Since ending my career as a cabbie, I’ve missed the pleasure of being useful, of helping people get to where they need to be, of demonstrating my ability to find my way around, and of driving.

There wasn’t any money in the game any more, not unless I wanted to steal other cabbies’ fares, work insane hours, blackmail base into giving me plum jobs or drive for Peter Slipper.

This time last year I drove along the whole length of Route 66, as well as making various side trips to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Madison County and so on. Had an absolute ball of a time and I’ve been driving the Mother Road again in my dreams this past few weeks. It really is a wonderful trip – the old road is all but deserted now where once it must have been clogged with traffic, but many of the diners, motels and tourist stops are still there.

Some fantastic scenery along the way, some quirky people, some great art, some wonderful old cars. It’s one of the world’s iconic driving experiences. I’ve often thought to myself that I could happily spend my life driving back and forth along the highway, savouring every moment.

Last year’s trip involved five adults, a minivan and five weeks. Previously I’ve driven a Chrysler 300C, which had a little more style, not quite so much room.

Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learnt from taxi driving and travel is that the experience is always good, but the best part of it lies in making the passenger happy. It’s not hard. Give people what they want, make it safe, comfortable, pleasant, efficient, and just add more on top. I’ve had some great holidays with various people, all with different tastes, and they all work out.

If I’m travelling with my wife, she doesn’t want to stop and explore battlefields. So we don’t. We look at national parks and art museums instead. The next time I come that way, I might have a companion who loves old battles, so we’ll take a look. And if they like aviation museums, we do that too.

And pretty much everyone loves Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon!

So here’s what I’m thinking. I get together a few of my old cabbie mates, the ones who used to drive Silver Service and know all about keeping a clean vehicle and making the passengers happy, we travel to America and drive people along Route 66.

People who cannot or don’t want to drive in America. Elderly couples, people who prefer a chauffeur, disabled people. After all, travelling can be a lot of hassle, arranging things like hotels and phones and mucking about with maps, and for some people, like my wife, driving on the other side of the road is one step too far.

We line up the passengers, we hire the vehicles, and we drive Route 66, Chicago to LA, arranging accommodation along the way, giving people the holiday of their lives. And they go home, tell their mates, share the photos and the videos and the postcards, and we get more and more customers.

I know and love Route 66, and I know the places to go and the people to meet. The photo-opportunities, the great views, the murals, the meals, the icons. Some of the thousands along the road, anyway. I’d like to know more! But more than that, I love to share my discoveries, to see people’s eyes light up when they see the things that have thrilled me.

Route 66 is really only an April to October experience. Sure, you can travel in winter, but it’s going to be cold in places – like Chicago and New Mexico – and there’s always the risk of road closures. Tucumcari is a lovely place, but not if you are snowbound for a week.

So in the northern winter, we stop driving Aussies and New Zealanders in America, and we drive Americans and Europeans around New Zealand.

New Zealand is one of the great scenic tourist lands. Every corner has a great view. Every little town a welcoming lodge and a delicious array of food. Wildlife and cultural experiences like no other place in the world. It’s heaven, simple as that.

At the moment, I’m throwing numbers together and doing my research. It’s a dream, but one that is achievable and could give me a great deal of joy. And, I trust, make a lot of people happy.

Every day that Parliament sits, between two and three in the afternoon, every member of both House and Senate wanders down for that grand piece of Westminster tradition known as Question Time.

The idea is that this is an hour when ordinary MPs get to ask the Government about issues dear to their hearts. Issues that the Government would not normally address in public as part of normal business. It is a chance for the Government to be examined as to their performance.

Let’s look at the logistics of this for a moment. Apart from the normal electorate work, which comprises most of a parliamentarian’s time, when in Canberra an MP will be in meetings, working with colleagues, supervising a department if they are a Minister and occasionally speaking on legislation in Parliament. In fact, most of the time they are not in the parliament chambers, but they aren’t idle.

We pay these people $250 a day. Ooops, no, sorry, that’s the travelling allowance for MPs visiting Canberra. Oddly enough, the two senators and three House members resident in Canberra also get this allowance, though only when Parliament is sitting.

There’s also an electorate allowance of between $32 000 and $46 000, provision of a private car, a generous set of health and other benefits, free business or first class travel and participation in an extraordinarily generous superannuation scheme.

Salaries are almost the gravy on the roast here, but they begin at $180 000 with bonuses of up to 85% for holding parliamentary or party positions such as Speaker or Opposition Deputy Whip. Then there’s ministerial salaries ranging from 25% to 160% of the base salary.

Julia Gillard, as Prime Minister, receives nearly half a million dollars salary, more than Barack Obama or David Cameron.

