old lag

It's always worse travelling East, apparently. I find myself wide awake at 3am, unable to sleep until 4.30-odd then effortlessly sleeping to 11 in the morning. In fact on the first night here all four of us were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 3am, reading, playing on small screens and prowling the silent night in a bewildered fashion. I've caught up with some good radio (ah, the BBC !) and writtten some fine lists that somehow seem less intelligible in the cold light of dawn. It will lessen, surely, or I'm heading West...

It's autumn and windy, colourful, the leaden skies threatening rain but so far not delivering. What's falling in abundance are acorns, which clatter on the roof above our bedroom ceiling like thrown stones through the (sleepless) night. Next morning grey squirrels nip about the grass below collecting them up and burying them (yes, they really do).

Green and Pleasant

There's a foreshortened perspective in England. Something to do with the light, or clear Autumn air, or just that things are closer to each other. Perhaps it's jet-lag, I don't know. Anyway it's cool and green, the smaller roads and lanes draped with that late-summer foliage that's not trying to be innocent and appealing now that the nip of Autumn hints at its demise. It's a privilege of our situation that we were warmly farewelled by family in the Southern Pacific and warmly welcomed by family in the North Atlantic, and a tribute to all that each has done the welcoming at six in the morning. Thanks guys.

I had low expectations of British Airways, based on research and past experience, but they came up trumps on the flight from New York. Apart from the business of selecting us for 'special screening' (searching all our hand luggage and ourselves, swabbing the bags for drugs) they provided good seats on a nice small plane, good food, a comprehensive entertainment system, quick flying time (6 hours) and friendly service. We took off into a deep blue and burnt umber sunset with the full moon rising on America, and landed into a dark grey dawn with the full moon just setting on England. Being Manchester it was cold (7 degrees), dark and raining. What else ?

This is where the plans run out and I start having to make things up as I go along. This is the blank sheet bit, albeit rich linen paper as it seems now, and the way it always seems to happen best. I feel a list coming on, just as I feel an urge to build a tent on every mountaintop. So far so good.

We rode the subway to Times Square in rush hour

Day 2 in New York so now we're locals, crossing the road against the lights, laughing at lost tourists consulting maps, strolling through Central Park and talking about the streets in numerical shorthand.

A relatively lazy day to finish our Stateside sojourn: here's the bullets.
Brunch at EJ's luncheonette (you don't know it ? A favourite with us locals) followed by a walk to the Metropolitan Art Museum and a few hours looking at art. Altogether more edifying than our visit a few years ago to the Tate Modern, which I thought might be a wind-up. A stroll through Central Park; families playing ball, kids on bikes, people sitting under trees reading, lots of dogs. Onwards to Zabar's deli and down Broadway to the subway station where we rode to Times Square (see above). Last-minute souvenirs, then to Grand Central for tea at the (fabulous and familiar to us locals) Food Concourse.

Back at our hotel in Queens it was a hot and noisy night of traffic, sirens and bursts of rap music from passing cars.

Just because I can

Now you can see how many people have visited my blog (about 6) and where they are (can you guess ?). And you can see where most of the photos were taken, on a handy map. Just click on the photos to go to the online album.

Then again, why would you ?

Weird People sit at the back

The subway, and New York generally, seems to be a good place to spot weird people. Training the kids not to stare at them is harder. Unfortunately they don't just sit at the back of the bus like they do everywhere else.

A mission to New York

At a distance, and with eyes half-closed (as you do) the MTA New York city subway map looks like one of those diagrams of the male reproductive system, though I'm glad it's not mine. Metaphorically tracing our route through New York today would be strangely disturbing however, so let me stay with the literal.

Decoding and negotiating the ticket vending machines was a return to HAL. A New York-style queue of patiently discontented people (mostly curious tourists making mental notes) formed as we tried to figure out the touchscreen instructions and which way to feed in the dollar notes without them being rejected. Finally armed with four Metro Funcards (more American irony) we thundered into New York in one of those distinctive boxy silver subway trains, emerged into the hazy sunshine and did that Gothic cathedral thing of looking upwards and gawping at the high verticals. It was Yosemite again, without the trees.

