Blog post 12

Getting up and feeling refreshed after our chilled out afternoon yesterday, we left early eager to start a new day of our journey. Today we were headed to Sacramento, about a 3 hour drive away, so a short day so far.

This was a pretty easy drive stopping for one break as we checked out a Best Buy and a few other stores, being that these store were just in a normal city, the stuff really was cheap! It was nice to see that you can get a bargain over here when your not in tourist central! Greg really enjoyed looking at all things electronic!

Heading in to Sacramento our plan was to stop at the Science and Discovery centre before checking into our hotel for the evening, getting there the problem became parking, everywhere you had to pay and it wasn’t cheap ($5 per hour was about the best variable), looking and driving around for awhile we were both getting frustrated so decided to head to the hotel it was around 1.30 (so to early to check in) but wondered if they would let us park our car so we could walk or use public transport to get us to the science centre.

Walking in the receptionist asks our name we tell her Ward and hand her our voucher (this was travel agent booked) she tells us there is no bookings under that name and that they are full for the night! This was not good, we now have nowhere to stay and have already paid for this, what are we going to do! I immediately started to freak out, trying to hide it as best as possible. The lady was quite abrupt and rude the whole time and finally goes back to her manager, she comes back and tells us that the company has obviously stuffed up and that there is one disabled room left ( the only difference is the shower and toilet) we didn’t care, we were just happy to have somewhere to stay! It was also ready for us to check in right away, thank goodness! Heading out to grab our bags I lost it I had the shakes and bawled my eyes out, so scary to think of having no where to stay for the night! In our room we quickly sorted out a way to get to the science centre, we could walk it being only about 1.4 miles away, Greg also decide it was time to transfer more money as we were running quite low on cash and funds in the bank, another thing to go wrong, the travel go card site was playing up and would not let us do the quick money transfer option! We ended up having to take the only option of an up to two day wait for a transfer! This made us very tight for cash adding more stress to our day! Not wanting to waste the afternoon as surely things couldn’t get worse we got got ourselves together and off we went enjoying this city and its history, which was everywhere over the side walks and buildings. There were a lot of Gangsta type fellows here and we’re not sure, but we think we saw some guy nicking off with something stolen from a vehicle! (Greg took a photo of him in case he really had, but the car alarm was turned off and no one seemed worried) Making it safely to the old town area we waked around unable to find the science centre. Heading to the information place we got a map and realised that it was not even in this area of town! The map said 8 miles away! We were frustrated and angry as the gps had brought us here and even Google maps had given us this wrong address! By now it was to late to head back and take the car over as it would close at 4.30 and it was aleady about 2.30, I suggest visiting another museum in the area, but Greg was quite unhappy (understandably) and we had to be super responsible with our money for the next two days! so we decided to walk around for a look. This was a pretty cool place, a lot of history here and it was so interesting to see a ship harbour this far away from the ocean! It was time for some food and we stopped at a place called the spuds, serving fries from around the world. We chose Irish fries (these were topped with bacon and cheese and a side of ranch dressing to dip them in), these were yummy and fun to eat so a highlight of our hard day so far! Its not really fun being somewhere when you cant spend money, so after this we decided to head back to the hotel, trying again to transfer money, we had to do the two day transfer and ration out our money, we were both pretty had it by now and feeling very homesick on this majorly stressful day! Lets see what tomorrow brings!

Thanks for reading

N&G