Sweet San Diego - looking out to sea

The Pacific! Here it is.

San Diego is the last moment of leisure on the mighty road trip. Six months gone? Already? Phew. I have been a passenger for six months? Right around the USA. How did I do it?

Bruce and Siri Google, with her pleasant Aussie accent, found the way and I documented it. Little notepad, iPhone camera to the ready. It has not always been easy to grab snaps from a moving car. Sometimes I was so excited taking notes that I forgot to try for the snap. Commitment to the blog has, however, forced me to be attentive and to have an extremely focused role in the passenger seat.

A zillion blessings to the iPhone's resources and my 6-month AT&T phone contract. I loved my US phone number: 650 255 1881. And that it made messaging cheap and easy along with unlimited local calls and a small quota of internationals. It is eminently superior to any form of global roaming - and, indeed, I have been scorched by those in the past.

How did we manage before the iPhone? We had Bruce's huge, comprehensive USA road map in the car with us - but we have never had cause to open it. The world was at my fingertips. So literally and miraculously. Thousands of invisible companions and advisors have been waiting, eager to recommend or forewarn. While Google explains strange landmarks and signposts out there in the landscape, Google Maps makes suggestions, or NOT, for places to eat in backwater towns along the road. In one mid-sized country town we had already parked the car outside the supposedly most popular lunch spot among the town's locals when Yelp reviewers yelped out warnings about cockroaches on the rest room walls and a chef spitting in the soup.

We sped off in relief to find a dependable national chain restaurant - Chilis, Panera Bread, Cracker Barrel, Denny's, Arby's, Red Lobster, TGI Friday's, Iron Skillet, Maccers...

These are fast food at a consistent standard of good. They feature clean rest rooms, too. They are a traveller's wonderful chum across the USA. One learns a lot about such places in 6 months. Similarly with the hotel chains - which chain has gone up and which has gone down. La Quinta, which we have loved in the past, has lost its sheen. I suspect it is in the new cult of emphasising facilities for children - and pets. Travel in the US is now very pet-friendly and, after the odd doggy-smell room, we learn to avoid the pet-friendly hotels. We learned to like hotel chains with points systems and soon have earned lots of points with Marriott and Hilton's H-Honors. We learned to like Trip Advisor, Expedia, and Booking.com, but also to note that not all hotels respond well to their reservations. In some cases it is clear they assign lesser rooms. None the less, when the chips are down and one is in dire need of a last-minute room, Expedia is simply stunning and I trust in it.

We stayed in 59 hotels around the country and if there is a common problem, it is probably the standards of wireless Internet. It is uneven and, of course, insecure. Some places impose extra charges. Some places have systems which don't actually reach all the rooms. In two instances, we could only connect by standing just inside the door or in the hall. It would be hilarious if it were not so absurdly frustrating. In one hotel we had to sacrifice a really lovely room with a fabulous city view and be moved to the rear of the premises to get functioning Internet. They did give us a big discount to go with the inconvenience so all was not lost. It shows that not everyone who books into a hotel is dependent on high connectivity.

Some of the inconsistencies with communications in assorted lodgings have put me behind with self-imposed deadlines for this blog. I need a certain oomph to be able to upload photos to Blogger.

There also have been odd computer glitches with my elderly MacBook Air - and they continue to plague me. One just has to be fatalistic and, as Joan Didion so wisely philosophised, play it as it lays.

We have slipped into a gypsy lifestyle on the road. It has been as if there was no beginning or end but just the state of mobility, the Rogue and us, hotels and us, the road ahead, the next adventure...

Suddenly, here is the coast. The Pacific. Australia is out there.

And San Diego is our nitty gritty, the place

where we have truly to rationalise the luggage and make ourselves air travel ready. No more hotel luggage trolleys laden with food bags, cooler bags, plastic bags, bedding and stuff. We have to shed. We have to send stuff home.

I've chosen our San Diego digs carefully. They have to symbolise all good things and all practical things. I am not

disappointed when we arrive. The sun is just setting and the super moon is rising over Mission Beach. The Capri by the Sea are beautifully-appointed condos right on the foreshore path. We are on the second floor corner where we can see the180-degree stretch of beach and sea

and some of the golden sunset burbs. We can hear the waves crashing onto the beach outside. They slam down in a determination of full moon high tide. The weather is perfect. We throw the windows open to sleep in the pristine sea air and the sounds of the surf.

Of course, condos are always a bit idiosyncratic. This one requires an electronic pass to move about the building, the grounds, and catch the lift, but a

key to get into the condo itself. The condo is equipped with everything one could need and B makes an express trip to the grocery so he can cook our ritual spag bol comfort meal. While watching the football. The Patriots lost. Oh well they don’t lose many.

