Thursday
August 12, 1999

Oh, Lord, I feel so much better!

Woke up this morning too tired to get out of bed. Decided, "Screw it -- I'm going up to the clinic and sitting there until someone gives me a scrip." Which I did, and they did without a hitch. Admittedly, it's only for three months, since the doc wants me to get another blood test done around December, but that's cool -- I need to get my thyroxine levels checked yearly anyway, and that'll be about the right time for it.

Then I went in to work and found out that my last Swedish lesson was moved to next week, which was a cause for much joy because 1) I hadn't been studying and 2) I didn't really feel like going out to lunch for the lesson. I'm in a two-person class, and our instructor Christine likes real-life experience, so we were all going to go out after work (speaking only Swedish) and get something to eat. But I only got my pills this morning, and I'm still feeling a little tired, so having that moved to next week because the other student couldn't make it was a godsend.

And then I did some surfing during lunch and found a nice way to break up our trip to San Francisco. Since I don't have the license yet, Lyn and I are going from Anaheim to San Francisco on Amtrak. Only problem was, the route the automatic route planner kept giving me was this yucky one where we had to take a coach from LA to Bakersfield, train from Bakersfield to somewhere else, take a coach from somewhere else to San Francisco. Which adding the train from Anaheim to LA, meant that we'd be hauling our luggage on and off vehicles four times that day. Um, no thank you.

So I got creative. Looked at the Amtrak website, found the route maps for California, and saw a nice one along the coast. Turns out we can take a train from Anaheim to San Luis Obispo, stay there overnight, then continue up to Oakland in the morning and take a coach from Oakland to SF. The nice thing about this is that SLO is VERY close to San Simeon, the site of the Hearst Castle, and Lyndon really wanted to see that on the trip. When we found out we couldn't rent a car he was really depressed about it, but this turns out to be even better -- we're still on the coast, I'm not driving so we can both relax and sightsee, and we can take a guided tour of the castle in the morning before hopping on the train to SF. Now all I have to do is call a list of hotels in SLO and Morro Bay and find out if they know of any regular bus service back and forth to Hearst Castle. Should be good.