All 222 MPs show up for Question Time and, for this one hour the collective cost is huge.

Fair enough. The Government deserves scrutiny, and the people, who are paying for all this through their taxes, need to be able to cast an informed vote for democracy to work correctly.

However, somewhere along the way, the role of Question Time has changed. An Opposition member asks a question of a Minister, and instead of a straight answer to a straight question, what comes back is a skilful deflection and an attack upon the Opposition and its policies. When a Government member asks a question, which is the other half of the time, we get more of the same, or a puff piece on how well the Government is doing.

For example, on Australia Day 2012, a member of the Prime Minister’s office, through a Labor Party intermediary, misquoted the Opposition Leader, initiating a near-riot in which the Prime Minister was dragged away from a restaurant, losing a shoe in the process. It was a severe embarrassment.

Some days later, as the facts of the matter emerged, a question was asked about releasing the texts of the relevant messages. Instead of answering a direct question, which really required only a “yes” or “no” response, the Prime Minister wanted to talk about an improvement in the employment rate, and with the intercession of the Defence Minister and the Leader of the House, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and the Speaker asking for a response to a “fairly tight, narrow question“, avoided giving any answer at all.

Reading the Hansard transcripts of Question Time shows more of the same. Much more. Naturally the Opposition focuses on Government embarrassments and shortcomings, and naturally the Government wishes to avoid negative perceptions.

It’s political advertising, paid for by the taxpayer. It does nothing for democracy.

Recently-arrested Megaupload king Kim Dotcom and the various copyright holders claiming losses of half a billion dollars have more in common than they realise. And they should meet in the middle to solve the internet war.

Dotcom’s assets are valued at $175 000 000, according to news stories describing the luxury cars, the sprawling mansion, the opulent lifestyle.

But hang on. How did he get all the money if he was, as the big movie companies insist, ripping them off and making the stuff available for free?

It turns out that the oh-so-sophisticated download model of the piracy barons is to break their downloaders into two sectors:

1. People who can download for free, but with restrictions imposed by artificial delays, slow download times, Captcha authentication and other limits.
2. People who pay around ten dollars per month to avoid the limitations and download as much as they want at normal speeds.

Those few dollars a month from millions of downloaders soon adds up.

To $175 million, apparently. Which is about a third of the half-billion dollars supposedly lost by the copyright holders.

Now, I’m always a bit leery of these claimed losses. Inflated to buggery, usually. A movie company points to fifty thousand downloads of a film costing $19.99 on DVD and bingo, that’s a million dollar loss right there. Add up all those sales lost to pirate downloaders, and you’re talking big, big money.

Assuming that all those computer geeks flying the Jolly Roger were going to fork over $19.99 for a DVD anyway. Most of these guys have terabyte hard drives stuffed with movies they’ll never watch if they live to be a thousand. If it wasn’t for pirate download networks, they’d buy only a fraction of the booty, but just as cruise passengers load up their plates at the all-you-can-eat buffets, if it’s all for free you might as well get as much as you can fit in.

In everyday life, people just don’t eat that much when they have to pay full price, nor do they buy as many videos at ten or twenty dollars a pop, nor shop iTunes for a hundred thousand dollars worth of albums.

But they will cheerfully pay ten bucks a month to download more movies than they can ever watch, more music than they can listen to, and more books than they can ever read. Ten dollars a month for “free” stuff.

So why on earth aren’t the copyright holders tapping into the same revenue stream that Kim Dotcom was enjoying and setting up their own subscription models?

All you can legitimately download for ten dollars a month. The thing sells itself. You could up it to twenty dollars or more a month, and if the product was high quality, compared to the often difficult or dodgy offerings of the pirate kings, you’d still get millions of people signing on.

Instead we get half-baked schemes like SOPA and PIPA, internet blackouts, and denial-of-service attacks by outlaw hackers. The internet is rapidly turning into a battleground, and that’s not good for anybody’s business.

—Skyring

The taxidriving thing has been going downhill for a long time. When I started in October 2006, aiming to gain enough money to feed my travel habit, it was great. There were only a couple of hundred cabbies on the road at any one time, and at peak times we’d be flat out. I worked six nights a week and on Saturday nights the money just poured in.

As time went by, I slowed down a bit. Gave up Saturday nights, then dropped Friday night for Sunday. My two big money-earners gone, but with them most of the drunks, and I got to spend my weekends with my family.

In particular Kerri and I enjoyed our Friday nights, when I’d cook dinner, having it ready for her when she came home at the end of her working week. And the family didn’t have to tiptoe around the house on their days off while I tried to sleep.

