California - not all aircraft
This is about some aspects of 'air' and a little of what we met this month. Hardened Pax need not read!
We had a two week fly-drive planned for March and plans had to change due to the highly unusual weather conditions.
BA LHR-SFO, chose the 380 rotation over the 777 for (I think) obvious reasons. In PE, we paid extra to ensure the A+C seats and not be trapped in the middle. Good flight although, I thought, the main meal served too early but the light meal before landing was very good.
I have been to SFO before but Mrs PAXboy has not. That worked well. we had planned to drive from SFO to San Diego, all the way on Highway 1. However, the very wet winter followed several years of drought. So many landslips occured and a couple of major ones on H.1. So we had to cut in at Santa Cruz and use the 101, then out again to reach San Simeon. Visited Hearst Castle and knew that W.R.Hearst was an earlier Murdoch - having a profitable newspaper handed to him on a plate. In the opening blurb, the Guide said, "If Hearst was alive today - he would be a mixture of Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk." You may imagine that this really endeared me to the late WRH ...
Visited friends and relatives on our way to San Diego and found restaurants (across the spectrum) to all be VERY much more expensive than on previous USA visits. Overall, the trip has cost a lot more than we expected. On our second day there was another big storm that did a lot of damage across California and we had the edge of it - heavy rain and wind. So we had to scrub going to the zoo and went inside to the San Diego Air & Space Museum. This we both enjoyed very much. I can say that the NASA exhibits interested me more as I had no idea of the scale of them. The Appolo 9 Command Module was SO small. Astonishing what they did with it. Also, the Mercury 7 mockup was so tiny.
A lot of good exhibits (actual, repro and model) covering the range of flight and military and commercial. The WWI section also covered the Germans which I thought was good..
Then to SAN for a short flight to Fresno on Air Alaska, operated by Sky West with an E175. The inbound was delayed by the storm in SFO. it had to wait for the 60mph winds to drop!! Lovely little aircraft and good flight and cabin crew.
Apart from cost, we found many staff in shops and restaurants wearing masks - which we had not expected. So they had obviously learnt the hard way and know that there are a lot of unvaccinated folks here.