Good evening, Singapore, and welcome to episode number 33 of Sleepless in Singapore on Sunday, September 1st, 2024. Today, I am going to give you the last part of my road trip in the United States of America down the West Coast from San Francisco to San Diego to Tijuana and then back up to LA and finally Death Valley, and then back home to Singapore. So please make yourselves comfortable, relax, and let my voice be your guide to a restful night.

Last episode, I stopped somewhere in San Francisco, I believe, or maybe a little bit south of San Francisco. So this episode is starting going down there, and the first thing we did that day was to try to get a new car. The old car, that Dodge we had, had a crack in the windshield. Not sure how that happened. We both don't really remember. We didn't notice how it happened. It might have happened overnight, but either way, it's covered by the insurance as long as you bring back the car as quick as you can to the car dealership or to the rental place.

And so we went to, I think, LA Airport to try to get a new car with the new windshield. Markus has this Hertz Super Gold Premium Ambassador, I don't know what membership, so we were quite confident that it wouldn't be a problem. We drove up the car, we returned the car, the guy took a lot of pictures and made sure that we signed all the papers. That wasn't a big problem, but then we went to the airport office at the car rental place. First, we had to wait for quite a while, and then there was a lady who really hated her job. She was really the definition of "I hate it here, why do you even talk to me?" But it was her job to give us a new car, and she did that in the worst way she could. It took her a long time, she wasn't very nice, and in the end, we ended up with a car of a very different class than what Markus had booked. I think it was some small Korean, I'm not sure, Hyundai or something. It actually was a decent car; it was just not at all what we had booked. But the lady said there is nothing she can do, they don't have any other cars, and if we return a car because of a defect, no matter if it was our fault or not, we are not entitled to the class we booked; we are only getting the cars they have.

So we took that car, and honestly, it was a quite decent car. A small car, practical. Already in the parking lot when I drove it out, it was more comfortable than that Dodge we had before, and it felt nicer. The quality was nicer; it was just a very tiny car. And so we drove out of the airport, and at the gate where we had to pay to get out, the car starts beeping, and there was a warning about some camera or some distance sensors or whatever not working. Markus, who was already a little bit annoyed by the whole situation, was like, "Okay, we go back immediately. They gave us another broken car. Let's go, we'll go complain." So that's what we did. We went back, and apparently, we also both didn't look that happy because when we walked back in there and started queuing again, there was a guy coming out from the other end of that office, and he said, "Oh, I noticed you're back already. Something not all right?" And we told him, and he said, "Okay, let me take care of it." So he took us to his desk, and we explained the situation, and he said, "Okay, I'm really sorry. I understand your frustration. Would you be alright if I gave you this car?" And we looked, and it turned out to be another American muscle car. It was a Chrysler, I'm not sure, it wasn't even a Chrysler, it was a Chevy something something, and it was a convertible, which I loved. It's got like a couple hundred horsepower, which also isn't the worst thing. We got in it, terrible overview, horrible quality. If you think that after the Mustang and then the Dodge, which was already worse, it could get even worse, that was the car that was even worse. But it looked big, it had a lot of horsepower, it was driving with the agility of a tank, but it felt right again. And especially being able to open the rooftop and going down the Californian highways in an open American car, that was exactly what I signed up for. So both of us were happy again, and I think I was driving a big part of that stretch down to San Diego, and I had a hell of a fun in that car.

In San Diego, we had an Airbnb smack in the middle of downtown San Diego, and luckily right on top of or next to Tacos El Gordo, which was amazing tacos, maybe one of the best I ever had. We really enjoyed it. We had a lot. I'm looking at the table now; it looked like there are at least 12 tacos. Taco al Pastor and pulled meat, pulled pork. We had some Mexican imported lemonade. We were sitting outside, basically in the street, on a table with these like red plastic cloth and eating from the trays. I don't think there are even plates, or maybe if there are plates, I cannot see them. It looks like the tacos are directly on the plates, and it was great. We loved it. We enjoyed that evening, and we walked around a bit more. We went to Cali Cream, which was my ice cream treat for the night. Big ice cream shop around the corner with cookies and ice cream. Very, very cool, very nice.