Then the Wednesday Philosophy Club came into my life, and I’d stop work about six-thirty of an evening, and be so deep when the class finished at nine-ish that I’d rarely feel like starting up again. Kerri and I would drive back home together, discussing the topics raised in the class. Climbing back into uniform and going out into the quiet streets for a few more fares seemed pretty hard.

On anynight, the late evenings usually consist of sitting around on various deserted ranks, and about two in the morning after being idle for ninety minutes, I’d start to wonder if maybe there was something better I could be doing with my life.

Then I lost my beloved day driver, PeskiePete, to the taxi base.

And above all, there were more drivers on the road, competing for the same business. The government had released another hundred taxi plates. It’s easier and cheaper to do this than to improve public transport, which loses money.

Most of the new drivers were Indians, up from Melbourne, where they were the target of abuse. They quickly became the target of strong criticism here, from the established cabbies, for stealing fares, setting up illegal ranks outside hotels and clubs, passing other taxis en route to a rank. Not to mention the various scams, such as taking the long way to a destination, aiming to hit as many red lights as possible, setting the meter on the night rate during the day, refusing short fares and so on.

Kerri was complaining that I’d crawl coldly into bed in the early morning and do nothing but whinge about the lousy shift I’d had.

It just wasn’t worth it.

The owner wasn’t making any money out of his cab, and he sold it to one of the new Indian “cabfathers”. With it went myself and my day driver Rhys, but when Rhys got up at three in the morning to begin a new week, he found that he was out of a job.

I couldn’t work with people who’d sack good drivers without notice, so I took a regular passenger to the airport, let the peak hour wind down, and drove Betsy back for the last time.

I’ll be a part-time driver now, if anybody wants me, because I really do like cabbing. But I’ve got other things to do now, not least helping to move house and to get back to what I really enjoy – blogging and game design.

It’s been a fun five years, but it’s time to move on.

—Skyring

The State Premiers are in town for a high level meeting with the Prime Minister. I picked up one or two from the Hyatt to take for a short ride to The Commonwealth Club, where a dinner was being held in their honour. Just round the corner, really, but you can’t expect such folk to walk.

The Commonwealth Club is one of those exclusive places dating back to Canberra’s earlier days. Its members include the top public servants – Departmental Secretaries, judges, politicians, community leaders, knights of the realm and so on. Personally, I find it rather stuffy and the food bland, but doubtless it is a comfortable home for the cream of Canberran society.

I picked up some locals as well, from a nearby suburb. Three senior members of the legal fraternity, judging by their conversation, which I listened to with one ear open, just in case they issued instructions to the humble driver.

“I won a prize today!” one of them said. “A weekend at any Australian hotel in the Medina chain.”

“Oh, well done! How did you score that?”

“Qantas puts on a shindig each year for its Gold frequent fliers, and they give out door prizes.”

He went on to describe the annual Qantas travel expo, where the airline rents out a convention hall and invites hotel chains, car rental companies and the like to man stalls showcasing their various products. The Commonwealth government has a huge travel and accommodation budget, and the high fliers often have their fingers on the government credit cards.

This was the answer to a question I’d been pondering. I scored an invitation several years ago, when I became a Platinum member of the Qantas club, and since then I’ve attended several of these events. Qantas pays for food and drinks, and there’s always the chance to win one of the door prizes. I’d dropped down to Gold this year, yet I’d still received an invite, and I’d put it down to sloppy book-keeping, but hurried along for the free tucker, a showbag full of glossy brochures and promotional pens, and the general atmosphere of travel and far places.

So. It wasn’t just Wanker Platinums like I’d been, but also Scum Gold like I’d now become.

This year’s theme had been rather bittersweet for me. Texas!

All the Qantas staff wore fluffy plastic ten gallon hats, t-shirts with various Texan themes (including one young lady who filled out her “Route 66″ shirt very nicely, and if I’d had a few of the champagnes on offer, I might have the nerve to ask her to pose for a photograph with me. Sadly, taxidriving is a profession where the allowed blood alcohol level is zero, and so I’d had to watch the trays circulate without me.

There’s always a theme and a game or two – like toss the hoop over the Eiffel Tower to win a bottle of French perfume – and this year they had a mechanical bull, which wasn’t getting a real lot of wear from the public servants making up most of the crowd. Nor from your humble night cabbie, neither, though a few bourbons might have changed my mind. Some of the younger attendees had a go, but I’m far too old and dignified.

