Wayward Wellingtonians

Featuring: Ghent, Belgium

2011-01-31T01:26:00.011-08:00

I've got far too many photos... so I've decided to show a couple from each place. Today's feature: Ghent, Belgium.

We were so excited to drive into Belgium. We ended up staying at the Holiday Inn at Ghent, 105 Euros a night, ouch! It was around midnight though, and every other hostel we tried was closed. Oh, well. The rooms were very nice.

At the park opposite the railway station.

Typical street views.

I loved the bell tower here. We weren't really sure about it at first... but I'm glad we went. The view was awesome.

Here's the bell tower from the outside:

And from the top....

The other highlight of Ghent was the Adoration of the Lamb. They were restoring it while we were there. It's amazing to see it in person. This is a sneaky photo.

We're back in Wellington!

2010-09-24T15:12:00.004-07:00

We've been back in Wellington for almost 4 weeks now, and loving it. B has had his first week of work this week, and I've just signed the papers for a new job (just waiting on references). Steadily catching up with family and friends has been fantastic, including the simple pleasures of running into people you know on the street on any given trip into town.

Under da sea!

2010-07-23T02:27:00.004-07:00

Yesterday we took one last look around our empty and now extremely clean house, locked the door, and gave the key back to our landlady. This was it - nothing now tethering us to the UK except our train ticket out.

(Look! It's mostly clean!)

Right now we're in a hotel in Gent, Belgium... more photos to come!

2 days to go...

2010-07-20T18:19:00.003-07:00

It's 2am, and we've finally finished packing. All the furniture has been sold or given away, and the house is mostly empty.

The movers, when pressed, gave an arrival time of "between 9 and 11am" which means either 8am or 12 tomorrow. Hence our semi-allnighter.

Special thanks to L & G for dinner tonight, and S as well. We're really excited about getting to Germany... if the car makes it. It is not well.

And a special un-thanks to the babyfood-yellow slug I stood on earlier tonight in bare feet, while walking outside to get something. I think my foot just skimmed it as it kept moving, but I was traumatised. I will not miss you, oh UK slugs of doom.

And then there was one....

2010-07-19T07:13:00.003-07:00

Oops. We've already packed away or given away all our crockery, bar a set each. Earlier, I dropped one of the coffee mugs, which shattered completely. I'm still picking bits of melamine out of my feet. Lucky Brendan barely drinks coffee, then.

Leaving on a jet plane....

2010-07-19T03:26:00.003-07:00

Or in this case, the Channel Tunnel, which my work friends tell me is called the Chunnel. :) On Thursday. (!!!) These next few days are going to be a whirlwind, but I'm really looking forward to travelling. I left work at 5am on Friday just as the sun was coming up... home at 6am and off to London at 12pm on Sat to see friends who flew down from Edinburgh. (Photos to come!)

Right, more packing. We have to re-show the house tonight - think the last one fell through. Eek. Missing the fishies already.

Planning... The Return

2010-06-17T13:53:00.002-07:00

It's official - I have told most of my clients, with some sadness. We're leaving the UK in July!

We'll likely be back in Wellington in September. I hear there are tables practically booked at certain restaurants already. :)

Right now I have just under a month left at work, and so does Brendan. I've already started packing, but I keep having to unpack things I want again so probably not the best idea!

Very much looking forward to seeing you all when we get back.

A guide to British-isms of the white middleclass variety

2010-06-04T01:31:00.006-07:00

A quick guide to some phrases you may encounter....

"I'm not being funny but..." = I'm about to complain or say something negative
"yeah" = quantifier similar to "innit"/"eh", one rung up the social ladder
British place name pronounciation: "ces" = "s", "thw" = "v". Or just say it fast and you'll be right.
"You alright?" = How are you?
Lush = nice

Running the half-marathon!

2010-04-28T14:24:00.002-07:00

Here is me, before we left....

I'm very pleased with my time- 1 hr 50min 30 sec! I was estimating I'd be around the 1:55 mark, so to knock a whole 5mins off my estimated time is awesome. I was pretty shattered afterwards, though.