Our Airbnb that night was not that nice. What especially was not that nice is that you book something via Airbnb, and Airbnb got all the system and all the processes in place. There is, in theory, nothing else you need. But then some people, they use another platform, and especially these people, after we booked, only they told us to sign up to some other platform and to download another app. And then I told them, "Look, I don't want to download an app for staying a night somewhere. Can we just receive the code?" And then already it was complicated with them. So finally, we got the code, and then the place was not bad, but it also wasn't great. I mean, it definitely wasn't five out of five. Usually, if it's like that, I don't even leave a review because there's no point in making it hard for people. But in that case, these people who owned the place, they sent us a message to leave them a five-star review for like five times, and it was super annoying. I already was annoyed with the extra app and all that crap. I think that's really not a good business model. If you ask someone for a review, if you remind them again and they don't give you a review, maybe you should be thankful for that and not push it. Because in the end, well, I didn't leave a review, but I was very close to leaving like a two-star review just because they were so annoying trying to force me to give them a five-star review for a three and a half-star place. Anyway, I was being nice, I didn't do it, and we had a good time in San Diego. We had good food in San Diego, and then San Diego in general was a really nice place.

We had an amazing breakfast the next day at Morning Glory in Little Italy, San Diego. Super amazing place, people of all joys and colors, very, very diverse, very hip, very fun, very nice food. You could see a little Mexican inspiration, obviously, San Diego being so close to the border. I had lobster eggs benedict with a big chunk of lobster on there, I can tell from the picture. Then we spent the day sightseeing. We went along Seaport Village, a very nice area to walk around. We went to see the USS Midway, which is a very large aircraft carrier that is based in San Diego. Then there is this big sail ship that I forgot the name of at Portside Pier. We walked around more to Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, which I'm looking at a picture here of the old printing office, and it looks very charming, very, very old but nice, like an outdoor museum. Just around the corner, there was the Old Town or still the Old Town State Historic Park. There was a little market selling all kinds of statues, and it's just a nice area we went to.

For dinner, we wanted to have proper local food, so we went to a place called Casa Guadalajara in San Diego Old Town. I guess that's proper Mexican food. I had a plate of rice and shrimp, or not shrimp, like the big ones, and red beans and tacos that came wrapped in aluminum foil to keep them warm. Markus had some kind of steak, like cut steak, and we were building our own tacos. We made them very spicy, and all in all, we had a great time. Really good food, interesting place, very, very big, a lot of seats, a lot of tables, a lot of Mexican or very southern American cocktails on the menu. Quite cool.

After that, we went to a place in the Gaslamp District with live music. There were two grand pianos, both played at the same time or in turns depending on the song, and people singing. That was also really fun. We had a couple of beers there, just sitting at the corner of the bar and looking at the stage. We stayed for maybe, I don't know, two hours or so. The place was called Hard to Tell, either it's The Garage or it's Good Night John Boy or The Shout House. There seemed to be a couple of pubs in the same building. It was one of them. Very, very cool.

The next day, we made our way to Mexico, or first actually, we tried to make our way into Mexico because I was googling a bit and trying to figure out how to cross the border from the US to Mexico. In whatever blog I read, an easy way to cross the border is at the airport. Apparently, the Tijuana Airport is so close to the border between the United States and Mexico that it has an entrance on the US side. You can buy a border crossing ticket from CBX Cross-Border Express, and then you leave the country, you leave the United States, you enter Mexico, you enter the airport all in the same building, and then you can fly out from Tijuana, which I guess is cheaper than flying out from San Diego or from the US. We thought that's a great plan. We just cross the border at the airport, we buy that ticket, it costs a bit of money, but it's very fast, and it sounded like an amazing plan.