I love Texas, and the announcement that Qantas is now flying a direct route from Sydney to Dallas/Fort Worth was a pleasing one. Not only is Fort Worth one of my very favorite cities, full of atmosphere and style, but the DFW airport is a hub for Qantas’s US partner American Airlines, and it’s a good way to land in the heart of the nation, just one hop away from anywhere.

I’ve visited Dallas twice now, both times making a poignant pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza, but its the sister city of Fort Worth I love most. The Kimbell Art Museum has a gem of a collection and there’s always an interesting travelling exhibition filling the other end of the gallery. The Stockyard District is nicely corny, with a daily longhorn muster, a hokey shoot-out between the campy sheriff and some wildly over the top black hats, and the old stockyards station is home to souvenir shops, Texan eateries, cowboy boutiques and the like, where tourists can happily spend a fortune.

Well worth a visit, by the way, it’s a lot of fun, and I had the best steak of my life late one night at Riscky’s Steakhouse, washed down with a bottle of Lone Star.

The Botanical Gardens are a treat, with a huge rose garden, ornamental lakes with snapping turtles, some grand old trees, and acres of peaceful parkland. The real treasure is the Japanese Gardens, where a small admission fee allows entry to heaven.

Fort Worth distills Texas, in my eyes. Cowtown has the atmosphere, the people and the happy surprise of real art and culture. There’s also various NASCAR and quarter horse and rodeo events, for those less inclined to Mondrian and Mozart.

The sad part of the new Qantas Texan connection is that it comes at the expense of San Francisco, which is, along with Paris, a city I love dearly. When Qantas brought in a direct transpacific flight to San Francisco, I couldn’t stop singing to myself for days. I’ve taken that trip a few times now, and I was on one of the last Qantas jumbos out earlier this year.

I guess that, next time around, I’ll just be forced to fly on Qantas from Sydney to Dallas/Fort Worth, and catch American Airlines to San Fran.

In previous years, I’ve anxiously scanned the little signs stuck up on the exhibition booths. Most of them display details of a freebie night or car hire or something for the bearer of a lucky door ticket, and I’ve always missed out, though I’ve done well for little giveaways of pens and notepads and mints and once even an airliner model.

This time I spotted my number! Woot! A night away in a resort in Perth. Airfare not included. I like Perth, and this would be a great excuse to visit, but I’m saving up my pennies for other things, not least a new house, and instead I’ll send the voucher to a Perth friend, who can treat herself to a free night in a luxury hotel and clean out all the fancy toiletries.

So that was nice. I enjoy these Qantas junkets, with the endless coffee and the light lunch that I go round again for a second serve and the pastries and the pens and the brochures. They might be enticing me to spend up big on travel but, apart from my annual round the world trip or the five weeks I spent doing the Route 66 thing in April, I am unmoved by blatant advertising ploys.

“…and you know what?” my dinner-suited lawyer passenger in the back seat continued to his colleagues, “The place was absolutely full of these jumped-up public servants! They fly all over the place on government tickets and get Gold cards.”

His friends tut-tutted. The elite flying levels are intended for the true elites. The judges, department heads, vice-chancellors and so on who tuck into lamb chops, three veg and sticky date pudding at the Commonwealth Club. The lower classes might dream of Bronze status from the crowded rows at the back of the plane, but it’s the true gold members of society who deserve the perks and the champagne.

We pulled up at the clubhouse portico, and the lawyer beside me paid the fare with a government card.

“Tell your mate,” I whispered to him, “that I didn’t see him on the mechanical bull.”

–Skyring

Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

I love Connie Willis! She writes intricate stories, meticulously researched, her characters come alive on the page, their environment is present in more than words and she does it all with gentle humour and romance.

She writes a book about the Middle Ages – you are there. Simple as that.

And that’s how it works. In her writing world, time travel has been invented, about fifty years from now, and historians are lining up to go through to the past to study their favorite historical periods. It’s modern people going back in time.

The theme is a step forward from the often hokey time travel stories of classic SF, where a scientist goes back and alters history, or kills an ancestor, or in one nifty story, is his own mother and father. All the wrinkles in time were done to death long ago, but here is Connie breaking new ground and collecting all the science fiction writing awards going.

I knew I’d enjoy these two books. Together they are two halves of one big novel and the reader is well advised to read Blackout before All Clear, lest all the surprises of the complex plot be revealed before they are set up.

So I bought them both on Audible.com and listened to them in sequence.

The print edition of Blackout might have helped. In the beginning, there is confusion in both the story and the mind of the reader. So many characters, all leaping back and forwards in time, interacting in past and present. Some of the characters are really the same person with two or three different names, depending on their assignment. To make things worse, the careful schedules of the historians are being re-arranged or cancelled with no apparent explanation. The English researcher who has received an American accent implant for a Pearl Harbor trip is now being sent to the Dunkirk evacuation first, for example, and he has to come up with a plausible explanation.