Running

2010-03-13T07:28:00.002-08:00

Another gratuitous photo for your viewing pleasure.... taken yesterday from work. The river was unusually smooth and calm, and the weirdest shade of green I've ever seen it to be. Gorgeous!

I've been training with Carrie two nights a week recently as we get ready for the Reading half-marathon (and she does the Shakespeare Marathon!). It's good to have someone else to train with, and probably safer overall given that we tend to run at night when it's dark. :S

Only a week left - and I've been a bit slack this week while she's on her skiing holiday. I've done a number of 10-milers though, and plan to do 12 tomorrow, so I'm not too bothered.

Goodbye Vauxhall!

2010-03-13T06:53:00.004-08:00

Brendan's car has failed its MOT (WOF equivalent), and it's not worth fixing, so we've decided to scrap it. I've kept the licence plates, however - apparently the Netherlands are the only other country where the licence plates can be yellow instead of white.

It's a bit sad, but Brendan says he's not as attached to it as he was to the Fiesta, which died last year. I still felt sad as I watched Brendan drive it around the corner and onto the car ramp. A couple of photos to come!

On the other hand, I now have the sole car as Brendan's going to carpool with his friends. I forsee a lot more shopping trips in my future!

The mechanics at the car yard were a father-son team. I'd bought a car stereo for my Renault there a few months before. We talked about our travels and about NZ to them - where LOTR was shot (South Island), what the weather is like (just like Britain but without the snow that fell in Basingstoke - which is apparently extremely unusual), what we like about the UK (how old it is!) and the best places to go in America on a once-in-a-lifetime trip (LA or Florida).

A lot of British people think NZ is hot, which makes sense I guess given that it is next to Australia, Fiji and other tropical/dry/hot places. The father ate chips out of a paper packet balanced on his lap while he talked to us, with black, greasy hands.

Finally spring!

2010-03-06T06:26:00.004-08:00

It's been a long, cold winter - the coldest on record for 30 years, according to various radio and TV sources. So I'm pleased that the past few days have been gorgeously sunny, even if not that warm yet. Bring on summer!

I'm doing the Reading half-marathon in 2 weeks... I've been going for twice-weekly runs with a friend after work, which does a lot for motivation! She's doing the full marathon so I'm running more than I need to, but it's all good practice. Especially as I've only been training "properly" for two months, and have only done three long runs of 10+ miles recently.

In other news, Brendan and I are starting to look at the next steps and future travel plans... we're very keen to visit more of Europe over summer.

Reading in the evening can be very nice

2010-02-13T07:24:00.002-08:00

The River Thames as it runs though Reading.... post-shopping with Liz R.

NYE in London!

2010-01-01T06:45:00.005-08:00

It was New Years' Eve, and we were in London. It was bitterly cold. We stood on the side of the Thames, watching the fireworks go off from the London Eye and hearing the whoops of people celebrating. After the fireworks ended, we walked back towards Blackfriars Bridge. It started to snow. Perfect.

Walking back into Waterloo Station, we hit the queue of people being herded around and into the station - pushing, jostling and mostly standing in the same place or only slightly shuffling forward. It took us about 1.75 hours to circumnavigate most of the streets around the station and get into the station itself, where we missed our train by 2 minutes 27 seconds. So we had to wait at the station until the next (and last) train 2 hours later, at 4:05am. It was a long, cold wait, but we listened to stories and ate chocolate muffins so it wasn't all bad. British women seem to have evolved some sort of imperviousness to the cold, judging by the number of tiny skirts/ shorts / dresses - and I counted nine women with bare feet!

Christmas at Kings'

2009-12-28T12:07:00.003-08:00

The choir of Kings' College, Cambridge. Famous for the annual broadcast of their Nine Lessons and Carols service each year on Christmas Day. This year, we were there.... queuing up at 8am to stand in line for one of the 600 places offered to the public.

The day is probably best told in pictures.