Food, a signature motif for our trip, is everywhere here, and good stuff too. We bought tasty filled rolls, cakes, coffee and marched through Battery Park to the Ellis Island Ferry. Street vendors sell all manner of quality and dodgy goods, and who can tell the difference ? It's a public holiday today (Columbus Day) but a low tourist season, and all the New Yorkers were at Cape Cod (we saw them queuing on the Massachusetts Turnpike on Friday) so the Statue and Ellis Island Immigration museum were quiet.

Ellis Island is where new immigrants went to be processed before gaining admission to America. Arriving in crowded and filthy ships and after the initial excitement of seeing the Statue of Liberty they waited days sometimes before disembarking and being subjected to questioning, medical examination and a tense wait for a decision. The place processed up to ten thousand people a day. I found it moving and uplifting, the photos of hopeful people who had fled the privations of Europe to find a new life, much like the waves of immigrants reaching New Zealand a century later.

Of course there were also the six million slaves from Africa, and they were the ones who made it here alive. In addition, a large percentage of the Europeans came as indentured servants, with the interesting exception of New England settlers.

I digress. From the Ellis Island experience to Grand Central Station and a grand architectural experience, as well as a superb Food Concourse, and thence to the Empire State Building, once again the tallest in New York, and a stunning night-time view of the big apple under a full moon.

Finally back to the scrotum and our hotel. Oops, did I say that out loud ?

Queens

New York, and the last city of our tour. The GPS did a major HAL coming in to New York but amidst a lot of honking horns, a man waving his fist at me and some diatribe from me towards the unit, we managed between the two of us (Carole and me) to find our hotel, then to the Avis return depot at LaGuardia Airport via the petrol station where I received the legendary New York surly service. I complained to Avis about the GPS (loud enough that she could hear me) and received a $50 refund for my inconvenience. It was the least they could do.

Driving in America's been fun though. You can do relatively little in America without a car, it seems, including getting from one end of a mall to the other. The car (a Dodge CaraVan) was spacious, comfortable, powerful and I want one.

Tomorrow, the New York subway...

Roads paved with gold

The best view of the New England Fall was on the Massachusetts Turnpike, the main road out of Boston. It appears to cut through a forest of maple, sycamore, beech and aspen trees, all of which are 'on the turn', blazing yellow, gold and orange in the brilliant morning sun. It was breathtaking. The Mohawk Trail, a fifty mile stretch of road through equally pretty forest, had the charm of the canopy of trees over the road, and the entertainment of a bizarre gift shop at the hill summit which sold such oddities as souvenirs of San Francisco, rabbit pelts and truly terrible coffee.

Another city, another budget hotel. Yesterday we took the subway into Boston, visiting Trinity Church and walking through the Beacon Hill district experiencing the English familiarity of this most symbolic place for American Independence. Charles Street raised a smile, and gave us the chance to photograph some of the shots you see in the slideshow. The Science Museum was closing within an hour of our getting there, but we hit the gift shop and Simon enjoyed icecream chilled with liquid nitrogen. We finished up in Quincy markets, sitting at the curbside on a concrete rotunda eating excellent pizza slices and listening to a full orchestra playing in the street, surrounded by market stalls selling all manner of things. Bustling with people, the air filled with the smells of every kind of food imaginable, a clear cool night with a bright moon to finish our short visit to New England.

Entering the Twilight Zone

Rod Serling could have created some gripping moments with the GPS, had it been invented in 1960. This thing usually conveys us safely from one set of coordinates to another, naming all the streets and points of interest and apparently having a special satellite up there just watching out for us. We trust her (yes, her), smile forgivingly at her sometimes strange pronounciations, share her sense of effortless accomplishment when we reach our destination. Then just occasionally she does a HAL; directing us to keep left, then springing a right-turn, introducing a full-reverse arrow thing on to the map screen, giving a different instruction to what's clearly marked on the display, our little blue car icon careering off the chosen pathway into a dark tangle of unknown streets. We switch to old methods, scrabbling with maps, reading road signs that are OUTSIDE the car, turning aside from The Route.