It’s all chaos, but that’s fine. The time continuum is a chaotic system and small inputs at critical points can have major impacts later on. It’s all part of time travel theory.

But something’s going wrong with time. Historians are sent back to World War Two on assignment, but somehow become stranded as events conspire to make their return to the future difficult. Is the gun emplacement freshly built on the portal site a coincidence or is it the continuum trying to protect itself from fatal damage? If the researchers somehow alter events so that Hitler wins the war and time travel is not invented at Oxford a century later, then there will be hell to pay.

The sense of worry and despair builds up through the dark days of the war, as the British Army is kicked out of France and the bombs begin to fall on London. There’s a mirrored sequence around the time of the Normandy Invasion, when the Allies return to the Continent and more and more dreadful terror weapons are aimed at England.

Throughout the book(s), more and more characters are introduced, though thankfully there are only a handful of point of view protagonists. The settings are varied, from the wartime Oxford Street department stores, St Pauls Cathedral during the height of the Blitz, Dunkirk and Dover in the Evacuation, and Kent as the V-1 flying bombs are falling out of the sky.

We are taken to Trafalgar Square during the VE Day celebrations a number of times through the eyes of different characters, but the nagging fear builds: was the war really won or did the historians somehow accidentally intervene in history through their chance encounters with significant people?

I must confess that I was getting doubtful about the time travel theory until towards the end of the second book when Connie Willis revealed a magnificent twist that sorted everything out. Ironically – and yes, Agatha Christie and her mysteries make an appearance in these pages – the answer was there in plain sight all the time and in her narrated introduction the heroic author gives away a vital clue. Listen very carefully!

There’s an enormous number of loose ends to be tied up, but they are all squared away, and there are poignant moments along the way when we realise that things aren’t going to work out perfectly. But it’s an immensely satisfying ending all the same, all the better for the long and tangled path we’ve followed to get there.

In fact, it might be worthwhile keeping a notebook open to jot down names and places, just to keep it all straight in your head. The reader can always flip back and forth through the print edition, but the audiobook is pretty much a linear progress through a chaotic narrative.

Perhaps the best part of the book is the atmosphere. Connie Willis has done her research well, aided by a lucky afternoon with some of the people who lived through these times, and she brings wartime London to life beautifully. The sound of the bombs, the taste of the scarce food, the noise of the shelters, the scarcity of clothing, the dark of the blackout and the eventual joy as the lights are turned on again. We are there.

A few minor grumbles. In the audio version, although the accents are superbly done, I must take exception to the sheer number of long “a” sounds. It grates on my ear to hear “train parsengers”.

Nothing in wartime Britain cost 5p. Sixpence, if you please! And it’s day before month, when talking dates – the English would definitely not have been discussing dates in American format!

But these are minor niggles, and all in all, I must confess – I love Connie Willis!

–Skyring

An added bonus, if you are an Audible.com customer, is a free download of Connie Willis and Carrie Vaughn (author of the Kitty Norville series) discussing these two books (and the Kitty series), research, writing and just having a great time together.

Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century by Paul Milo

I’ve always been a bit of a science fiction nut. Gadgets fascinate me. I drive a car filled with buttons and screens. GPS, climate control, sound system, cruise control, iphone, bluetooth, remote controls…

“We’re living in a science fiction age,” I tell my passengers, as I change to a new tune on the sixstacker.

And we are. My car may not fly or drive itself, but it’s sleek and silver and a world in spacetime away from the car my father drove – which had fins, may I add.

I have a supercomputer in my pocket with instant global communications. I can chat in realtime video to someone in the Faeroes. It’s just mindblowing, when I think about how newspaper stories of my childhood came via cable from London and were days behind. And don’t even think of ringing overseas unless you want to spend a fortune on a short conversation with somebody you could barely hear.

My younghood was full of visions of the future. The Jetsons, HG Wells, Popular Mechanics, Stanley Kubrick…

Somehow it didn’t quite work out that way. Modern London may have a few shiney towers, but much of it would be familiar to Charles Dickens. Paris more so, given that it wasn’t half destroyed by aerial warfare in a nuclear war.

This book looks at what the future was going to be like. 1984 never had human clones or rocket holidays to Martian resorts, dirigible cruiseliners with dinner in pill form served by robot waiters, but it’s fun to read about all the things we were going to have, backed up by quotes from leading thinkers on how all this stuff was just round the corner.

Or the things that blindsided us. Who saw the internet coming? Blogs and tweeting and viral videos. Revolutions run by cellphone. Capitalist China.