Snow day!

2009-12-22T06:31:00.008-08:00

Yesterday, it snowed. And I mean really snowed. There was chaos that truly put last year's to shame.

Brendan and I had separate adventures! He left work at 3:30, I left work at 3...

His facebook update: spent 3 hours driving home in the snow. This included the battery dying, pushing the car off the road, buying jump leads, killing another car attempting to jump my car, getting a third car to jump the second car and mine, getting stuck on an ice-covered hill, twice, and then ice-driving through the frozen back streets of Basingstoke.

My facebook update:

So far I've spent 4 hours in my car in the same 4 miles, killed my battery .5 miles from a safeish place to park it, pushed my car, jump started it and parked at aldermaston, waiting for train that might not come...

What happened... an enormous amount of snow! Basically most of the roads in Hampshire and Berkshire were impassable. I left work at 3pm and didn't get back until 10pm! I spoke to many many people who had similar stories of being stuck in their cars for hours and hours, batteries dying etc.... My car is still in Aldermaston Wharf at my boss's house.

It was nice though, because people were very kind-spirited about it all and helped each other.

I spent 45 mins getting the few miles from work to Tim and Carrie's house in Aldermaston, then another 3 hours getting the next mile or so. You'd pretty much move a car length every 15 minutes - I was timing! After 3 hours of this I decided it was ridiculous, and heard a man talking about how the road was blocked by a lorry stuck on the hill by AWE. So I turned around and went back... 45 mins later I was about .5 miles from their house when my car battery died! Luckily I had jumper cables in the car (thanks Brendan!), and luckily some lovely guys helped me to jump start it and push the car until it got going again.

However, even though I parked at Tim and Carrie's, neither of them were there... Carrie, Lucy and one of our clients were all stuck in Basingstoke at a client's overnight! So I took the train from Aldermaston into Reading, and then back to Basingstoke. Thankfully they were delayed but still running, and I managed to get home. Many other people didn't.

Here is what the BBC had to say...

And here.... 3000 people trapped in cars overnight

And here... Basingstoke still at the centre of it all

And here are some pictures.... I was on the AWE road, and the roads of the IDR in Reading are incredible as well. When I took the train home to Basingstoke from Reading I saw cars stopped there at 9 at night!

Ice-skating in Winchester....

2009-12-03T12:15:00.006-08:00

Last year we went iceskating with Lina at Winchester,and it was awesome. This year we went with Liz and Gareth, and it was just as good if not better.

Here's the cathedral and the Michaelmas Christmas Fair... very traditional.

Here's us iceskating... I'm getting much better and can go really fast! I still can't stop as well as I want though. (I.e. only by crashing into the barriers a little...)

The days are getting very dark now- the sun goes down at 3:30. So depressing. But only another few weeks to the Winter Solstice, and it will start getting light again.

I've been extremely busy with work recently - I'm being naughty tonight and having a night off. Lots of copy to write and projects to manage! But I really do love it. And I work with the most awesome people. Brendan has also been very very busy with his work, with two big projects. He's just bought the game Dragon Age and has been rather into that as well, leaving me with less choice for Christmas presents. ;)

I also have a new car so I can drive to work by myself! :) So we have two cars now as Brendan has the other one. It's grey and has a sunroof.

Right, time to leave you all with a photo of the River Thames taken from my work in November, right before all the leaves dropped off - I can look out the window at work and see this, although it's not usually as still and reflective.

A car of her own...

2009-11-13T07:08:00.006-08:00

I have my own little car! It's grey and has a little sunroof. (Granted, it's winter, but who cares....) I love it - it makes me feel like a boyracer. Or girlracer in this case. It's slightly faster than taking the (unreliable!) trains from Basingstoke - Reading, then another.... but mainly it's flexibility - I can get to client meetings in Thame etc, or leave late if I want to.

Here's the first frost of the winter.... my car's the third one in the picture.

Edit: I can't actually remember when it was that I bought my car, but I think it was sometime around November. Hence the photo is most likely from early Dec, and I've mostly put this post up to remind myself that it was roughly around then. And so that you can all see it!