There's a silence then she says "Recalculating", but what she really means is "What are you doing Dave ?" It's touch and go. We've even switched her off a couple of times recently. The errors are getting more frequent, and more bizarre. Should I worry ?

This is a place

The biggest mall in New England has 7000 car park spaces and several miles of corridor. That was our exercise for yesterday. We had to work off the pumpkin pie somehow, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But surely even 7000 carloads of people couldn't buy all these clothes, or eat all this fast food ? There's a bit of a retail meltdown in America, apparently, and prices are keen, but there's just not many people around in these big shopping centres, except in the queue for McDonalds which was never less than 10 long. As with the desert, the mountains and forests, I'm struck by the scale of American shopping. Our latest hotel is on a 35-mile main trunk road into Boston which is lined with palatial retail parks like giant fiefdoms facing each other across the four-lane roadway. Every one seems to have McDonalds and a Dunkin Donuts. My idea of building a fast salad empire in the US is faltering.

The pumpkin pie was delicious by the way. Clam chowder in a breadbowl, similar, and there have been some good Caesar salads though I only managed to finish one of them. Coffee, on the other hand ... don't get me started.

Spongebob Rules

Billy Connolly once described taking his two girls on a journey back to his roots in Scotland, trailing around the places of his childhood and telling them stories of his life there, immersing them in the history, the music, the culture of the place.

Asked upon their return home to America what impressed them most about this odyssey they both replied 'Sesame Street on the hotel TV'.

Why am I telling you this ?
Spongebob Squarepants. Say no more.

Falling for New England

Combine English country landscapes and that northern light, South Island colour and good kiwi architecture, Scottish dourness, pumpkins, millions more deciduous trees and a continental climate and you begin to get New England. We drove along roads lined with red and gold trees, a blizzard of spinning leaves falling around the car, the distant hillsides clothed in bronze rust patchwork. Villages and towns of wooden cube buildings sporting steeples, hipped roofs, peaked caps of cedar tiles and corrugated iron, painted in those colours marketed as 'heritage' by smart paint companies. 

There seems to be a seasonal tradition of stacking bright orange pumpkins on steps and verandas, or arranging them into figures with straw hair and arms of rakes and pitchforks, tying 7-foot high corn stalks to the porch posts, creating tableaux of ghosts and witches, cauldrons, spiders and other halloween symbols in the front gardens. At the roadside stalls sell pumpkins from roof-high stacks, plus apples and raspberries. We had some orchard apples which were crisp and sharp and delicious.

Pretty, characterful, lived-in, spacious and with a story to tell that seems to go beyond frontier. 

How many ways can you photograph a waterfall ?

Some new pix added showing Niagara. Click on the pictures themselves to go to the web album and bigger versions. Look for the No Smoking sign. Highlight of the day for me.

Spaghetti Bolognaise

Our latest home has a kitchen, so this evening we had our first home-cooked meal in a fortnight! The cry went up for Spag Bol, and good it was. We're resting up for a day or two, here in Massachusetts. Both kids are feeling ragged from travelling, and so are we. Eating out is cheap and easy in the States, but home-cooked is still best.

A visit today to the Shaker Village at Hancock, and an insight into a very different age, way of life and way of thinking. What radicals they were, these pioneers of a better alternative (and home-cooked meals), and in the teeth of often violent opposition. I'm thinking again about the lengths to which we will go to follow our own compass. A thought-provoking visit on a bright, cool Autumn day dressed in red and gold foliage.

Torrent

The Niagara River flows towards Canada, reaching the border at the famous dropping point. Consequently, trying to see Niagara Falls from the American side is rather like trying to focus on the tip of your own nose. We didn't appreciate this subtle piece of geography until we got there, noticing that for most Americans Niagara Falls (the town) is little more than a petrol and toilet stop on their way to the Canadian town also called Niagara Falls. This town (the Canadian one) looms across the river, a jumble of high-rise buildings, towers, casinos and conspicuous wealth.

