Up to 9th April: Pre-trek

From Wd

Wilson's Diary—12.50am 9th April 2007, Best Western Americania, SF

So this is San Francisco! The chrome fittings, the pink-and-beige striped wallpaper, and the cluttering bathroom fan.

Due to an unfortunate experience at our local eatery, we seem to have decided to spend our entire stay in San Francisco in the hotel room. (Maybe this will give us a better feeling of true confinement than our planned visit to Alcatraz later this afternoon.) But to bring you up to this point, we must first take you back to the distant past ...

We set off at 8.00am yesterday for Heathrow. (It was supposed to be a 7.30 start, but you know what James is like.) Our driver, Corrie, seemed to be shouldering all the travel stress on our behalf. (Perhaps she had finally realised how much she would miss our contribution at home over the next 17 days. She will just have to empty the bins herself.)

The airport experience was that of a tedious factory inspection line, exacerbated by the fact that Virgin Atlantic would not let us check in online from home. (We discovered later the reason: Virgin had blacklisted another passenger named James Wilson.) Our tickets must have been examined 10 times, and our passports likewise. Everyone even had to remove their shoes so they could be inspected for explosive. As I told my neighbouring passenger in row 46 on the 747, the weak chink in these anti-terrorist measures is now the inside job—that the man who cleans the toilets or works at Starbucks in the departure lounge passes the bomb to be passenger who has passed all security inspections.

I told James that the woman in front of us in two of the queues was Sophie Ellis Bextor, the pop singer. He thought it could be, but he also thought that her boyfriend "looked gay". My only doubt stems from the fact that this woman and her entourage were, like us, in the economy queue.