Feeling the earth move... twice

Well, it's been an adventurous couple of days, reader. We're on holiday - our first proper break since last Christmas - and we feel like we're getting that authentic Californian experience in all sorts of ways.

We couldn't go far on Monday, because Helen had a choir rehearsal in the evening which she needed to attend to stand a chance of singing in the concert. So, we took our first visit up to the city of San Francisco since we've been here in the US. Palo Alto, where we're living, is about 45 minutes out of San Francisco on the Caltrain, so we hopped on what they call the "Baby Bullet" to start our day out.

Our first port of call was the ball park, now renamed after... erm... well I was told that if you've got nothing nice to say then you shouldn't say anything, so let's just say it's named after something called Oracle. It's Oracle Park. The San Francisco Giants baseball team play their home games there.

Soon after we decamped to a nearby Blue Bottle Coffee for some breakfast. For the uninitiated, Blue Bottle is a quintessentially San Francisco coffee chain, serving high quality espresso at quintessentially San Francisco prices. And they also do a half-decent cup of tea.

We then saw some of the sites of downtown San Francisco on foot, taking in the famous Dragon Gate at the entrance to Chinatown. Of course, as always with me, someone asked me about a local landmark, and I was able to give them everything I knew about the Transamerica Pyramid... which must have taken 3 or 4 seconds at least.

Having scaled some of those famous Bullitt-esque streets, we were able to watch cable cars going both up and down

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/b4ccc2_65d52cfe3b254b5e889671be13900ed7/720p/mp4/file.mp4

We then did some shopping in the city before heading home. Helen did her choir rehearsal, and as usual I went and met her afterwards, and we sat on our sofas enjoying a cup of tea before bed.

And then this happened:

I'm sure, dear reader, this conjures images in your mind of violent shaking and shelves tumbling dramatically to the floor, before giant fissures open in the earth's crust. Well, I can assure you that if you're 30-ish kilometres from a magnitude 4.5 earthquake, it doesn't feel like that. It feels a bit more like the floor is vibrating a bit, followed by a couple of sharp jolts. Having never felt an earthquake before, neither of us knew what was going on, but there was no other visible explanation, and a few minutes later there was confirmation on the US Geological Survey website that there had been a quake at the appropriate time. A cool thing here is you can report your own experience of the quake so they can build a map of impact; we were within the first 100 reports, although by the time we went to bed there were over 30000! And of course, given the US propensity to celebrate a crisis, the local news were definitely enjoying this.

For those with technical interest: there are two main faults in the Bay Area, the famous San Andreas, which runs up the peninsula (under the Oracle offices; fill in your own punchline), and the less famous Hayward, which runs up the East Bay. The epicentre of this earthquake was to the East of the Hayward, probably on an uncharted fault somewhere.

So on to day 2 of the holiday. Today we chose to drive about 75 miles south, to Salinas, the birthplace of the great American author John Steinbeck. There's an excellent museum in Salinas which is dedicated to him and his works, and we very much enjoyed 2 or 3 hours there. A lot of Steinbeck's work has a distinctly local feel, and after the museum, the drive to Carmel, where we're staying for a few days, took on a different tone as we saw the landscape in a new light.

Before enjoying the museum, we had lunch in a fairly ordinary American restaurant, and were happily munching our way through US-sized portions of taco salad and omelette with home fries (yes, very nice thanks), when we felt what we thought was perhaps a big truck driving past in the street. Vibration in the floor, then a couple of sharp jolts... it couldn't be another earthquake, could it? Never felt one before, then two in 24 hours?

Well, it turns out it could be. This one was centred on the San Andreas fault, relatively close to Salinas itself, and a 4.7 magnitude, so slightly bigger than last night. We genuinely do live in earthquake country, so this is to be expected, and as far as I'm concerned it's one of the fascinating parts of our adventure. Welcome to California, as the waitress said.