Autum is here....

2009-10-22T09:22:00.001-07:00

It's really rather depressing - it's already getting quite dark.

But the autumn leaves are glorious.

Scotland!

2009-09-06T04:27:00.003-07:00

Midges, enormous blisters and rain... did we really sign up for this?

We've spent a week in Scotland as our summer holiday, walking 80 miles in the Highlands from Fort Williams to Inverness along a walking trail called the Great Glen Way. And boy was it "summer" in quote marks. The scenery was fantastic, though.

The mechanic and the concert: or, what Brendan did on his birthday

2009-07-24T15:40:00.015-07:00

Today is Brendan's 25th birthday.

Today is "buy a dozen overpriced Krispy Kreme donuts as a special treat for Brendan's birthday and eat two before feeling sick" day.

Today is "be given free concert tickets, have trouble finding the concert and then lock the one set of keys in the car ignition with the lights on" day.

Yes, really. We tried for about 20 minutes with one of the parking marshalls to get in - now we know one way to break into your own car! The string wasn't quite long enough though. So we called our insurance** and they sent a mechanic.

Here is Brendan looking unimpressed. Look at that unimpressed-but-pretending-to-smile face!

Here is the mechanic's tow truck, which couldn't actually fit into the car park.
(He said he works for Thames Valley Police, and usually gets called out for serious crashes on the M3 and M4, and suicides. They have to take the person's car as it's evidence in case of foul play. Ick.)

When the mechanic finally managed to break into the car, we all breathed a sigh of relief. Then Brendan and I enjoyed the last hour of the concert!

The concert was all tribute bands, quite a lot of fun really. Thanks to Lynne for tickets!

Today I was in Leamington Spa for a work meeting. We took the train up from Reading, which was about an hour. My boss thinks I'm the papparazzi cos I took some photos as we left.

This is the famous Leamington Spa on the left, built around the same time as Bath Spa when "taking the waters" was really fashionable as a health and beauty aid (and rather expensive!). (Sounds like the modern spa then!)

**They must be sick of us by now. This is the second time we've called them this week, after Brendan left the lights on at a work conference in Southampton. At least it's not AAA, where they only let you have six callouts a year (each). Which is probably much more than necessary for most people who don't drive dodgy cars or suffer from overt forgetfulness about lights in winter. But only just enough for Brendan and I with two dodgy cars in San Francisco and one country-wide trip. In our mail from America after we left, was a letter from AAA sternly warning that we had one callout left each. I think AA UK has a maximum of five.

Bleeding brakes...

2009-07-02T05:30:00.005-07:00

In the past two months, we've done a lot - I started my new job, we moved out of a house with no electricity and into a new one which has been completely repainted and a new bathroom and kitchen put in, and bought a new car. It's a Holden. Or more accurately, it's called a Vauxhall here. Being in it with the windows closed makes me feel sick, because the first owner was an avid smoker and a builder.

We've also been to Reading a few times with friends, and I've moved offices, to a little place called Pangbourne on the Thames river, just south-west of Reading. (It's dirty and yucky, but at least it looks pretty!)

Last Friday I was driving to work. The BMW in front of me slowed down and stopped at an intersection. I put my foot on the brakes... and I wasn't slowing down! I managed to slow down enough and turn the car onto the shoulder with a squeal (there was only a sliver of one, and then a building)! I got to work a bit shaken, with no brakes.

Thanks to certain friends who are good with cars, I managed to impress the mechanic who came to tow our car home enough that he drove me all the way home instead of charging me £150 to go 20 miles, which was awesome. (I was very grateful.)

He also explained that it was probably air in the braking system, and told me how to bleed the brakes. Brendan and I decided that this was a good idea, and we would do it ourselves.

So, all of Sunday afternoon, and Monday evening, we learned how to take the wheels off the car and bleed the brakes. Lots of fun, arguments, swearing and four (four!) trips to Halfords to buy the right sized spanners and assorted tools. But, the brakes worked again! We are very proud. We're not particularly mechanical people!