I’d like to say we are

doing lots of interesting cultural things in San Diego but we have been here before and we are at the end of a massive lot of doing a massive lot. We’re a bit road weary and I am still not in the greatest health. Shingles are mean.

We perform the traveller logistics. We assess our excess. We shop for the last-minute thing. We pack and post overweight. We cull our car travel equipment - the chiller bags, the bedding bag, the extra

pillows, our little travelling pantry of seasonings and oils and honey and pickles...

We go for walks around lovely Mission Beach, fascinated to find that the local jetty is in fact a sort of hotel with rooms right on it and over the water. We walk the backstreets as well as the beach. We take our folding chairs out for the last time and sit on the beach in the sun. It is a hard sand beach and with the super moon, it is having very high tides.

There are workmen out from before dawn every morning grading the beach and building breakwaters around the lifesavers’ station. All that grazing and bulldozing does not leave a lot of shells or life on the beach - just masses of funny little flies which like to sit harmlessly upon one’s self.

We get into the joy of sunrises and sunsets making this just a couple of beach bum days. The local people turn out to

be ritually devoted to those special times of day on the beach, carrying yoga mats and wee chairs to sit alone along the beach in the tidal swish of sunset. Some burn incense.

They make a beautiful and serene picture, a heavenly human enhancement to the aesthetics of the fading day. We hover on the sands, sharing their meditative spirit as part of the last throes of our great Sa Trek freedom spirit.

Goodbye open road. Goodbye beautiful American skies.

Sigh.

But there is another goodbye to be had, the hardest one of all for Bruce.

Our very last stop on mainland USA is at a Los Angeles airport Marriott hotel whence Bruce returns the olive green Rogue to Alamo.

She has done 14,150 miles (23,000 km) through all sorts of terrain and conditions and she has given us not a murmur of trouble.

We have not scratched or dented her.

We gone through some astonishing car washes with her. We love how

she sparkles in the sun when she is green clean. We have just spent a lot, a lot, a lot of time with her. She has been our cocoon home, the one constant factor in a travelling lifestyle.

She's where we hang out hats, where I have my seat cushion to give me a little extra height and support, where we keep our daily drinks supplies and the little pantry of travel snacks - the adored Chex Mix, fruit chews, liquorice, peanut butter cookies...

And, as her driver, Bruce has grown very attached to her.

The moment he hands her over at Alamo, he goes into Rogue

withdrawal. Poor boy spends a restless night worrying what he has done with the car keys which have been on or beside his person for six months.

He looks contentedly at the map he has kept throughout the trip. He has marked off each stopping destination only after we are stopped and lodged. His plans have worked well - driving only for a few hours on each driving day, driving only in daylight, of pausing for long enough to get to know the places we visit...

It has worked well.

From coast to coast, it is now done.

This is the dream, y'all.

It’s the American barrier island dream location. Fort Walton Beach.

Our balcony at the Nautilus Court looks down upon an endless strand of white sugar sand. Caster sugar sand, really. It is very fine.

It squeaks to you as you walk upon it.

And, unlike Australian

white sand, it does not get hot in the scorching sun. It is soft, silky, comfortable. It is because it is all limestone, crumbs from shells and coral, says Bruce. Ironically there are not many shells on the beach. Just tiny cockles.

Blue beach chairs and umbrellas are set out in perfect symmetry every morning for our use. It has been a dream of mine to sit upon a beach

like this in this style. Now I realise the dream. Chandler, the sun-bronzed chair boy, checks us off on his list, ensuring there are no sneaky outsiders stealing our Nautilus sun spots. Chandler does all the work of bringing the chairs out and putting them back each day. I love the Florida sun. It feels soft. Nonetheless, I dip into the sea at regular intervals. It is a warm sea. Gulf of Mexico sea.

We are on Okaloosa Island in a place called Fort Walton Beach. I found it in one of my trawls for good places to stay when Bruce said to look for a beach location in the Florida panhandle. It’s a bit of a coup.

I am besotted. Bruce is besotted.

We have a bedroom each, for starters. I have the

bright sea view room at the front and Bruce has what he likes to call the Man Cave at the back. I can stay awake as long as I like with no fear Bruce will be disturbed. Bruce can sleep as early as he likes and not be disrupted by his night owl wife.

We also have a long, spacious living room with two fabulous recliner chairs plus dining table and sofa. And

an excellent kitchen, plus a sophisticated laundry. Not to mention the most heavenly balcony with sun lounges, table, and chairs. We lack for nothing. And the view is simply exquisite - the emerald sea and the white sand. They call this The Emerald Coast and once one sees the sea, one realises it is right. It is emerald green.