By contrast, the American Niagara Falls town (city, actually) is a down-at-heel urban sprawl with the through-road to Canada clearly marked but little in the way of direction to the US side of the Falls. For foreign visitors driving on the other side of the street in a car that in other countries would suffice for a community minibus this was confusing and stressful, but we eventually found the Niagara State Park with its associated attractions. Various lookout points give views of water disappearing over an edge, and glimpses of splashing torrents below. There are two parts to the Falls; the American Falls and the Horseshoe Falls. The Horseshoe is the one on all the photos, and that's the one you can't see at all from the American side. I felt underwhelmed, frankly.

More satisfying were the walkway beside the bridal veil falls and the Maid Of The Mist boat trip. On the walkway we got drenched in spray and nearly blown off our feet by wind. It reminded me of so many family walks in Peebles. One section of the walkway is named the Hurricane Deck. Directly under the waterfall and in the teeth of the displacement-generated wind I got a sense of the raw power of the waterfall, but of greater interest to me was the very prominent NO SMOKING sign on the railing beside the cascading water. Who says the Americans have no irony ?

The boat trip took us into the Horseshoe Falls where the thundering noise, flying spray and churning turquoise water, coupled with the experience of being surrounded on three sides by towering torrents, was another experience of nature's power unleashed. I had felt this in the desert, and at Yosemite when we reached the top of Glacier Point and looked over a rocky edge to a 4000 foot sheer drop to the valley floor. Having lived all my life on two small islands I'm moved by the scale of America; its size and its extremes.

Fresh from yet another wonder of the world we undertook a five-hour car journey (an inch or so on the map) to our first New England destination. A beautiful evening with the sun setting over cornfields and autumnal forests, the light slanting across red-painted hip-roofed farmhouses with giant grain silos and - honestly - old tractors parked out in the golden fields.

Oh hear that ol' piano

Not many men could carry off a rumpled white suit (might even have been off-white) and badly balanced red tie but somehow Garrison Keillor seems to find the words and mannerisms to make it work. He roams about the stage set of A Prairie Home Companion talking and singing effortlessly and apparently off-the-cuff (though sections of the script were constantly being carried on and off the stage by a man dressed in black, and sometimes handed to Keillor seconds before he read aloud from them.) It all shambled along like a a Dickensian banking office; people wandering in and out of the room carrying pieces of paper and looking vague, one hand running across the forehead, and Garrison Keillor conducting the whole show with a distracted air, like a man just doing his job. Which I guess he is. Of course under the water the feet are paddling furiously, and that's what I loved about it. It was flawless, sparkling and unpredictable without raising a sweat, indeed nothing more than a bushy eyebrow.
We got a mention, which was nice, sitting in our seats high in the second balcony; the only ones left when I got out of bed at six in the morning several months ago to book them online at the moment they went on sale. It was a special night, the first new show of the season so the live broadcast was followed by the annual street dance and meatloaf supper on Exchange Street in St Paul. I'd managed to keep that part of it secret from Carole and the kids, so it felt like a bonus and, for me, worth the flight to get there.
We stayed in a lovely (budget) hotel which used to be a railway station, and we ate our breakfast yesterday sitting on the old station platform. No such luck this morning as our shuttle driver arrived at 5.55am to take us to the airport. Breakfast in Chicago and lunch at Niagara Falls, but that's another story...