Paul Milo has had far too much fun with this book. One can almost hear him chortling with glee each time he pulls out some ancient government report advising investment in zeppelin stations for popular locomotion, skimming through for the choicest quotes on bionic eyes and lunar highrise.

I guess my favorite invention that never happened is the atomic car. Prototypes were actually built showing how the reactor would sit in the rear end, a safe metre or so away from the kids in the back seat. You’d never need to refuel, you could power your house from it, you could probably go supersonic if you needed to overtake.

And yet the concept makes the children of this modern age laugh until they cry at the folly of the notion.

My only criticism of this book is that it would have been enhanced by some photographs. The city of airships and towering saucer pods. The robot butler. The happy family off for a weekend on Saturn, Dad smoking his pipe as he soars past the moon.

Nevertheless, a good read, something to make you think next time you hear a politician talk about our bold new future.

San Francisco! One of those places, like Paris or Texas, where I’ve always got a happy grin cemented onto my face. It might be just airport code SFO, but I’m still bouncing along pushing a luggage trolley, leading a party of five off to the hire care precinct, smiling at random travellers and humming songs about golden gates, cable cars and sunny California.

We took the lift up a level and boarded one of those automated trains a couple of stops to the rental depot. “You can drive,” I told my son as we sprawled our baggage over the front of the carriage.

The van was booked through Netflights, home of amazing car rental deals in English pounds. Dollar Rentals had the best rate and here we were lining up to collect the keys. We pretended it was just Twinkles and I doing the driving, avoiding the $25 daily fee for younger drivers DD and DS. The Aussie dollar had hit parity with the greenback, but five weeks of twenty five bucks wasn’t to be contemplated.

I passed, with heavy sighs, a long line of Mustangs on the way to our silver Chrysler Town and Country. One day, I’ll drive Route 66 in a convertible, but that day wasn’t this one. We had five people and a stack of luggage and I was aiming for comfort over speed and style this time around.

We filled her up, I sat in the commander’s chair, contemplated the array of buttons and dials ahead of me, punched a few for luck, fired the ignition and rolled grandly down the ramp into America.

Not my first time at the helm of a Yank cruiser, so I had a certain amount of confidence. And a certain amount of worry that I’d forget and go the wrong way at an intersection. I didn’t, but I kept drifting right within my lane, a common failing amongst we Aussies, as we automatically found our comfort zone on the right side of the left lane. Sort of having a dollar each way.

The job of the co-driver in the front passenger seat was to nudge the driver back into position, screaming now and then if a streetlamp or bridge railing came too close.

The plan was to fill in the time before we could check in at our Fort Mason youth hostel with a drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito for lunch, a drive around the Marin headlands to catch some of those postcard views of the bridge, bay and city, and then see how we felt. Maybe jetlag would see us hitting our bunkbeds early, maybe we’d be out of phase and partying until three AM.

I hadn’t felt like hiring a GPS for five weeks, so had bought a Tom Tom at home that came with a free international map download. I’d picked the North American map, and despite a little hassle with websites and software installs, had gotten it loaded up. They could make these things simpler.

It worked once it got a good look at the sky, and I set Sausalito as the destination and off we went. I’d expected to be directed straight up through downtown and over the bridge, but it sent us further west and we dived under Golden Gate Park and through chunks of suburbia. I think I might have made a wrong turn somewhere while it was searching searching searching for satellites.

Not to worry. We were just hanging out of the windows, having a ball, pointing out road signs and black and whites* and all the things you see in the movies. “Oooh!” Futurecat squeaked in delight, “California poppies!”

Soon enough, the towers of the bridge were rising up. I pulled off into the visitors centre, where I knew there was a parking area, a shop, and some fantastic views. Been this way before, you see.

Darling Daughter has somehow inherited the whimsy gene. The mention of flowers reminded her that here we were in San Francisco, and like the song I’d been singing to myself, we’d better get some flowers in our hair. And photographs taken. Here are Twinkles and DD, appropriately beflowered. There were also some shots taken of your humble narrator, but as this is my blog and my story, they will not be seen here.

We will, however, feast our eyes on FutureCat, a Newzealander who received her screen name from Americans puzzled as to how it was always a day ahead where she was and could she send them the lotto numbers, please?

We were all smiling. It was just fantastic to be there after all the planning and dreaming and have the day go so swimmingly.

I ducked into the visitors centre for some change to feed the meter during the picture frenzy. I had some US notes, but nothing in the way of shrapnel. I spotted an area with National Parks Service stamps and passports for sale and I was mildly interested, but I didn’t buy one. I’ve been kicking myself ever since – I missed out on dozens of stamps until I finally bought a book in Maryland. Have to go back to collect the whole set, I guess!