The car is at the mechanics at the moment, though, just to double-check. Apparently the reason I stopped a little and didn't totally crash into the BMW or into the building, was that the back-up brakes went on when the main brakes failed. It looks like we do have to replace the master cylinder. Ack. But brakes are, shall we say, quite important.

Brendan is...

2009-05-21T10:51:00.002-07:00

feeling guilty for not making any blog posts and leaving Tina to do them all.

That was all I had to say. Who needs Twitter to microblog when you have laziness?

Singing exams at Odiham

2009-05-16T09:28:00.014-07:00

This afternoon another choir member and I went to the village of Odiham (near the RAF base), about 10 miles away from Basingstoke. We were to to sit choral singing exams run by the Royal School of Church Music, at the church of All Saints.

This is a window installed in the church by the RAF. I like the helicopters!

While Sue was having her exam, one of the bellringers arrived to wind the clock in the belltower, so I got to climb up the rickety ladders to see it. The clock mechanism is actually 150 years old!

There are 6 bells. This is the one which makes the "dong!" sound on each hour. The wheel on the left is the mechanical ringer, I think. On Sundays and special occasions there are 6 bellringers to make the chimes. Sue says it's all about following the patterns.

After, we had a traditional British cream tea in the local pub. Enormous, warm scones and little ramekins of jam and clotted cream, which looks a little bit like whipped butter.

We're going on a car hunt...

2009-05-15T13:46:00.004-07:00

... this weekend. Because we absolutely need one. The bus/train/bus combo only works for Brendan if the train is perfectly on time and the bus is late. And I need a car for client meetings.

I'm really enjoying my new job, although it's super-super busy. I get to do lots of writing and work with cool people.

The other "interesting" thing is that we are currently sitting in our room surrounded by candles, because our flatmates didn't pay the power bill. And we didn't realise until Tuesday, when the lights didn't work. Tymek is on his way home from holiday in Poland, so hopefully that's sorted soon.

A quick update....

2009-05-08T13:35:00.007-07:00

Still no car. It's a bit awkward, since the buses become a bit sporadic after dark. I walked home an hour in the dusk the other day rather than wait 1.5 hours for a 10-min bus. However I did get to see a tiny deer in the forest by our house, so it wasn't all wasted.

Brendan is enjoying the sights of Las Vegas this week for a work conference. Or more accurately, he's in conference rooms during the day and hearing the sights of Las Vegas rumble as he tries to get early nights. (Comment from him today during our talk on Skype: "I get to bed much earlier without you!"*) I, on the other hand, have been revelling in late nights and a lack of socks on the floor. ;)

But all this is about to change - on Monday, I start a new job in marketing/communications! I'm really excited since I worked really hard to get it. I'll be doing a lot of creative work (and hopefully use my filmmaking/writing/design skills) as well as learning to have my own clients, which is awesome.

In other news, here are some gratuitous pictures of the countryside/woodland park next to our house. Enjoy.

Here are some bluebells next to the path I walk through the woods to get to Tescos/the bus stop. The forest is filled with them, and occasionally I'll get a whiff of the most gorgeous smell coming from the flowers.

(What you can't see is that to the left of this image, people have been dumping their rubbish as the path opens out into the corner of the car park. Disgusting. Before I took this shot I removed all the plastic bags scattered over this area, and put them in the communal bins downstairs. And then a spider jumped out of one onto my hand!)

I also discovered this pretty cluster hidden inside the tree belt between the houses and the field next door.

The fields are lush with dark green barley at the moment. I think a lot of people walk their dogs here, because this is a right-of-way footpath.

*It's not that he's inherently an early bird, because he most definitely is not. It's because he needs more sleep than me, and takes longer to get to that point.

RIP little car....

