Goodbye Ma Suite

Last Thursday we finally moved out of the California Suites Hotel.

It had been an interesting three weeks, but the idea of a whole night’s sleep and the ability to “eat in” once in a while swung it.

Finding an apartment had been relatively easy. It’s off-peak (in seasonal terms) here in California, so many of the holiday homes are lying empty. Couple that with the prospect of a long-term let, and two 30 something tenants whose training regime sees them tucked up in bed by 9pm, and we were an attractive proposition for landlords.

We had, however, reckoned without the gods of the American banking system.

Going through the rentals site would have landed us with a whopping £60 visa charge (no paltry amount given our budget). Instead Irene, the owner of the apartment, suggested paying by money order. And so the fun began.

Money orders (like cheques, but someone else writes them out for you) can be acquired through banks, post offices, or supermarkets. However, you can scrap that first one off the list if you don’t have a US bank account. The latter will take debit cards, but UK debit cards come up as credit cards when you swipe them through their machines. And credit cards aren’t allowed.

That leaves the option of taking a wodge of cold, hard cash into the supermarket (we’re talking $2,000 here) and swapping it for the money order.

Aside from the security issues of cycling around on a beach cruiser with every pocket stuffed full of bank notes, most ATMs won’t issue you more than $500 on any given day. Long story short, it took two days, six attempted ATM withdrawals, one blocked card, two visits to the post office, three to Walmart, and we were done.

Here’s how Andy looked at that point. The irony of that sign in the background.

Anyway, after a “Last Night In The Suites” celebration that involved a heady trip to the garage and some dabbling with giant Doritos, we were ready to go.

The hotel had ordered us a cab to Turquoise St (between Pacific Beach and La Jolla). It turned out to be a Chevvy.

The luxury was however confined very much to the outside, as we crammed ever last centimetre with suitcases.

Twenty minutes and one coffee later, we were ready to take on the new gaff.

The lounging prowess of the bed got a solid testing, as did the sofa and the “office area”. I did a fair bit of over-enthusiastic squeaking about the size of the oven, and the fact that we are right next door to an Albertson’s supermarket. Andy logged onto the wifi within seconds (the Suites was solidly cabled and we’d been sharing a laptop) and we were settled in.

We celebrated with a couple of sandwiches from the deli across the street, recommended to us by Maurizio at Suples gym up at Atos.

As promised they were mind-blowing, though I suspect I will need around 4 hours of blistering Bulgarian Bag work to whittle the calories off my waist (perhaps this Maurizio’s way of making me commit).

After a tour of the neighbourhood, and the fact that we’d swapped the freeway for a scenic stretch of beach*, it was time to tackle the final hurdle. We’d left our monster beach cruisers up at the hotel (they were too big for the taxi) and now it was time to collect them.

Suffice to say, after four hours of moving and a giant sandwich, the last thing you fancy doing is taking another two hour round bus trip back to the old place. Especially when the 44 frequently resembles ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’.

Bike moving done, we holed up on the sofa with one of Albertson’s ‘Chicken Dinner Deals’. This is fast becoming our staple diet.

*Should the beach feel a tad too far, we also have two pools and a spa, a fitness room and a sauna at our disposal.

Sometimes Andy is overwhelmed by the beauty of his new surroundings.

I'm keeping a close eye on him, but I think he'll pull through.

Fast Food Fatigue

On 18th October, fingers crossed, we will be moving into a studio apartment, situated roughly in between Pacific Beach and La Jolla. And instead of the endless beach bodies, the bars, clubs and shops, the thing I’m most looking forward to is…having a kitchen again.

Bar a guilty penchant for red wine, chocolate and a biscuit or six, back home our diet is reasonably sound.

This book is our bible, and largely champions the idea of cooking from scratch, using fresh ingredients and a vat full of spices.

Even on a lazy day, we can fall back on the staples of poached eggs, leafy veg and rye bread (that last one’s just for me, I might as well feed Andy glued-together sawdust).

The provision of such delights, however, does depend on a fully stocked cuisine, and an endless supply of cutting, dicing and mixing implements. Here at the California Suites, we are limited to just a chopping board and a microwave. No bowls, knives, flames, fans or towering chefs’ hats in these parts.

Which means we have to eat out, every single meal. Well, apart from breakfast, but that holds its own dietary ideosyncracies.

Here we are on our first day out of the hotel, getting ready to gorge ourselves on shrimp tacos.

Cue much post-meal waddling. But whilst being bloated and content goes well with a laid back stroll and a windy beach, there are hiccups when you introduce a training regime.

As most active sports-folk know, nutrition is vital to recovery. If you don’t eat right, you don’t recover, and if you don’t recover, you can’t train again.

It's Food 101 - a good balance of protein and carbohydrate, along with plenty of fibrous vegetables, washed down with several litres of H20.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Andy has the kind of metabolism where he needs to chow down every couple of hours in order to maintain muscle, whilst conversely, I have to eat very carefully to avoid getting, let’s say, over-curvaceous.

Our budget for food is stringent, coming in at $40 a day for the both of us.

After a couple of novel sushi, frozen yoghurt (the place in the photo confusingly doesn’t do berries or beans, but it does rock out peanut butter and cinnamon roll flavoured fro-yo) and Subway filled days, we see a pattern emerging:

Cheap food is abundant, but it generally sucks when it comes to nutrition (both in terms of fuel, and avoiding excess booty).

Healthy food generally comes at a premium price.

A week in and Andy’s looking leaner than a 'Men's Fitness' model, whilst my digestive system has ground to a complete halt.

I’m eying up the entire aisle (yup, you read that right) of digestive aids in Walmart with more desire than any of the food on offer.

Anyone see a link here?

So, as of next Thursday we will have an oven, kettle and the like, and we can get back to domesticated bliss. Oddly we’re both craving the aforementioned poached eggs, along with toast and honey and a side of asparagus.

In the meantime, we have stocked up our mini-fridge with granola, papaya, banana, porridge oats and microwavable brown rice to bypass the packet bagels at the breakfast buffet, and stave off starvation in Andy.

We’ve raided the contingency fund to buy some recovery based protein powder.

And we’ve found a couple of staple restaurants that we eat at on almost a daily (sometimes twice daily) basis:

Alladin’s do Arabic fare, and tasty Arabic fare at that. The only downside is that most of the menu is outside our budget, which means that I eat this chicken kebab with tabbouleh about eight times a week. I keep hinting heavily that they need some kind of loyalty card scheme (or perhaps just to sponsor our training) - no takers so far, though we did score some extra pitta this evening.

Pho "T" Cali is a recent discovery (last night in fact) and its relatively clean-tasting broth, laden with chicken, shrimp and the like, works well post-training, when you don’t mind a bit of sloshing on the cycle ride home.

Roll on Thursday. All microwave-friendly suggestions, or actual food parcels, gratefully received till then…