HOLIDAY, NOVEMBER 2014 (33) - OCEAN BEACH

NOVEMBER 14 (Cont'd)

The final destination of this year's California holiday was Ocean Beach, a long, open stretch of sand at the western end of Golden Gate Park which had, on previous occasions, proven tricky for us to get to with the amount of "No Left Turn" or "No Right Turn" signs on the way to it, but, with "Min" to guide us, we got there simply enough, although my inner demons were beginning to mutter darkly about pushing my luck when it came to incident-free driving.

Still, all of that was forgotten as we pulled our luggage-filled car into the car park behind the sea wall and tried to drink in the spectacular views of that most Pacific of Oceans, and watched as the surfers and the hippies made the most of a day where the beach seemed remarkably busy, given that it was still supposed to be a work day.

We got out of the car and walked along the deceptively long seafront up towards Cliff House where there was still one last chance to do some bird-spotting and see the very last batch of Pelicans for this most "Pelican Heavy" of holidays.

It was, of course, a rather bittersweet moment, really, because we were both more than a little aware that this was, indeed, the proverbial "it" as far as this holiday was concerned and, once we returned to our car, and programmed "Min" for one last time, hitting our "Home" button, the holiday would be pretty much all over bar the travelling.

And so, with us both rather overwhelmed with melancholia, we dawdled back, trying to drink in the moment, and the view, and the hot sunshine, and those blazing blue skies, and did our level best to savour the memories so that we could drag them up later when we were back home in our damp and soggy little town in the hills of sometimes not-so-merry England.

Finding that we were still far too early, and feeling parched and desperate for the loo, we meandered across the Pacific Coast Highway towards the Beach Chalet, a beautifully decorated building at the end of Golden Gate Park and mooched once more amongst the souvenirs and the postcards before noticing that it seemed to have acquired a restaurant that we didn't recollect.

So we headed upstairs and sat at the bar drinking one of their "Special" Lemonades each, an order which appeared to perplex the bartender almost as much as the stupidly large tip we gave him when we realised that we didn't really want to accumulate any more fiddling small change.

Then we meandered back downstairs, took another long look at the murals, headed outside to snap a couple of last snapshots - including one last bird who remains suitably unidentifiable from the blurry result I got - looked at each other and decided that we were indeed, as ready as we were ever likely to be to go home.