Our days here show us the sea with small surf, patches of weed, and undertow, and the sea dead calm, crystal clear with a wealth of silvery fish of all sizes meandering

comfortably through the shallows. Jellyfish visit, too. Swimmers call out and bring curious sunbathers to stand warily in the water around them to look and photograph. There’s an Asian family in our beach area. They are down from 7am each day doing every possible thing you can do on the beach, from paddle boarding and body surfing to netting fingerlings and burying each other deep in the sand for hours on end.

They manage to net a decent meal of good-sized crabs right in front of us. The Americans are fascinated and come up to look admiringly into their bucket.

These few days are my idea of bliss. I feel brown and fit.

In the cool of a morning, we take a walk on the low-tide hard sand at the water’s edge down to the Okaloosa jetty. We pass one after another array of beach chairs and sunshades, each one impeccably

lined up near the water, each representing a different condo or hotel community. Mostly they are blue or green, but one is black and another non-conformist, deep purple. Just as the sand dunes along the beach are uniformly adorned with wooden wind-breaks and sand-defenders, so are the chairs and umbrellas of a thoughtfully harmonious aesthetic.

We ponder whether this is centrally controlled by some Fort Walton community authority.

It is further to the jetty than we

thought. Funny thing that. The sand gets softer and the slope of it more extreme, so the walking is harder. I’m kicking myself for not bringing a drink of water. There are no shops or cafes on the foreshore. Just condos and hotels. Finally we find a refreshment stand right on the pier itself. Rather a crude fisherman’s shop, really, with bait and ice cream and drink machines - oh, and a loo. We might have strolled down the jetty which is lined with fantastic heron sculptures on the light poles but there is a $2 charge and something deep within the Aussie psyche balks at being charged to walk a jetty.

We sit and rest for a while with a cold drink at a table outside a foreshore bar and then make the

return trip past all these worlds of Americans at play on their gorgeous beach. Back at our blue beach chairs, we look at our iPhones and discover we have just walked 6.2km.

We take only one expedition - to the nearby barrier island township of Destin, which originally attracted us to visit this part of Florida.

I’m glad we did not stay there. It is lots of fun, lots of touristy, quaint,

characterful activity and a lively little market under the grand hotel.

We go for a wander there, particularly charmed by the water at the marina dock. It is that same pristine green as on our Emerald Coast beach and huge, happy fish swirl around among the pylons, seemingly aware of the No Fishing sign above them.

Fort Walton Beach serves us well. Bruce has a dental filling fall out and the Nautilus management finds him a

wonderful dentist who does the repair job same-day.

I find a beaut nail salon for a revamp of beach toes. This time I get a shimmery green colour adorned with palm trees and a little white seagull. The nail salon is just like all the others all over America and Australia. It is run and worked by Vietnamese girls with very basic English. The only difference I find is that what we call "nail art" in Australia, here they call “design”.

We find a classy Publix supermarket and equip our condo for every meal.

We already are carrying stone-ground grits from Nora Mill in Sautee and muesli from Trishna in Fayetteville. And our usual travelling kitchen of knives and chili sauces, olive oil, olives, booze, and other essentials.

We don’t eat out at all in Fort Walton Beach. We eat on our gorgeous porch watching brown pelicans fly over the sea, spotting the odd pod of

dolphins, the regular passage of the surf rescue bods in their beach- mobiles, the putting out and taking in of the chairs, the rhythm of beach life.

Some day-trippers coming to the public carpark near the condos entertained us no end with the incredibly complicated supplies of beach paraphernalia they lugged down to the shoreline: shade tents, umbrellas, chairs, eskies, inflatables, and boogie boards. Some of them had special soft-wheeled sand carts in which to load their luggage.

Others just made one trip after another at the end of the day, often looking rather the worse for sun exposure.

There are military installations in the vicinity and we have the entertainment of some absolutely intriguing aircraft buzzing or roaring overhead from time to time. A lot of those things with their propellors on the end of their wings. Bruce can identify them all.

Then there is the dune cat. A dear little inky black female cat emerges from somewhere at dusk each night

and comes to talk to us, and anyone who will listen. She is saying that she is hungry. She has obviously had kittens. She is very tame. She is thin. We call her dune cat because she is always there in the dunes where, probably, her diet is the darling little green anole lizards one sees occasionally. Maybe the odd dragonfly. Against all condo rules, I toss some left over bologna off the balcony for her and she quickly finds it. I learn that she is not actually abandoned but has to live outside because of the no pets regulation at a neighbouring condo. Hmm.

There is another mood to the beach each evening at sunset. One of almost gentle reverence. People drift onto the sand and

wander about or just sit quietly on the sand ledge by the water’s edge and wait to watch that great golden orb of sun melt into the horizon in its celebration of glowing red and orange. Each night we watch carefully for the mysterious green sunset flash, but never see it. The thing about Fort Walton Beach is that it is really, really hard to leave. This has been the most comfortable and perfect place on every level.

I wonder if fate might ever bring us back here. I’d like to think it might.