Finally we piled back into the van and I found my way out of the carpark onto the bridge. I probably went a few turns too far, and at one point we had gone under the approach ramp and were heading off to Seal Rocks. But I was dead scared of making some fatal error. You know those “Wrong Way” signs they put up? Well, they put them up for people like me.

Here we are on the Bridge. The image is tilted because everyone apart from me was hanging out of the right side of the van to take in the view. That little yellow thingamajig is a Ballycumber, the emblem of the BookCrossing.com community to which Futurecat and I belong. I’ll explain later, but it’s a lot of fun.

We whipped past the freewheeling cyclists on the way down to Sausalito, parked the van and went exploring. Palmtrees, sunshine, smiling faces, restaurants, souvenir shops and always the Bay in the background. The kids ducked into a toy shop and didn’t come out again until they had played with everything. I contemplated buying a bumper sticker.

A firetruck drove past, the back crowded with tourists and a couple of cheerful guides pointing things out. Just one of those quirky San Francisco sights. Apparently the guides sing and dance and just have a wonderful time showing the place off. I love this town!

A little further along the way was the fish and chip shop I’d found in 2010. This time I plumped for a table inside and we ordered up various meals – the first decent tucker we’d had in all of a 48 hour Friday, I guess. In what became a father-son bonding ritual, I asked for a couple of local beers, which of course were Anchor Steam. We clinked our glasses and posed for the camera. Fish and chips, a beer and the Golden Gate. Here is paradise!

I saved the bottle and soaked the label off later, to stick in my travel journal. Perhaps I’m a little nutty, but I have fat journals for most of my trips, full of tickets and maps and receipts and beer bottle lables and bumper stickers. One day, when I’ve spent a fortune on a lifetime of memories and have developed Alzheimer’s, I’ll be able to go back and do it all again.

In another of my nutty rituals, I pulled into a Starbucks, where I bought a super-ginormous coffee mug, the souvenir San Francisco edition. Towards the end of the trip, the van was fairly rattling and clinking along on groaning springs, and I had to subsidise the US Post Office to a breathtaking degree.

There were galleries and boutiques, restaurants and real estate agents. I could think of worse places to live. This guy was singing on the dock of the bay, just piling up the tips, selling homespun CDs and putting a bit of cool into the sunny day. We lingered, listening.

And then we bade farewell to fair Sausalito, heading off for the Pacific coast and the Marin headlands.

The Tom-Tom wasn’t much use here. It didn’t show hills, and what looked like a good direct route would often turn into something you’d be worried about hiking along, but we had a grand time amongst the green hills, old military installations, dusty lookouts and groves of trees. It was all ridiculously scenic.

We all know about Amelie and the kidnapped travelling garden gnome who gets photographed in various exotic locations? Well, meet Wolverine. DD’s boss has this plastic Wolverine figurine she keeps in her office, supervising affairs from a bookshelf. Wolverine got kidnapped, and we were forever finding new places to pose Wolverine and his razor claw hands along the way.

That was fine, and DD’s boss was doubtless charmed to receive emailed photographs of her plastic friend teetering on safety railings above iconic landmarks for the next few weeks, but what added a whole jar of spice to the adventure was the fact that the original internal rubber linkages allowing Wolverine to move his limbs or bend and turn his head had long since perished, and every now and then an arm or head or torso would fall off as he was being positioned for the photo.

We tried to keep him together with Blu-Tac, but that wasn’t as secure as it might have been, and a fair proportion of the trip was spent retrieving bits of Wolverine from the landscape.

Like this one. Just over the safety rail is a drop that plummets down to rocks on the shoreline via gullies and near vertical slopes. Wolverine’s arm plopped off onto the wrong side of the barrier and teetered, like a movie car, on the edge of the drop. DD scrambled over the fence to get the body bit back, Twinkles hanging onto her rainbow belt in case she slipped. I didn’t really need this level of excitement, but we got the limb back. And DD.

But, OMG, the view! This was like living in a postcard. Simply stunning. I’ll come back one day with a bigger camera.

Before we left Marin, I took a picture of the New Zealand flag I’d hoisted onto the van’s aerial and secured with a ball of chewing gum. I wanted to make FutureCat comfortable about being a lone New Zealander in a van full of Aussies. Besides, I figured people would think it was the Australian flag anyway. See how there’s a little nick in one corner? Over the next three weeks the threads gradually unravelled and by the time we got to Washington DC, we were British. Barely.