2009-04-27T14:22:00.003-07:00

Our car is dead. The past few weeks it's been steadily worsening: loud rattling noises in low gears, clutch deteriorating to the point of being unable to get it into 1st or Reverse without turning the car off first, struggles to get it into any other gear.... We'd worked out how to get around these "quirks", but we didn't expect it to completely die tonight from another issue!

When we drove to Paris in November, Geoff said he thought the clutch would die in about a years' time, and that it would take a few months to fully die at that point. Um, not even 6 months.

Brendan had just dropped off his carpoolers at the railway station when it died, so it didn't need to be towed too far home. Thank you insurance company!! The tow truck driver said it was the starter motor. (He also said, "Your clutch must be really ****ed if we can't hill-start it.")

The unfortunate thing is that it chose to die tonight. I have two meetings on Wednesday afternoon, in different parts of the country. I can't make it between them by train. So I immediately jumped online and booked a rental car. Between the cost of trains for me, and Brendan needing to take a bus/train/bus down to Winchester, the price actually works out to about the same.

As soon as our flatmate gets back from Poland, he promises to help us find a new car. He has some sort of Polish car mafia contacts. Or something.

Domesticity

2009-04-23T13:14:00.004-07:00

Today Brendan was home sick for the second day running, so he felt the need to go to the supermarket and buy junk food from Iceland. Like neopolitan icecream bars for 75p. (It's kinda funny when he tries to talk, and only a whisper comes out.)

Presenting: Kia Ora orange squash. Not orange juice; orange squash. It's quite bitter. The name, though, is hilarious: for non-NZers, "kia ora" is Maori for "hello". So it's "hello orange squash"? Also, I feel as if it contravenes some indigenous copyright laws. Much like the Lego Technics debacle a few years ago.

(Here's a photo of a walkway near our house. Our new house in Chineham is much nicer than our last one.)

Spring has arrived!

2009-04-09T05:28:00.004-07:00

After losing our internet for a month, and then regaining it, we've been a little slack on the updates front recently. Also, trying to upload photos from our small camera is not a happy thing, because it eats batteries.

We're enjoying our new flat in Chineham, which we're sharing with two crazy Polish guys. We do occasionally manage to escape Basingstoke (once you get a few miles out, it becomes much more interesting!) so here is a list of posts which are currently under construction, either in draft form or in my head:

The British Pub Experience (with Tony)
Winchester/ Hursley (with Martha)
The search for Watership Down
The Forest of Dean Half-Marathon (plus road trip!)
The Welsh Border and Cardiff
Newbury with Gareth and Elizabeth
The 'Inas do Bristol
Vyne walk

The weather here has improved significantly. It's raining today, but we had a solid run of about two weeks of sunshine. Amazing! On roadsides everywhere, the trees are starting to green (or pink, or white) and there are daffodils. Mmmm.*

*Not that Brendan notices, since he is currently obsessed with the Playstation. ;)

Top Gear goes to my work!

2009-03-10T09:51:00.003-08:00

In November, the car show Top Gear filmed an episode featuring cars racing inside Basingstoke Mall... where one of my jobs happens to be. Awesomeness. Click the link to see a jazzed-up version of something I see a few days a week... without the cars and spectacular carnage, of course.

Enjoy!

Moving.... again

2009-03-02T09:23:00.005-08:00

If it seems like we're moving all the time, that's because we are. For various reasons. Like stir-crazy landladies.

So we have moved to Chineham, a village tacked onto the back of Basingstoke. Our new house is much nicer. It's 5 minutes' walk to the supermarket, which is either good or dangerous, depending on how you look at it.

Photos to come... our internet is very limited at present.

Stonehenge!

2009-02-05T00:38:00.014-08:00

We rounded the crest of the hill on the highway, and there it was ahead of us: Stonehenge!

Tall, wonky, somehow familiar stones, brooding dark against the yellow grass of the hillside. Bigger than we had thought, after all the people telling us how small they really were. The large "heelstone" at the outer edge, next to the road, was about twice as tall as a person.

Brendan and the heelstone.

All that separated the casual observer from the stones was a chain-link fence running along the road. We parked down the road at the parking lot, and stepped out of the car.

