San Bernadino 66ers play someone else whose name I forgot instantly. It took a few detours through nearly empty streets due to gps stupidity (bad reading by us in reality) to get there but once at the San Manuel (pronounced like manual not manwell) stadium it was clear, this was the thing to do on a Saturday night in San Bernadino. As we were on honeymoon we thought we'd splash out and get the best seat we could. Executive box it was at the ridiculous price of $10 each. We had a brilliant view and were behind some of the club owners and execs which was funny. Baseball is a game I now understand the rules of, if not the desire to watch. It was a great evening and I thoroughly enjoyed myself and the family and community atmosphere but baseball is essentially rounders where the players are grownups and score less often. And our match lasted three and a half hours, at which point it was bedtime.