We went there, and the lady at the counter told us we have to use the machine. So we went to the machine, and the machine, to be fair, was not only asking for our money and our passports, it was also asking for a flight ticket or for a boarding pass. So we went back to the counter, and the lady said, "Oh, you can just key in any random number or any random flight, and it'll work. You don't have to have your boarding pass, you can just go in." So that's what we did, and we each paid, I don't remember, 80 US dollars, not super cheap. Then we had that ticket, and then we got to the next machine in the next line, and then we had to have a boarding pass; otherwise, we couldn't go. So we went back to the first lady and told her, "Look, you could have told us. So how do we get our money back?" And she said, "You cannot cross without a valid ticket, and you cannot have your money back. Tough luck, have a nice day." It was a little our fault. We could have read all the details, we could have made sure that it didn't end up like that, so we weren't too angry at the lady, but we still didn't like it.

We did some more googling, we did another half an hour of driving. I think we might have even paid for parking, or I don't remember, did we end up paying for parking there? Anyway, it was a quite costly, stupid mistake. But we did some more driving, we finally ended up at a Mexican border crossing for pedestrians who do not want to fly somewhere. We queued, we showed our passports, and it was a bit of "Welcome to Mexico" and all that. You can tell, actually, it immediately looks a bit different in Mexico than on the US side, in a good way, in a positive way. I like the feeling over there.

The first thing we did after all that border crossing troubles, Markus and I, we went for breakfast. I am looking at an Instagram story I posted back then that says "Best breakfast in four weeks of USA Mexico." We went to Georgina Ristorante, and breakfast there was really good. I had pancakes, I had some kind of, it looks like eggs benedict, but somehow big and fancy and interesting. It was really good. We walked around Tijuana for, I think, a couple of hours in total. We didn't have much to do there; we only wanted to take a couple of hours to see how it is and then cross back in the evening. But we walked around a bit, very, very different from the US. One thing you can see, there are tons of pharmacies close to the border, I assume, where you can buy medicine that you cannot buy in the US. There are a lot of places where you can eat and drink, like bars, restaurants, pubs, all kinds of that. There is quite a bit of street food, there are street food tacos we didn't try because we were super full from that very nice breakfast that we had around lunchtime, to be fair.

We went to Avenida Revolution, we went to Tijuana Centro where these shops are. I gotta say, we didn't see that many people because by then it was slightly afternoon, and it was quite hot. I assume everyone was just back home where it's cool and where reasonable people are during these hours. But we had a good time, and we did not regret being in Tijuana even just for a couple of hours. Then in the later afternoon, we queued in the long line to get back to the US from Mexico as pedestrians, which took maybe 45 minutes of queuing. But then border police was alright, and we got back to our car, and we drove to LA in a lot of traffic coming all the way up there. It took us quite a bit. We arrived maybe late afternoon, and because the first time I was in LA, I really liked that area, we got an Airbnb somewhere in the hills, somewhere close to Hollywood. Again, we had a nice, probably a bit overpriced Airbnb in the hills there. We rested a bit, and then we went out for dinner at a place called Petit Trois, where I had a burger made by a French chef, drowned in sauce but somehow very delicious. Markus had an onion soup with cheese and bread crust on top, so big I've never seen before, and some fries and some steak. We enjoyed that a lot.

In the evening, we were walking around. We went to see the Dolby Theatre, we went to see all the stars on the Walk of Fame, and we were just walking there. I think I went for another ice cream, obviously. We had a good evening. The next day, we went to see Griffith Observatory. We took pictures of the Hollywood sign, we went for, well, hardly a hike, but we walked for like half an hour or so. We walked around that area of Griffith Observatory, and then we were just driving around in Beverly Hills. We tried to find the house where Will Smith was living when he was filming The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and we went to see the house where Modern Family was filmed. In general, we just drove around there, and I think that is a very interesting, very fun thing to do. I enjoyed a lot to see all these fancy villas. It's something I only know from the movies, these long roads in LA with the palm trees and these mansions. Sometimes it's very interesting.

