Our first school visit today

After a fantastic night’s rest in the Days Inn motel in King City (we said we would promote it), Miss W and I headed off to San Francisco. We had left messages for Mr Miller in King City but didn’t get a reply in time so off to Kami Thordarsoni and her students in Santa Rita Elementary in Los Altos, south of San Francisco.

Miss W was much more careful today – we had no accidents with the car at all. One problem though, is we weren’t given a big USA road map with the car.  Last time Miss W was in USA she bought an AA Road Atlas but she didn’t bring it with her because it is 10 years old and would be out of date. So we are relying on gathering brochures that include maps of where we are going or checking out Google maps whenever we need to.

So today, we decided to head to Monterey Bay which is famous for its aquarium and whale watching in the Pacific Ocean.

***** Cooee, Australia, can you hear us?******

We decided to head cross country through Carmel Valley. But of course the maps didn’t have road numbers or anything on them. Luckily Miss W has a good sense of direction – she knew if we were heading north west we would hit the coast just south of Monterey Bay. Sometimes though the sun was coming through the left window which meant we were driving south – the roads were very windy reminding me of the roads near Queenstown in Tasmania. The hills were very dry and barren, but in the long valleys between we passed many wineries.

Suddenly we saw lots of clouds. This happened when we hit the coastline near Carmel. What would cause these clouds to form just on the coastline?

By the time we got out of the car near Monterey, we only had two hours to get to the school and with Miss W not knowing how bad the traffic would be (remember yesterday in LA), she decided to get on Highway 101 North until Highway 280 North. From there Ms Thordarsoni had given fantastic directions which we followed easily and we actually arrived 10 minutes early to the school.

What a great class they were!! Lots of questions about Australia – animals, population, temperatures, forests and deserts.  In fact, there and then I decided we need three new pages on this blog. One each for questions about Australia, Canada and USA. Students in Australia can answer the comments on the Australia page. Each comment will actually be a question left by another student who lives in a different country. The same will go for the other pages – Canadian students to answer questions left on their page and American students to answer those on the USA page.

The students also got to smell the tube of vegemite I brought with me. Some comments were about dogfood and fudge. Wonder what those two boys will think once they taste it!

We also visited another teacher and her class who have started blogging too. They also had some great questions about Australia and vegemite.

Now Miss W knew she needed to fill up with fuel (gas in USA), so after some directions by a parent who had arrived, off we went. Fuel was very cheap Miss W thought about $3.90 per gallon. Wonder how that compares to $1.40 per litre in Australia!

Now to head to San Francisco – more traffic jams – took 60 minutes to drive 7 miles – over the Golden Gate Bridge – see me in the photo. Out into the suburbs – well we missed the turnoff for Highway 1 up the coast. Miss W was in the middle lane where the sign had said to be, then suddenly we needed to be two lanes to the right and we just couldn’t get over in time for the turnoff, so we continued north on Highway 101 to Ukiah where we are staying the night.

Miss W needs to get better organized with snacks and food for when we are travelling. We have water and a couple of apricot and almond bars. She might have to do some shopping tomorrow before we head further north to drive through a tree – I’ll believe it when I see it.

If you want to comment on this post, what about answering some of the questions or write about things I have highlighted?