Waiting in St Louis

Yesterday we moved from balmy California across two time zones to the frozen tundra that is Minnesota. A restless and hot night in San Francisco in a cheap hotel room (with obligatory paper-thin walls) listening to a drunken tirade from a woman in the room next door. She settled down about 4 in the morning, by which time I was past caring.
Earlier in the evening we'd eaten tomato soup from hollowed-out loaves of sourdough bread and walked through a city of $2 shops on Fisherman's Wharf, caught a tram up the undulating streets and walked a mile back to our hotel, having completely misjudged where it was. The steep leafy streets and elegant houses are quite a contrast to the grubby concrete of Anaheim and the purposeful glitz of Las Vegas.
Our flight to St Paul went via St Louis and sitting in St Louis airport we realised that neither of us has a clue where in the US St Louis actually is. Do you ? Couple this with a growing uncertainty about which day it is and you have the perfect holiday.
The wait in St Louis went on and on, and there was no information. When we eventually boarded our pencil-thin aircraft the pilot apologised for the delay. President Bush had decided to fly through St Louis earlier in the afternoon and all flights were grounded or left circling 50 miles away until he was gone.
Our budget hotel in St Paul is an old railway station, complete with rails running through the lobby and a beautiful vaulted ceiling. No elevator however, so at midnight the four of us had to lug all our luggage up the stairs to our room. No mean feat having not slept the night before.
The kids are taking travelling in their stride, finding our way around airports, organising their own stuff, waiting patiently when the President jumps our queue, being adaptable and creative with a deluge of new experiences. Me, I just seem to get get more curmudgeonly as the years go on, though in a benign way I think.

It's all done in a studio

 

Now I know how they did that Moon Landing thing.

The photographs are coming

Honest. It just takes time. Hooray for free high-speed internet in budget hotels.

Yosemite

Superlatives become commonplace after a while when travelling through this landscape. I did my best to see the place through Ansell Adams' eyes, helped by a local gallery of his pictures and the ubiquitous opportunity to buy associated gifts, but the scale and grandeur of the valley defied my camera. We just ooh-ed and ahh-ed along with all the other tourists.

Our night in a log (well, wooden anyway) cabin at Curry Village in Yosemite Park helped us appreciate the budget Best Western hotels we've generally been using along the way, though it was a treat to meet Ed, the golf-cart driving porter who helped us carry ALL our luggage from the car to the shed - er - cabin. We've cunningly arranged the luggage so only the overnight and valuable stuff needs to leave the car each day, but we hadn't counted on the Yosemite bears. Apparently they break into cars looking for food if so much as a handbag is left inside, so along came Ed to transport our pile of bags. He chatted away about the park, the bears, life in general and helped us feel at home.

We didn't see a bear and, despite my cruising the carpark this morning with my camera, I didn't see any cars broken into. We did see a squirrel.

Today we saw the biggest living things on Earth; giant sequoia trees. A magical afternoon walking in nature scented with wood smoke and pine, a lingering memory of sun rays slanting through the drifting smoke. The gift shop was closed; a sort of gift in itself. Speaking of records, we went from sea level to 9500 feet and back to 3000 feet over the course of yesterday, an ear-popping experience.

Tonight we are in small town America. Went to a local pizza place where I felt somewhat out of place. Sports memorabilia and insignia all over the walls, three giant screens showing three different sports channels, lots of baseball caps and beer bellies, surly service. Great pizza. Local Republican HQ prominently evident across the street. Is it just me ? After all, we're not from around here...

Lots of great chats with the kids about travelling, family, learning and education, feelings, communication, loyalty, experiences. We're learning a lot about each other.

I've been through the desert with a GPS called Sally

Garrison Keillor (about whom more later) does a great send-up of these devices. It takes him on unwanted detours, argues with him and willfully misinterprets his instructions, but is infinitely patient and forgiving, faithfully taking him (eventually) to his stated destination. We've named ours Sally, and I never want to be without her again when I'm driving. We tell her where we're going and she gives step-by-step instructions to turn left or right on to this that or the other road, anticipating lane-shifts and monitoring traffic flows, giving progress reports and even devising routes that involve as few left turns (think about it) as possible. Amazing. When I divert off her chosen route (as is my habit in life) she pauses just long enough for effect, then says 'Recalculating' with a weary sigh. She tirelessly recalculates, devising ingenious ways to get me back on track whilst giving the impression that my mistaken turnoff was, after all, the best route to our destination. A true friend.

