A welcome sign!

Travelling in America (well the tiny bit of America we have been through so far anyway) and it seems nigh on impossible to find coffee – just plain simple, good coffee. You go into a garage/service station and what do you find? Everything you could possibly want in the way of beverages: hot or cold; alcohol or non-alcohol; any flavour, any size . . . but no coffee. You look hopefully along a bay of machines with the word Coffee and Gourmet Beverages above and find you can have – vanilla, cinnamon, strawberry(!) – anything really, except . . . just coffee. Before you get to the two tanks of green sludge and pink sludge and the huge range of taps giving access to every Pepsi variety in existence, you find two scruffy machines, which appear to be dispensing coffee (one says de-caff), and you pour out some brown liquid – it doesn’t even look like coffee, it doesn’t even smell like coffee – it most certainly doesn’t taste anything like coffee.
  
So we look for the M sign. Never did I ever think that I would be seeking out McDonalds. But at least in those places you can actually get something that resembles an espresso, albeit in a large paper cup! They do look at you very strangely when you ask for a single shot and you do have to cling to the cup so no one can add anything to it and then at the end the question – ‘You want cream with that?’
  
The relief when we turn off the main Highway, find a Cool Bean Cafe and see this sign. We order an espresso and say to the guy – ‘A welcome sign that’ and he just smiles . . . he knows.

We are now settled for a few days in a delightful 'cottage' (actually a fine cabin) in its own grounds and close to Yosemite NP. Wonderful to empty cases, do some shopping and cooking and generally relax in our own place. Everything has been a bit full on and time and wifi a bit iffy. It has been great to find so many blippers following our adventure. I will now catch up with everyone.