I catch the bus back to Merced and stay the night with Larry and Janice again. Larry is retired. He used to be in the printing business for many years until the owner took off with the funds and that was the end of his job. He became a handyman from then. Janice has worked in the hospital system for most of her life and still is involved. She manages programs at the local new hospital for high-school students to do community hours there. The students earn points for doing free community work, which then counts towards getting into college. Seems like a great system. Janice tells me some of these students will try all sorts of tricks to do as little as possible but she is on to them.
They live in a modest home in a pretty part of Merced. They have two sons who are truck drivers and a daughter who works in a bigger city close by. Merced is a bit depressed with unemployment running at 20%. Janice explains that gangs from LA and San Francisco extend their influence to as far as Merced and while they used to contain their activities to one part of town, they now cause mischief all over. But it is no worse here than Cairns. Our trouble-makers are just different.
I’m not the only boarder this time. There is a lady from southern France who admits to being more Spanish than French, ‘Madrid is my Capital, not Paris’. She has been traveling Route 61 in a hire car with a friend and is on her way home now. Tong is a young Chinese man, very tall and thin. His nickname is ‘root’ because of his design. He has been studying at a uni in Atlanta for the last two years and is on his way home to China. He is a keen photographer and carries two very heavy high-end Canon cameras with him. He has a Canon EOS 10D and 5D, which are serious cameras and he has adapted specialised non-Canon lenses for them. His photos are beautiful but lugging these heavy cameras around in his backpack can’t be easy. On his travels he needed to get from a town to the next, which was over 80 miles away. There wasn’t any public transport and he had no luck with hitching a ride so he bought a pushbike on the Internet and rode it in a day and a half with his backpack on his back and the cameras set up on the frame of the bike. His backside is still sore he says, but he got there. he was amazed that in those parts, petrol stations were often over 50 miles apart. I laughed and explained they can be I lot further apart than that in Australia. He doesn’t believe me.
A curious thing about the traffic in real America (not tourist areas) that I have noticed is that they are very curtious to pedestrians. Many times I have stopped on the side of a busy road in preparation for crossing and the cars stop. I don’t see that in Australia. Big pick-up trucks are king here. All the car-makers seem to have a model, even Toyota has one called ‘Tundra’. It is huge!
angusmccoll 
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