Americans really like cars. They generally like big cars. That’s not really a problem because there are plenty of big roads to drive them on. The main road running along the southern edge of Palo Alto (called El Camino Real) is a 6 lane highway, with a speed limit of 35 mph. Admittedly, we are not in a very representative part of America here. We are in California for starters, which is a pretty cosmopolitan state, and then we’re living in Palo Alto, a town where something like 65% of the adult population have 4 years of college education (i.e. an undergraduate degree). So we see quite a few VW Beetles, Minis and Volvos as well as the Dodge Durangos and Ford Pickups. But the weirdest thing I have seen so far, car-wise, was a hopped-up blue something, metallic paint, tinted windows, and chromed hubcaps that spin around when the wheels aren’t moving. Now I am told by the knowledgeable N that these are illegal in the UK, for the obvious reason that they make your wheels look like they are moving when they aren’t. My thoughts were, as a piece of car decoration, they make about as much sense as spokey-dokeys for bikes!

It’s Monday morning – we’ve been in California just over 2 days now, and here are some observations – may of which have been made before by other people, so apologies for repetition:

• Some people own some very silly cars.
• But that’s OK, because even the fairly minor roads are 6 lanes wide.
  
• There seems to be some sort of election going on here. We were asked if we wanted to register to vote yesterday – tempting to see if would work, but we resisted.
• People drive really slow – the speed limit in most areas is 35 mph, except on the freeway.
• The weather is *so* much better here!! OK, so it’s rained a couple of times already, but it’s warm rain, and it’s so unusual is occupies most of the local news.
• Nothing comes in small sizes – juice cartons, bags of rice, cups of coffee – everything is large, because there’s always plenty of space.
  

You have no concept of how much stuff is in your life until you have had to pack the whole lot into cardboard boxes in 12 hours. Which is what we did on Friday.

OK, so we cheated a little bit. The day started with the shipping company coming to take the 180 cubic feet of our things that we can ship by air freight. Fortunately, these guys packed as well, so all we had to do was point them at the relevant shelves and cupboards and they did the rest – scarily fast as well. N took great pleasure in pointing out the number of boxes that were required just to pack up the kitchen. But what’s the point of coming to California to take a cookery course if you don’t bring your tools??

So after about 2 and a half hours, the shipping was all packed up. The rest of the day was packing up boxes for storage. We must have thrown away about 15 sacks of rubbish over the course of the day, and I took 4 trips to the charity shop around the corner as well – and we still ended up with a ridiculous amount of stuff!

But we did get it all done in one day – from a completely full flat to a completely empty (and completely clean) flat by about 9:30pm. Impressive. But by that point we were too tired to care…

So, it starts here.

This is our last week in the UK.

Passports – check.

Visas – check.

Tickets – check (i hope)

So its just the packing to be done now – the simple process of parcelling a 2 bedroom flat into 4 heaps:

1) Ship to the US

2) Store for a year

3) Pack in a case to go on the flight

4) Get it out of the house – Oxfam, my sister, anyone else who will take things from us.

Oh, how simple it all sounds when you list it like that. My contribution to this so far has been primarily the placing of small sticky dots on various items, colour-coded to correspond to the groups above. On the other hand, I may be confusing ‘contribution’ with ‘displacement activity’.