2005-10-28 - 12:18 p.m.

An uneventful flight home, and certainly not enriched by the dreadful food and entertainment choices on American Airlines. �We will now be starting our award winning dinner service� � I�m not sure what awards it has won, but �least tasty reheated green beans� must surely be one of them. Luckily, you�re too distracted by the shockingly bad film choices on offer to notice too much.

I know the apple pie festival has been at the forefront of all our minds for some time now, but in the end, it was something of an anti-climax (I almost wrote anti-PIEmax there, but realised I would then be honour bound to kill myself).

I beetled up the San Diegan (?) mountains in my rented convertible, which I would have looked very cool driving if I weren�t straining over the wheel to see where I was going all the time, or wrestling with flappy maps on high-speed thoroughfares. I managed to get there in a relatively crash-free manner, though, and excelled myself by driving around for 30 minutes looking for my hotel � this in a town with three streets.

Ah, it�s a different way of life up there in the countryside. Mostly one that involves closing everything down for the week and leaving the streets looking like the place has been wiped out by a polio epidemic, but it�s certainly relaxing, I�ll give them that.

I�d expected a high-octane competition between competing bakeries, all aggressive sales techniques, with perhaps the odd drive-by scrumping as orchards fight to achieve dominance of the apple supply market, or a seedy underbelly of crust sabotage and pastry mutilation.

But no.

It was basically just a few shops, er, selling apple pies. I went into one of the shops. I ordered pie and coffee, bold as you like. I had a slice. It was�alright. I�m not sure how I�m going to translate this experience into the �one man�s mountain trail on the search for an American culinary icon� story that I had sold it as, but I�m sure I�ll think of something when the time comes.

More shops closed. The woman from the chamber of commerce that I tried to interview scuttled out for a cigarette as soon as I went into her office and sat out front like a silent little smoking troll, so I decided to leave her alone. The winery � famous for their apple wine � looked at me as if I had asked for cabbage brandy. Well, of course, it�s obvious to THEM that the apple wine isn�t ready for another few months, but I�m sad to say I�ve let my apple wine schedule knowledge slip. I�ve had a lot on my mind, what can I say?

Crushed under the weight of apple fatigue, I went back to my empty hotel and was in bed by 9.30, and not in a good way. It was a really beautiful town, but perhaps it would have been better to go at the weekend, when there are actual human beings moving around and doing things.

I drove back to the city, mostly with my eyes closed due to the stressful nature of the highways and my foot-down-and-pray driving style. �You were driving fast,� said the attendant at the car hire place. �I can smell it!� I�m sincerely hoping he was referring to the engine.

I�d lucked out on a free night at an expensive hotel for my last 24 hours, a situation that calls for my usual �go out for cheap takeaway and sneak it back into the room without the concierge noticing and therefore avoid blowing next month�s rent on one dinner�. I washed it down with the conveniently complimentary bottle of wine. They don�t call me the last of the big spenders for nothing.. Or at all, in fact.

I�m tired today, not through jetlag, but by staying up until 2am watching the most hypnotically retarded TV show ever invented, which I will write about at some length for your ignoring pleasure very soon.