San Francisco to Sydney - Days 5-6

Day 6 : San Francisco

Quick : name the original seven dwarves. Well, there's Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy and Sneezy, right? Actually, no.

Today we visited the Cartoon Museum, a museum dedicated to everything cartoon-related, though a good 50 percent of its wall-space is currently taken up exclusively with Spiderman memorabilia. Anyway, it was inside the museum that Debbie and I discovered that the original seven dwarves excluded Bashful, Happy and Sneezy and included - wait for it - Baldy, Jumpy and Deafy. It felt like finding out there was a fifth Beatle.

I've always felt that Doc was something of a ring-in, but undoubtedly the Bashful-Happy-Sneezy for Baldy-Jumpy-Deafy swap was the result of some deeply scientific focus group analysis. I just wish that I could have taken part in this:

Researcher : So. Tell me. Do you think a dwarf who is chronically nervous is more or less Disney that a dwarf who sneezes pathologically? What about an especially shy dwarf compared with one who can't hear? Please think hard about your response.

Coincidentally, a Spiderman had been rigged up, climbing down the nearby Metreon, a complex devoted to movies and all things cool in SONY technology. Personally, I'd never imagined Spiderman to be quite this large - in the photo at right he's about three storeys tall. Maybe he's recently been sprayed with some steroid-based insecticide.

Day 5 : Yosemite to San Francisco

There was no more snow in Yosemite overnight - at least none in the valley - but there were still a number of places showing the effects of yesterday's snow. Yosemite Creek, for example, pictured at left, was like a flowing sheet of ice, and had a build-up of what is called 'frazzle ice' on both of its banks. Frazzle ice, we were told, is essentially frozen river or creek water and, during the previous days, we'd spotted this ice in a number of locations : in and around Mirror Lake, near Lower Yosemite Falls, and just about anywhere that water had been in any significant quantity.

The rocks immediately beside Upper Yosemite Falls were also showing the effects of the freezing weather, covered as they were with a thin veneer of ice, which you should be just able to make out in the photo at right. I don't know whether frozen waterfall water is considered frazzle ice, but it's ice nonetheless and it makes a waterfall especially picturesque.

Most of today was spent in transit - bus, then train, then bus, then taxi - so there's not a lot more of the day worthy of recounting. The hotel we're staying in does have one novel feature though, which Debbie particularly likes : an early 1900s-style Otis elevator with a door of latticed metal which concertinas as it opens, and which reeks of motor oil and grease and metal. The elevator's due for its annual inspection next week and we reckon it should pass (we don't really want to know if it doesn't). We're on the 5th floor, so we either use the elevator or climb four, narrow sets of stairs. I'm trusting the lift.

Originally posted by TC