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We went on a long walk through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, along the James Irvine Trail, down through the forest to the Pacific Ocean.

We didn’t climb the trees but this guy did…

Check out Flickr’s new maps for London. This is stunningly good stuff… Yahoo and Flickr now have good maps for Britain and the rest of Europe as well, which should help the whole geotagging thing really fly outside the US. I’ve known this was coming for a while, but it doesn’t make its arrival any less welcome…

Tom Coates on Flickr’s maps

Er… maybe. Flickr/Yahoo is still, in fact, well behind Google in the quality of the mapping not that you’d know it from Tom Coates but then, of course, he works for Yahoo…

I while back I cited Venice as an example of the difference in map quality. Well, Yahoo’s got better, true. Here’s Flickr, now:

Flickr’s version St Mark’s Square

and here’s Google’s:

Google’s version St Mark’s Square

and I think you’ll agree that Google still wins hands down. In fact, although this is the highest zoom possible in Flickr/Yahoo, Google zooms in further:

Google, St Mark’s Square, full zoom

I hope Flickr catches up soon.

The real thing, incidentally, is beautiful, of course, and when we visited in an unseasonably clear and warm(ish) February, quite magical. Here’s Helen’s photo:

the Piazza San Marco

W a-s-h i-n-g t-o-n, baby, D.C.!
W a-s-h i-n-g t-o-n, baby, D.C.!

Washington, D.C.
It's paradise to me
It's not because it is the grand old seat
Of precious freedom and democracy
No, no, no
It's not the greenery turning gold in fall
The scenery circling the Mall
It's just that's where my baby lives
That's all.

Washington D.C.!
It's the greatest place to be
It's not the cherries everywhere in bloom
It's not the way they put folks on the moon
No, no, no
It's not the spectacles and pagaentry
The thousand things you've got to see
It's just that's where my baby waits for me
W a-s-h i-n-g t-o-n, baby D.C.!
W a-s-h i-n-g t-o-n, baby D.C.!

Washington, D.C.!
It fits me to a T
It's not the people doing something real
It's not the way the springtime makes you feel
No, no, no
It ain't no famous name on a golden plaque
That keeps me that makes me ride that railroad track
It's my baby's kiss that keeps me coming back
It's my baby's kiss that keeps me coming back

The Magnetic Fields, Washington DC

Can we afford to miss this when we’re in the States in a couple of weeks?

If this town were a haircut, it would be a mullet … a strip consisting of commercial carbuncle of hucksterism and garish shops whose merchandise is so tasteless that it would shame Homer Simpson

Moon Handbooks, Tennessee

Helen crashed today. Driving at about 40mph along a duel carriageway another car pulled out from the left into her path. To avoid a collision she veered towards the central reservation and ploughed straight into a set of traffic lights. The car’s a write-off, she’s ok.

She could be dead tonight, or lying mangled in hospital, or have at least a broken limb or two but nothing except for one small bruise. I wonder if she’s lucky to be unharmed or unlucky to have been in such a nasty accident.

I heard about it as soon as I arrived at work – I’d forgotten my mobile – and I left straight away to pick her up from the Asda supermarket, where she’d been taken in by the helpful people, who’d phoned her school, called the police, contacted me, given her cups of tea and buttered toast and looked after her. We will be obliged to shop at Asda forever now.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Talinn – the Estonians don’t like it

Estonian’s related to Finnish and, more distantly, Hungarian. It’s absorbed quite a few German influences over the years but it was still the only place I’ve visited in years where I had, basically, no clue how to say anything, even with an English-Estonian dictionary and phrasebook.

I read a recommendation that there wasn’t any point even trying to speak Estonian – most Westterners get the pronunciation so wrong they can’t be understood. Take the word for ‘thank you’ – tanon (I think). The ‘t’ is pronounced very hard with little aspiration so the word sounds like danon, as if you have a blocked nose – and I tried and I was still almost unable to persuade anyone I was speaking Estonian.

Nouns and adjectives in Estonian decline in fourteen cases: nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative. This is almost impossible for me, who stuggled in school with nominative, accusative, genitive and dative in German verbs, to begin to comprehend. The word for house changes depending on whether I’m going into it, leaving it, viewing it or burning it down.

Continuing our recent tradition of a quick cheap Winter holiday on the Continent (Venice, could it ever be bettered? Cologne, whizzy Cathedral and metre-long bratwurst) we have booked Talinn for a few days.

Talinn’s the capital of new-Europe Estonia (home of Skype and flat-rate taxation). It hasn’t joined the Euro yet and its currency, the Etonian Kroon is known as the EEK (ISO 4217 code). How good is that?

When Blair & Co. were voted into office in 1997 we thought that a significant difference our new Labour Overlords (and I, for one, welcomed them) would make would be the proposed constitutional changes. House of Lords reform, Assemblies for Wales and Scotland, and so on. Now the North-East is being invited to vote in a referendum for a regional Assembly.