And then we entered Fisherman’s Wharf into the GPS and followed the voice back over the bridge. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve stayed at the Fort Mason youth hostel, but it was a welcome sight on the grounds of the old military base as we parked the van, pulled out our bags and checked in. There was a young lady on the desk and she handed us forms to fill in as she gently extracted money off my credit card.

“You know,” I said, “It’s really comforting to us Aussies that youse have got all these gum trees here.”

“Double You Tea Eff?”

“You know! Gum trees!” I pointed out the window at a nearby grove.

“Oh, those are Eu-cal-ypt-us trees!”

I rolled my eyes. “Geez, how pretentious can you get!”

“Pretentious? Moi?”

–Skyring

* Black and whites = cop cars. Just like in The Blues Brothers and Dukes of Hazzard except they weren’t leaping about so much.

This is something that may or may not change my life. I’ll see how it goes, but it looks good.

Day One is a journal app, one of millions allowing the user to jot down notes, keep a diary, whatever. The sort of stuff that you need to keep, but isn’t public or formal enough for a blog. You know, the little stuff you jot down on bits of paper and lose.

I’ve tried the paper journal thing with Day-Timer and Circa Agenda, but although they are handy, the system ends up consuming a lot of storage space as the years roll by, and just how do you search for something that you know you wrote down but you’ve long since forgotten which day. Or year?

Of course, I can keep this information on my computer, just by jotting it down in a word processing document, but my computer is getting cluttered with little files full of stuff that I forget.

Just a few minutes ago I had need to write down something that I wouldn’t need to use for a year or three, but I really needed to remember. I considered my cluttered life which I’m doing my best to pare down, and wondered if there was some journal app I could use.

Something that I could sync between Mac, iPhone and iPad. I opened up the App Store on both Mac and iPad, typed “journal” in the search box and scanned for something which appeared in the results on both devices.

Day One was a match, and when I opened up the information page, saw that it did the job and synched via DropBox which I already have installed, I was sold!

Installation was painless. I really love the way Apple has implemented the App Store across all its devices – no more downloading disk images and registering on various websites, just hit the “Install” button and the thing appears.

I pasted the information I’d copied from Facebook onto the blank page on the Mac app, saved it, opened up the same app on my iPad and there was the same entry. No sync cable, no cut and paste, no effort at all!

Now this is something I can use, no matter where I am and what device I have with me! At the very least, I’ve always got my phone handy.

And if I lose one device, the information is stored away on the others, and in DropBox.

There are many handy features, but it’s not bloated. The development team are responding to feedback and have some extras on the horizon. One which looks extra good is #hashtag categories, a big help in organisation.

I’ll report back later – as I write I’ve only had the thing for a matter of minutes – but this resonates with me as a Really Good Idea.

–Skyring

Thames: The Biography
by Peter Ackroyd

I ducked into a bookshop in Kings Cross Underground to get Peter Ackroyd’s marvellous book London: The Biography. I was there to check out every square on the British Monopoly board and I wanted to get my research right.

The book was a superb resource. I buried my nose into it and didn’t come up for a long while. Perhaps the highlight was reading about London Stone and then seeing the actual relic of the ancient city right there on Cannon Street.

So when I recently found a companion book on the Thames in the bargain barrow at Paperchain in Manuka, I couldn’t get my money out fast enough.

My hostel, just down from St Pauls, was only a short walk from the river, and I have walked along it, and over the Millennium Footbridge scores of times, each time pausing to lean over and watch the slow water. If ever there is a sacred river in the English-speaking world, this is it. The bridges, the cityscapes, the legends, the images – they all flow together to form the natural counterpoint to the city itself.

Peter Ackroyd doesn’t disappoint. In fact he soars above my expectations. It would have been so easy to trace the path of the river down to the sea, talking of the history and the places at each stage, but he follows a different course. Each chapter is themed: trade, wildlife, bridges, weather, death, music, literature, religion and a dozen more.

We see the river as a whole being twenty times over in a new light. And each time it is a different river, never the same twice, every set of eyes and every heart focussed on a new view.

I love this approach, independent of time and place, the river has its own stories and its own way of telling them. Happenstance and artifice are blended by Ackroyd, skipping around like light on the ripples of the running river.

Pictures a plenty, along with maps, but this is no guidebook for a trip from A to B. This is something to dip into almost at random, to emerge refreshed or appalled as the case may be.

Sometimes the river was dead with filth and pollution, sometimes seething with life. It’s all here, along with the curious places and people of the water and waterside.

Next visit to London, I might venture a little further up and down the great river. In the meantime, I’ve got enough to keep my appetite stoked right here.

–Skyring