"Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona" Get back - The Beatles

Sunday 16th April 

We had a few awakenings during the night but when our alarm woke us up at 4am we felt the better for the early night. We dragged our bags out to avoid waking the others in the room up and then we're ready to walk to the a Greyhound station. We braced ourselves for the cold but it was nowhere near as bad as it had been the day before. We were bracing ourselves for bad news when we arrived though, as we hadn't had a chance to print off our ticket at the hostel, so we had to ask the man behind the counter if he would print the tickets off for us. Before we even spoke to him, we could see he was going to be a pain in the backside. He had the look of the kind of person who would flip one day and shoot a load of people and that he must have been 40 years old and still lived in his parents basement. It was a no for some lame excuse that he didn't explain and he told us that we'd just have to try our luck with the driver. Thankfully, the driver was the nicest bloke in America and he let us in fine, which was a huge relief. We settled in on the busy bus and headed towards the city of Phoenix. It was only about a 3 hour ride and it flew by in no time. At Phoenix, we grabbed our bags and finally managed to print our tickets off. We were a bit peeved to find out our next bus was already running about half an hour late but we just had to forget about it as there was nothing we could do. After 2 hours of being stared at by a strange looking man who had an obsession with being first in the queue, we boarded our second bus with the destination of Tucson, Arizona. This was another pretty short ride and we arrived in just over 2 hours. This is when things started to go wrong. The uber ride was simple enough and it dropped us right outside the enterprise car rental place, only it wasn't open. We'd booked a car for 2pm for the 16th April and when we had it had told us that the shop would be open. We were pretty annoyed as we'd been looking forward to seeing the cacti at the Saguaro national park east of Tucson. Our uber driver, Gary, was incredibly helpful and called Enterprise to try and sort something out. The lady on the phone was useless and all they could offer us was a car from the airport that we would have to return to the airport, which just wouldn't have worked for us as it would have cost a bomb on transport. Reluctantly, we got over seeing the impressive Saguaros and asked Gary if he could just drop us at our hotel instead. He did so and we were rather surprised when he said there would be no charge. We insisted on giving him some money, so handed him over some cash to say our thanks. The hotel seemed pretty nice, although it was bang opposite a park that was populated by numerous homeless people, which made the area look a bit dodgy. Once we were checked into our room, we decide what to do with the rest of our day. There wasn't much to do, being Easter Sunday. Everything would be closed, the national park was in accessible through public transport and we didn't fancy mingling with all the tramps out in the park. We decided to just walk to the supermarket to stock up on goodies and taking the opportunity to catch up with some rest. As there was a subway sandwich shop by the supermarket, so it was our plan to pick one of them up for dinner and eat it later but when we got there, that was closed too. We walked back to the hotel feeling pretty exasperated. We needed dinner and with no onsite kitchen, we were pretty restricted to takeaways. We'd planned on visiting a highly recommended Mexican place in south Tucson but that was only if we'd had the car. Instead, we had to settle for a burger place that delivered to our hotel door. It did the job but it didn't cover the disappointment that was Tucson, Arizona. One small consolation was that we saw loads of Saguaro cacti at the side of the road as we were driving in to town and we also found one or 2 in people gardens as we were walking to the supermarket. The failure wasn't helped by our quick moving, with 1 night in Tucson, we didn't have an extra day to fall back on incase of emergencies, so we just had to take it on the chin.

Sorry, this one is quite hard but for this particular place, it's quite hard and singers seem to tweak the name slightly to make it fit into lyrics a bit better.

“I hear the train a comin’, it's rollin’ round the bend and I ain't seen the sunshine since I don’t know when, but I'm stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin’ on, and that train keeps a rolling, on down to….”

James and Charlotte