Hunting for Accommodation - Mammoths Would Be Easier!

Well, it's been a rather busy time of hunting for accommodation in Davis since I got back from SA.

The day after I got back, I saw a very nice flat attached to the back of someone's house (the appointment was set up before I went back to SA). That was ideal in many ways, but I was pipped to it. Thereafter I started combing the internet, the local Davis newspaper, email lists for international students and staff, etc., etc. and following up a stack of leads. On Monday I went through to Davis on the train (there is a very good commuter service from North of Sacramento right through to San Francisco). For most of the day, I literally pounded the pavements (only they call them sidewalks here - pavement is the stuff you drive your car on in the USA! Somewhere I once read a lovely quote along the lines of America and Britain being two countries divided by a common language) looking for flats. I walked for miles and the only place I found that was available was over $1100 per month, which is well beyond my budget. The basic problem is that accommodation in Davis is subject to the same sorts of factors as Grahamstown: too many students chasing too little accommodation, chasing up prices and making short-term rentals difficult to find.

On Tuesday I spent a day on the phones and internet again, and set up some viewings for Wednesday. That turned up one good lead: a very nice apartment, but expensive (over $1000 per month) and far from campus, but with a lease ending at the end of June 2009 (most Davis leases run through to the end of August, which is not ideal for my sabbatical). One visit to a potentially promising place fell through, which was rather frustrating.

Anyway, today (Thursday) I managed to reschedule Wednesday's missed appointment for later in the afternoon and set up a new one (someone who had contacted me after a friend of theirs passed on my name following an unsuccessful contact). And Bingo! The second place turned out to be a really nice setup - a room in a house, sharing with a great young couple (and their kitten) with a stunning view of the currently-uninhabited part of the Davis cemetery - i.e. a lovely view of a small stream and a rolling green grassy area, populated by (live!) wild turkeys and guinea fowl! They gave me a set of keys on the spot (despite the fact that I will only be able to get the first month's rent to them next week) and were just very easy-going about the whole arrangement. In many ways it is a very similar set-up to my own in Grahamstown (just a little strange to be the tenant rather than the landlord!). It's fairly close to the University (about 2 miles - easy cycling distance), and to shops, etc. However, I trust that the proximity to the Davis cemetery won't be of any use! :-)

It has been amazing to have been able to use Colin and Janet's home here as a base while house-hunting (leaving them is going to be difficult when I move down to Davis!). They have been incredibly generous in providing a roof over my head, meals and the loan of a car for the numerous trips to Davis (including a considerable rearrangement of their own and the kids schedules and routines to free up a vehicle - usually the boys' Ford Focus).

Anyway, I've given myself permission to take it easy on the research front until the Davis term starts (around 22-25 September) so I'm not in a great hurry to move down to Davis yet! I'll probably leave it for later next week, but it's great to have finally found a place to stay for the year.

This weekend is a long, holiday weekend here, as Monday is Labour, sorry, Labor Day! Then Tuesday is Bryn and Jared's birthday. So there's lots to celebrate at the moment.

Great weekend...

On Friday morning I was chatting about doing some caching with my friends Colin and Janet, and the possibility of doing it in conjunction with some boating on one of the many nearby lakes, when Janet suggested we leave on Friday evening and spend the night camping at the lake. Well, we did!

We arrived quite on late on Friday night and had to do some night boating as the campsite was a "boat in". Thanks to Colin's boating skills we found a camp site and set up OK in the dark. We woke up the next morning to an absolutely amazing view down the lake (a very long, thin lake - check out 39°14'21.57"N 121°15'50.46"W on Google Earth).

After a delicious breakfast of scrambled egg and bacon burritos (what is about eating in the fresh air that makes everything taste so good?!), we enjoyed some boating on the lake, including tubing. We had a three-man tube that is towed behind the boat - great fun!

We then heading up the lake to an inlet where we had some lunch, before walking up the river (about 1.5km) to an amazing, old covered bridge... and a geocache! After spending some time at the bridge and chatting to two lovely ladies at the visitor's centre, we hiked back along the river bank to another geocache! Unfortunately, we then needed to leave, so it was back to the boat, to get down the lake (with a little last tubing for the kids), get the boat out of the water onto the trailer and drive back home.

This morning we went to one of the three Sunday services at Bayside church (my first Sunday service there - in the past I had only been to their Saturday evening services). They had a very good visiting preacher from another church in Sacramento. The afternoon has been a gloriously lazy time of sitting around the pool reading and swimming. I could get seriously used to being on permanent holiday in the Californian summer!!