Hot desert night

I'm sitting outside the General Store at Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley. It's just after 9 at night, the temperature is 36 degrees, the stars are bright and the crickets loud. An awe-inspiring place; we've spent the day visiting the huge dunes north of here, the salt flat at the lowest point in America (84m below sea level) and watching the sun set over Death Valley from a high ridge. At the hottest part of the day we experienced 44 degrees, beating my previous record of 42 degrees in Sydney in 1979 ! Simon has been taking his new camera for a serious test run, and something over 120 photos await viewing and editing. We were winners in Las Vegas, scoring Simon's camera for a bargain price and having the cheapest meal out so far.

Lots of photos of mine for uploading but it may have to wait a few days as we're out of interweb range for the next day or two.

Driving to Las Vegas

It's what I imagined but bigger. Driving away from Los Angeles was like one of those perspective things on the interweb where you start with a quark and pull back until you see the whole leaf, then the tree and the town and the continent and the planet and you keep going until you are Zaphod Beeblebrox or some such. Anyway, LA is vast and all-encompassing until you see the desert beyond. We drove four and a half hours through a brown rock-strewn moonscape punctuated with water towers, abandoned trailer parks, a prison and tiny settlements, broken signs on high gantries advertising long forgotten venues and events, the occasional fenced compound housing assorted trucks, sheds, shacks and old cars. It could have been another Disney creation for all that I was able to connect with the scale and reality of it.
We talked in the car about all those people who inched across this shimmering dustbowl in carts, looking for a better life; what we will endure to find what we want, to find a home worthy of us. What a privilege to sit in our (huge) refrigerated steel ship listening to the Eagles (sorry, but what else ?) and glide along our smooth desert corridor. A rich experience, I loved it; the incredible scale of the desert, the album-cover Joshua trees, the dead-straight roads, the expressions of awe from the kids as each new sight rolled past.
After 200-odd miles of this there was a road sign: Las Vegas 63 miles, Salt Lake City 560 miles. I thought about it, but only briefly.

To begin at the beginning

No such luck. Here we are already on our final night in LA and an unexpected treat was seeing the Disney fireworks display from our bedroom window. A contrast to last time (2004) standing on Main Street in Disneyland with two tired little kids, one asleep on the pavement and the other watching the fireworks with vague disinterest. Somehow just as special from the window, with the added bonus of hearing all the neighbourhood car alarms sounding off in response to the shock and awe of the explosions. Presumably it's just part of the wallpaper if you live in Anaheim.

I understood only hazily that Anaheim is not Los Angeles. This week my plan to see the Getty Museum was sunk by the sheer difficulty of getting anywhere in LA - sorry, Anaheim - without a car. As it happens I rearranged the car hire and got it today instead of tomorrow, so had my first experience of driving in the US on the Friday afternoon freeways of Anaheim as we shopped for food, cameras (!) and tried to find anything to eat that wasn't fried. I bottled out of driving 40 miles through central LA on a Friday afternoon to see the Getty. It'll still be there next time.

Oh yes - food shopping. Big portions, high cholesterol, low prices. Say n'more.

Arriving back where you started

September 23rd:
Left the ground in Auckland at 5.55 this afternoon and arrived in LAX at 11.15 the same morning, at last reclaiming the day we mislaid on the way over in 2004. We are changed people for our four rich years in New Zealand but returning by the way we came has a strange concertina effect. Also air travel is a great leveller, at least in cattle class.

September 25th
The other great leveller is Disneyland. I get into those shops and realise my own fundamental shallowness. That Fantasyland sweatshirt and black plastic ears combo set is just the thing to keep out the cold and raise a smile on Peebles High Street in February, isn't it ?

Even so, we had a great time on the rides and in the park; the kids are a great age for Disney, with Sara managing to ride a few of the more syrupy attractions with balanced irony.

Coming this way again gives us an odd sense of the familiar as we were here just before arriving in New Zealand and now just after leaving. It settles our knotted stomachs, or mine at least. Shallowness has its place.