Day 10

 No license plate today but prom'ised tomorrow.  Bummed but to be honest he did say up to 7 days.  Too bad it’s taking the full seven days.  Went on a fool‘s errand today trying to find the Apple store downtown.   In a town this big you would think that they would have an actual Apple store, which they may have had at one time but it appears that they don’t even have a subsidiary office anywhere but I had to find that out the hard way. Although it was to say the least an interesting drive because I went through downtown and over to the really nice suburban areas and new construction some of which is very innovative ecologically  and architecturally.  To make a long story short I was told there were two Apple stores now because they had moved from the original place and turns out that neither one was an Apple Store just an Apple iPhone repair shop.   Neither of them said they could fix my phone so no help as far as that was concerned but had a good ride checking out everything, I’m almost a veteran of this town now

To add insult to injury turns out that they misunderstood me wanting to stay tonight at my hotel so now I am at a hostel for which I had pretty negative thoughts beforehand.  However those were based on my hitchhiking days in the seventies and hostels are not the same anymore in fact this isn’t even actually a hostel it’s an Airbnb according to the sign on the door but when I read online that it was 30 bucks I was thinking one big room with 20 beds and a bunch of broke hippies like me in the old days, except I never was broke.  I could’ve happily stayed here for the week at 30 bucks a night instead of 150 or 125 but yeah hindsight is always great.  This place is like three stories and a bunch of individual rooms. I don’t know if it used to be somebody’s mansion or what but very clean, very friendly lady running the place, good security and the only thing I would’ve liked but can’t have everything is a refrigerator in my room so I have to come downstairs if I want to get a cold drink. I’m in the lounge right now doing this and I ate my dinner in their dining room and we get a free breakfast with the room in the morning and I have stuff stored in the downstairs refrigerator so everything‘s good. Wi-Fi has been a little slow but seems to be working fine now I guess the later it gets better it gets.

Based on new information I guess I am going to go south first because it turns out that there is a coastal route that will avoid most of the smoke and the fires which I wasn’t aware of because my GPS and phone are screwed up half the time. Right now all I can see on the map is major roads and no secondary stuff shows up such as at the beach but I am assured that once I get past that couple of hundred mile stretch of fire and smoke it’ll get way better because it’s always a south wind blowing north. That’s why we got so much smoke here, there’s no fires around here but the sky is filthy because of all the ash blown up our way.  Sure hope this turns out to be a good decision because I would really hate to miss such a spectacular road and section of such a wonderful scenic country.

Having trouble loading photos so I guess I’ll have to do that tomorrow not that I had a lot to show for the day except for a picture of a really good dessert that I had no idea what it was but it looked really great in the showcase at the bakery just around the corner I’ll try to find out from the owner here what actually it is and if it’s a popular dessert.   I’ll try to find out from the owner here what actually it is and if it’s a popular dessert