A blast of icy wind hit us, whipping straight through our gloves and hats and scarves. We hurried up to the entrance gate. The hillside was very exposed, and we rather painfully struggled to keep our hands warm enough to take photos. Even though the ambient temperature was actually 1*C, and it was sunny, the staff told us later that the windchill brought the temperature to -7*C!

Because it was so cold, we didn't manage to stay for very long. We walked around and enjoyed it, but decided against walking up to the cone-shaped barrows on the fields on the other side of the monument. These barrows are burial places for the leaders of those who built Stonehenge.

On the hill, you can see the barrows.

Lots of signs around the monument warned to keep off the grass, and there were two wardens standing in front as well to ensure that no-one goes up to the stones. It was only in the past few decades that people have gained an appreciation of preservation here - it used to be that everyone wandered around as they pleased and carved their names on the stones!

We look far less cold than we are.

Stonehenge is the most important ancient monument in Britain, and is at least 5,000 years old. (Some scientists think it's much older, based on post holes dating to 8000 BC underneath the car park!) The whole site was actually built in multiple stages over 1,500 years, at one stage being abandoned for 1,000 years. It's a rather fascinating mystery.

Winter blast!

2009-02-02T00:33:00.006-08:00

It's been relatively nice here recently. So it was a bit of a shock yesterday to see a few snowflakes! But nothing compared to this morning:

I opened the door and was met with a world of white. The snow's about 10-15cm thick, and it's still snowing pretty heavily this morning. What's quite cool is that the snowflakes clump together to make mega-snowflakes.

I certainly wasn't dressed for it, though - and I didn't have time to go upstairs again and fumble around in the dark for boots and thick socks. And I disregarded the little voice in my head telling me to take my umbrella. So it was a rather cold walk to the railway station.

In the UK, a lot of things come to a standstill when it snows. But this is apparently the heaviest snowfall in 18 years! Right now, all of the London buses are cancelled. Parts of the Tube are closed. The airports are closed. The schools are closed. People keep ringing my work saying that they can't get in, or asking if the building's open so they can skip coming into work. (I'm working on the switchboard, so I get all the calls.) And just like Californians, Brits can't drive in the wet. There are lots of accidents. Brendan had a fender-bender (but he and car are OK)! Craziness!

Snow balls! Someone had made this one, we just added to it! We were rolling it away towards the park when a door opened nearby and a head wrapped in scarves popped out and made a noise like, "Mmm! Emmm nn mm ommm mmm mimm!" Or something muffled that we couldn't hear, anyway. We surmised it was something to do with the snow ball, so we rolled it back.

We always knew England had funny names....

2009-01-26T14:36:00.005-08:00

But as this article from the NY Times shows, we didn't know just how funny!

Current favourites I've seen recently include Hatch Warren, Over Wallop, Middle Wallop, Woking, Dorking and Reading (said Redding). And of course our old village Awbridge, said Aye-bridge. Not to mention Milton Keynes' Cock and Bull pubs, the origin of the phrase "a cock and bull story". In any case, I already found British place names reasonably amusing, so this article just confirms it.

I noticed on our roadtrip that the US had a lot of "Buttes" and "Butts", though. It's all about how the language has changed over time.

A walk in the woods

2009-01-10T13:37:00.010-08:00

Today we went for a walk in Morgaston Woods, next to The Vyne, a huge country mansion near Sherbourne St. John. Jane Austen used to visit her friend who lived here, and I suspect it was the inspiration for the large country houses in her novels. I wanted to look around The Vyne as well, but unfortunately it's closed until March. (I found it by accident last weekend on my 11-mile long run, when I got lost. It's about 5 miles out of Basingstoke. I measured. It was a long, cold run.)

The past two days it's been snowing. The trees are particularly gorgeous, since everything is covered with a layer of spiky snow. I love it!

