Gringo Tour 08/09 - Part 7

After arriving at the KBF Resort - we headed a mile or two down the road to get to the Buena Park Mall - a hugeish one level mall which was the size of Tasmania. But because it was almost 10pm - everything was shutting. We quickly checked out our first American Wal-Mart (last time we went to a Wal-Mart was in Nanjing China...). It was big, massive and I did a Sound of Music twirl at the front door in excitement. I bought a box set of Sth Park which was cheaper by $5 than Best Buys from the other day.

We hadn't eaten dinner yet (we seemed to be in Latino time) and the choices were fat ("Fatburger" - no joke) or gross (McDonalds). We decided to try our luck at a Chicago based franchise (which we hadn't heard of) which had excellent hot dogs and burgers (I had a chicken burger which was tasty and not too fatburger) and Ant had a hot dog and fries.

On the way back home - we had to quickly check out "Sears" (in a sort of road accident sort of way). Sears is the clothing equivalent of K-Mart (ie: St Vinnies has better clothes) and everything was pretty tacky and cheap. Ant and I love that line out of the Mean Girls movie ("I'm a size four". "Try Sears").

We had to get up fairly early the next morning because we had tickets on the Amtrak train from Fullerton (not the apartments) to San Diego. I had set the alarm at 7am but we didn't need it because our next door neighbors' kid decided to have a mindblowingly loud temper tantrum at 6am. Ant and I put up with it for about 20 minutes before Ant went Emo and banged on our interconnecting door... red-head ranga style. It put a stop to the whining.

Because we had spotted an IHOP down the road (aka International House of Pancakes) the other day - we had to keep up with our American tradition of having fat fat sugar sugar huge huge pancakes at IHOP (and for me - the bottomless coffee). We were greeted by a very camp "Juan" who was a bit surprisingly lacking when it came to the service (we waited for about 10 mins for the bill but he didn't come so we just walked to the front counter). I had the "light and lean" three stack of pancakes (3 is a small portion in America) - whereas Ant had the five blackberry pancake meal (which was calorific to the max). Although Ant's Blackberry IHOP pancakes were calorific - they weren't as bad as some of the stuff on the menu (ie: eggs, bacon, 5 pancakes and sauce - it was the kids meal).

We headed back to the KBF Resort to grab our bags and got the front desk to call for a cab (yes - a taxi in the states...). Ant attempted to find a bus route that would go past the Amtrak station - but alas - he couldn't find one - so we had to cab it. Although we thought it was fairly close, and that cabs in america were relatively cheap - it cost us about $25USD with tip to get to the station. When we arrived - it was pissing down (almost biblical style). We raced into the Amtrak Station (which was quite cute) and had to wait for about 20 mins for our train to arrive. We decided to check our bags in (instead of carrying them onto the train). It didn't seem like a great idea when we were waiting on the platform and Ant could see our bags getting drenched from the rain...

The train trip to San Diego was OK - although we thought we had reserved seating - we didn't so we had to settle on a couple of seats facing backwards for the trip. The view from the train was fairly impressive most of the way - the train ride was pretty much on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and you could easily see the beaches and ocean. The PA system people were fairly crazy - when the Food Cart man was speaking over the PA - he sounded like his cookies had more than just choc chips in them. And when we arrived at San Diego - a really camp guy screamed out "Whell here is what all of you have been waitin 4...! San Diego!".

We got off the train (sin bags) and it was absolutely pissing down (biblical style). We waited around for our bags to surface - but about 15 minutes later - a guy appeared on a kart thingy with our wet bags. We watched slowly as a decrepit Amtrak old woman and the fat man piled, one by one, all of the bags of their kart onto the ground. Then they wanted us to produce tickets and get them to find them - but Ant in true ranga style pushed a couple of old people out of the way, grabbed our bags and got the hell out of the station. Till next time...