Back to SA

Well, immediately after the Leadership Summit, it was back to SA for a brief visit. It was great to have the opportunity to see everyone there, and to check out the work on my house. It was also really good to be able to see Theo for his birthday (and to fit in a bit of geocaching!). The cache at Paul Kruger's church was rather special, and we also had a good time hunting down two caches on the T.U.T. campus (a very pretty campus).

Fortunately, the flights to and from SA avoided any travel on JetBlue, and the flying was actually very uneventful.

Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit

I had thought about trying to get up to Chicago to attend the GLS in person at Willow Creek, but the relative costs (R10000 versus R600) and logistics (I needed to fly back to SA shortly after the Summit) eventually swayed things and I went to the satellite site at Bayside (Colin and Janet's local church). They were off camping with Janet's sister and brother-in-law, so I was on my own to look after the menagerie, and to do my first solo outing on the (wrong side of the) roads (successfully!).

The GLS was amazing as always. Bill Hybels was his usual inspiring, stretching, challenging self. I went straight-away and bought his new book, Axiom, which looks great. I thought there was perhaps more emphasis on social issues this year (not a criticism). Wendy Kopp of Teach for America left me wondering if there was a possible model for South Africa to follow in terms of addressing some of the problems in school education. Bill George's presentation was a little "academic" in its style (not a bad thing!), but I thoroughly enjoyed it and bought his two books. The interview with Brad Anderson of Best Buy was also a highlight for me - an excellent example of a servant-leader in action.

Hmmm....

It seems that keeping this blog up-to-date is going to be a bit of a challenge!

A lot has happened since the last entry, which I will try to catch up in a number of postings.

Spirit West Coast

Having arrived in California, the first engagement was to head off down to Monterey for Spirit West Coast (SWC), a huge Christian music festival (described by Janet as "Woodstock without the drugs"!). Well, SWC was AMAZING! The highlights for me were the Third Day concert (Third Day are one of my favourite Christian bands) and the Newsboys concert on the final night (Janet has seen Newsboys about 5 times and thought it was the worst of the five, but they really rocked and it was a great finale to a great experience). Seeing people/groups like Jars of Clay, Kutless, Todd Agnew and Aaron Shust live was also great, and I was struck at how they (and several of the others) really worked on keeping the focus off themselves and their "performance" and on God.

There were also some Christian comedians who were quite entertaining, and several seminar or "message" sessions which were thought-provoking and encouraging (in particular, one seminar on the influence of the media in society was very thought-provoking in terms of my own "entertainment choices").

The site of the festival (Monterey) is near the coast and reinforced all my negative impressions of the California coastal climate: the evening concerts (open air, admittedly) required a long-sleeve, thermal undershirt, a sweatshirt and a thick, fleece-lined, padded jacket, plus a polar-fleece beanie to keep my head warm - it was COLD!!! The days were lovely, warm and sunny, with a cool breeze, which was very pleasant, until the sun started to go down. On the last day, when we had to pack up and head back it turned foggy and miserable, which was well-timed - the festival would not have been fun in such conditions. On the way back we stopped off at the world-famous Monterey aquarium. It is an amazing aquarium and we had a good time there for a few hours before hitting the road for the drive back to Sacramento.

Never fly on JetBlue!

Well the Great Sabbatical Adventure got off to a rather rocky start! My flight on JetBlue from JFK to Sacramento was cancelled on the day I arrived (Sunday 27 July) due to "weather". There were a few showers in NY, but nothing that should have caused the level of drama that I experienced. That meant finding a (highly over-priced) airport hotel (which the airline declined to pay for - "we don't pay compensation for 'weather events'"!) and then catching the Sacramento flight the next day.

I arrived at the airport the next day only to find that the flight (the one and only direct NY-Sacramento flight) was cancelled again due to a domino-effect from the chaos caused by the "weather" conditions the previous day. Tuesday night's Sacramento was fully booked, so there was no guarantee that I'd get on that one! By this stage I was starting to wonder if I would ever get here. Because of the wide-scale flight cancellations on Sunday, all the flights to California were fully-booked, but they put me on stand-by for a flight to Oakland (just outside San Francisco), which I didn't get onto. Fortunately I made it onto the second/last Oakland flight for the day (still on the stand-by list).

Of course, that still left me rather far from Sacramento and the Hobsons. When I phoned Colin from Oakland airport to see what I should do from there, I got this funny stereo effect, and turned around to find him sitting down next to me! He had had to do some business in SF that day and had stayed on to fetch me from the airport - I don't think I have ever been so glad to see him before! That was about 9:30pm, and after a longish drive, we were safely home here in Sacramento just before midnight.

My impression of JetBlue was not at all good: they were highly inflexible in terms of prioritising passengers displaced by the cancellations or providing any kind of assistance to stranded passengers. Hopefully I never have to fly on them again!