Andrew Marr on BBC Radio 4 yesterday was chatting to the irritating Satanic ritual abuse enthusiast, Bea Campbell about a North-East identity; Campbell seemed to be making an unusually sensible observation that the North is defined negatively, as not being the South; others on Marr’s show observed the North lacked a cohesive identity or cultural hegemony.

Grey Street, Newcastle Upon Tyne

Photo : Ian Burton, Freefoto.com

The first time I stood in the main shopping street of Newcastle, just above Grey Street, I felt there was something odd about the sea of faces in front of me and it took a good 10 minutes before I twigged that every face was white. It’s a bit like West Wales.

My first job in the North-East was in Sunderland. Sunderland and Newcastle are about 12 miles apart and to nearly everyone else in the UK there’s no difference between the two. But the two populations absolutely hate each other. The hatred is played out formally in their football allegiances and less formally in the fights that explode every Saturday night on the Quayside. A bit like Wales again.

The Welsh-speaking West loathes the English-speaking South-East. The South-East thinks of itself as cosmopolitan and cultured – which is true only in contrast to the impoverished Welsh-speaking West and North-West. In contrast, the West thinks of itself as the torchbearer for a real Welsh culture, holding out against the louche English sympathisers in Cardiff: it flirts with neo-fascism and produces endless Welsh-language tv programmes about singing, harp-playing and Max Boyce.

‘The Welsh’, said the Doctor :’ are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing’,he said with disgust : ’sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.’

Evelyn Waugh, in the excellent ‘Decline And Fall’

Our experience of the Welsh Assembly has been unconvincing. Without tax-raising powers and with no chance of disturbing the Labour Party’s current monpoly on power, the Assembly has operated as a corrupt dispenser of patronage and other peoples’ money.

The Welsh Assembly’s mangement of the NHS in Wales has been disastrous and it’s been unwilling to investigate properly some specific concerns about mismanagement of funds – that is, my money and your money.

Coming back to the North-East: I can’t see how another regional assembly in an area defined by an atlas rather than a shared sense of purpose, with even fewer powers than the Welsh Assembly, would be a useful devolution of democracy.

When we lived in the North-East I discovered that some people often called each other Billy. Two managers in the first company I worked at in Sunderland called each other Billy. It’s in Newcastle I first heard someone described as Billy No-mates; and nearby was a place called Billy Mill

I thought all this Billy stuff might be vaguely related to a Protestant / Catholic tribalism (Billy = William of Orange, Protestant) but I didn’t find any confirmation of that.

Just returned (10-hour flight back). We flew into and through the night, as we did when we returned from Georgia in 2001. Helen tells me that flying West to East is the worst for jetlag which is maybe why I’m still up at 4:13 am (about 8pm California). The US is so beautiful and California so suprisingly wild. I learned the Grand Canyon is in Arizona (not Colorado or Utah) and I am glad Helen persuaded me to visit Las Vegas.

Some excellent photos of California, Nevada and Arizona in the gallery with more to come.

Rough outline of trip / memory jerker for me:

1. Landed San Francisco
2. Picke up car, drove into Marin County (posh) over Golden Gate bridge. Fell asleep in cinema
3. Moved on up coast to Arcata, then Orick(?), 11 mile round walk through redwoods and along coast, fantastic
4. Down through Yosemite. V touristy.
5. Death Valley. Incredible. Took dangerous route with car, 4 hours at 10 mph because of rough track without passing anyone else, temp outside about 115 F. Wondered what Ray Mears would do in these circumstances if we broke down.
6. Modesto, in homage to Grandaddy. No-one in Modesto had heard of Grandaddy
7. On through desert to Las Vegas. Strange town. Forgot to marry Helen.
8. On to Williams, Arizona, on Route 66. Bad curry, incredible lightening storm.
9. Grand Canyon. Despite expectation of diappointment it didn’t disappoint. A bit more than brain can cope with, though.
10. Prescott, on to hippy Sedona recommended by drunk sheep herder in bar in Williams, left quickly for return to California.
11. Joshua Tree, more incredible desert. On to coast via sick-making curvy descent from 6,000ft interior
12. Along Highway 1 via Big sur to Monterey
13. Monterey to SF
14. San Francisco. Dangerous Mission district, Chinatown a bit frightening (box of toads to eat, anyone?), Castro was fun, Helen liked the Apple store just down from our hotel
15. Last night, bumped into Bill, Brenda and Michael. Bill has millipedes, giant millipedes, which we held.
16. Accidentally tried to take knife through security at airport. Security people very understanding about it.
17. Back to Heathrow. Virgin steerage class cramped but much better than KLM / Delta last trip out. Whiled away the hours with films.
18. Landed Heathrow, drove back to Wales, stopping many times to collpase into sleep.

We’re flying at 11am (UK time) to San Francisco, picking up a car and driving around anywhere that takes our fancy for three weeks. Blogging will be light.

It’s an eleven hour flight!