Wednesday 29th April

Look closely and there is a coyote crossing the buggy track

We ought to try this sort of comp at Lutterworth!

Today was very hot with our car temperature recording 100 degrees this afternoon. We had booked to play golf at the Vineyards course again today as we enjoyed it so much on Monday. We first had to find a post office for stamps for postcards (no wonder they arive after we have got back!). This proved to be more  difficult than we expected as for the first time since we came here the Tom Tom was unable to take us to the door! Ben eventually asked a man working on the highway and he directed us. We then had the usual wait and finally managed to make the asian girl on the counter understand that we only wanted 4 stamps to put on postcards to send to England!

As we hadn't had enough time to do some wine tasting on Monday we put this right this morning. We selected  six different wines to taste (2 whites, a rose, and 3 reds) and our preconceived thoughts that American wines are not as good as French were significantly reinforced! Earthy is the best description we can come up with - amazingly they were charging between £28 and $40 dollars per bottle and people were queueing to pay it!

The vineyard was next door to the golf course so we arrived there in a 'happy' frame of mind. The wind proved to be very strong on the front nine, but we managed to play this with improved scores from when we played on Monday. We knew where the lakes cut into the fairways this time! The wind dropped for the back 9 so it was very hot. These holes were as pretty as before and we had the additional benefit of watching a coyote walk across the fairway in front of us.

We ate back at the hotel and got engaged in a conversation with a younger couple from Milan. They were telling us about their plans to leave Italy because of the political and financial position in Italy (i.e. they were being taxed out of existence) and move to the Canary Islands. Both spoke excellent English and were obviously well educated - just the sort of people a country can ill afford to lose!

We will be leaving here tomorrow morning and are intending to drive up the coast road to Los Angeles airport taking in Long Beach and Pebble Beach golf clubs (we checked the price of Pebble beach and it is only $500 - shame we will not have the time to play it!!!).  Our flight is at 9pm and we are due back in England at 4pm on Friday - hopefully the computer glitch at UK passport control reported on this evening's news will have been sorted.

We have had a really good time and when using the US scoring system have had a very close overall result in our golf matches.