We also drove along Mulholland Drive, mostly just because I liked that movie back then when it came out or when I first saw it. Then we went to Venice and walked around a little there. It doesn't look like the actual Venice except for the waterways, but it's still a very interesting place. We had lunch at Venice Beach, where I ordered a shrimp cocktail, and that maybe was the most protein I ever had in my life. It was a giant shrimp platter. We walked along the beach, we went to Santa Monica Pier, where I met the sister of an old friend and her husband and the kid. We sat there, and we had ice cream for half an hour or so. In general, we had a good time at this place, at the Santa Monica Pier.

In the evening, I met my friend Rachel, and she took us to a Korean barbecue place in Koreatown in LA, which apparently is one of the biggest or even the biggest of all the Koreatowns. We had a good evening there. Even though I met Rachel in person for the very first time, we immediately connected and had good talks. She was telling us a lot about Koreatown and LA in general, and she offered to take us around the next day for a little bit of sightseeing. So Markus and I went back to our place, and the next day we picked up Rachel again, and we went out to a place I remembered from the first time I went to LA, which is Neptune's Net. It's kind of like a random diner, seafood, fried seafood, fried fish kind of place along the road. That was also close to another place we went to, the Aviator Nation Dreamland, kind of a shop or something opposite of Malibu Pier. I think we might have had breakfast at Malibu Farm Cafe in the morning. Other than that, we were just going up and down the coastline and enjoyed the very nice views there.

In the evening, Rachel had plans, so Markus and I went to downtown LA. We went to Mark Wahlberg's Burger Place in LA, which had alright burgers. We went to a souvenir shop, we went to the Walk of Fame again, and then eventually we called it a day because the next day would be a long drive and also the last day of the actual road trip. So the next day, we went to drive for four and a half hours from LA to the Death Valley National Park, and then another two and a half hours from the Death Valley National Park back to Las Vegas, where we had flights to Markus's place in Philadelphia.

Death Valley was impressive and not that impressive at the same time. Impressive was that you literally get out of the car and you think you put your head into an oven. It was 49.2 degrees Celsius when we went, according to the car, and that part of Death Valley is apparently the hottest place on earth. It's the lowest place in North America. There is a bit of a museum and a visitor center. Apparently, there was an old mine at Furnace Creek, so we walked around there for a bit, and we looked at stuff for a bit, but we didn't want to spend that much time because, you know, it was quite hot. After that, on the way, I kind of saw my very first little tornado, you know, the ones that are not super dangerous but still a very impressive sight. This like very tall, like 20, 30, 40 meters tall, well, little tornado.

And then in the evening, we had another night in LA—or maybe we even had two nights, I'm not sure. I think we might have had two nights in LA because I kind of vaguely remember two dinners we had in LA. You know I'm all about the food. We went to a Brazilian steakhouse that was really good, not super expensive, and Markus and I were both very excited about it. Then we also went to a very expensive Asian fusion restaurant. I think it might have been the Kumi Japanese Restaurant and Bar, and we spent like 300 US dollars each for a menu. Totally not worth the money. Maybe because I have access to proper Asian food around the corner everywhere here, but even if not, I feel in general it wasn't bad or anything; it just wasn't worth that much money.

What was worth the money and what we both enjoyed was going to see a Cirque de Soleil show of The Beatles. I think, yeah, I think it was The Beatles. That was very good. There's not that much to talk about, so you've got to see it. There's a lot of acrobatics going on, and all the songs are played. It's a mix of theater and circus, and it was quite entertaining. If you like the music, maybe even more so.

Finally, on the next day, we went to the airport and flew back to Philadelphia, where we spent, I think, two more days or three more days. We cut our road trip short a little, already from the beginning in the planning, because it was the 4th of July, and Markus wanted to be home for the 4th of July celebrations. But in the end, it turned out that, I mean, there were celebrations all around, but it wasn't the event that we anticipated.

I still had a very good time with Markus those two days. Then, on July 5th, I took my plane—a direct flight from New York Newark Airport to Changi Airport, back home. 18 and a half hours, three meals, a bit of work, a bit of sleep, a lot of watching TV, and arriving back home quite a bit tired but also very excited to be back.

Now, let me wrap up with a little bit of Tom Sawyer before next week, when we'll start a different adventure.