The wetlands had frozen over completely! The pond/lake here is only about 10cm deep in most places, and is frozen right through. I wish we owned ice skates - the ice was perfectly smooth and it would have made a fantastic, enormous ice rink! After we played around on it, other people came out on the ice as well.

It's snowing!

2009-01-09T14:39:00.003-08:00

Last night, it snowed here! So exciting. Here's a few pictures from this morning, looking out the window:

Brendan's scraping the powdery snow off the windscreen so he can go to work:

When I went for a run, the pond was frozen and snowed on. Kids were running around on it. I ran around on it too. Just because it's still a huge novelty.

The park was covered in a fine layer of snow. It mutes all the colours to white and grey.

On my way to choir tonight...

I love how the snow attaches itself to each individual blade of grass. When I came out after choir, the snow on each blade had doubled. It looked very odd, like thick fluffy worms. It's crunchy when you step on it.

Here's a photo taken this afternoon, just before my run about 4:30pm. Temperature around -2*C.

And here's similar grass around 9:30pm. Temperature estimated -3*C or -4*C. It's a lot less defined.

Snow makes me happy. It's just enough that it's fun and pretty, and not annoying. If it was several inches deep, it would start to be inconvenient. But at the moment, I'm enjoying it. The British are moaning about how it's one of the coldest winters in memory. So it's not just me then!

The Final Siege of Basing House

2009-01-04T05:38:00.007-08:00

Picture this: It's October 1645. You're a member of the Royalists, holed up in the old part of Basing House. The Roundheads have already attacked the house twice before and have been held off. Colonel John Dalbier and 800 men have had your company surrounded since August, but so far you've held strong.

Then a rumour goes around the men: Oliver Cromwell, second-in-command and later feared leader of the Roundheads, has arrived. Bringing heavy artillery, including a cannon which shoots 63-pound shots, pulled by 70 horses. And a few thousand angry men.

Under the "rules" of battle which governed at the time, once a decent hole in the walls had been made by the attackers, the defenders had no right of surrender. So Cromwell asked the Royalists to surrender. They said no.

So that night Cromwell blasted a hole in the defences. Rather than attacking immediately, he gave the Royalists the night to think about a surrender. (They really should have.) In the morning, the Royalists flew "the black flag of defiance" (aka "screw you!") instead, so the attacking army moved in. They even used the first poison gas attack, burning wet straw mixed with sulphur and arsenic. The house was overrun, and about 150 people were killed.

During the siege, the house was accidentally set on fire and burned down. The soldiers were (unusually) given leave to pillage the house, taking goods worth about 10 million pounds today. (For the full story by Alan Turton, click here. It's quite fascinating.)

So why am I telling you all this? On New Year's Day Brendan and I went to a free tour of the ruins of Basing House, given by one of the archaeologists in charge of the area, Alan Turton. It was a freezing, overcast day and everyone was cold. But Alan Turton was very interesting, which helped keep our minds off it. Basing House is located in the village of Old Basing, where I go running. It's about a mile from our house in a straight line, or 1.5 miles to walk. (England is a contrast. One moment you're in the city, the next, in the country in a little village! The poor people live in the city, on "estates", while the rich people live in the country.)

Here's the crest on the entrance. This was actually the 'farm' gate. It's been a bit weathered away by time. The family crest here said "Love Loyalty" in Latin, and the family certainly lived up to the motto!

The Basingstoke canal went through here in the 18th century, destroying a lot of archaeological history in the process. Before railways were invented, canals were the means of transporting goods throughout the country. The Basingstoke canal always had a bit of a problem getting enough water, though, and never was fully profitable. This bridge goes both uphill and turns a corner, and is very unusual. (Not sure about the baskets underneath.)

The "old house" of Basing House was built on a Norman castle fortification, with earthen walls. The castle was separate from the rest of the village, protected by a high earthen wall around the outside. The village was also protected by high walls topped with a wooden pallisade, and a dry moat.

Here we can see the walls, which were perfect to avoid cannon attacks (which fired straight) but were useless to avoid artillery fire, which went upwards and then came down and exploded, showering shrapnel everywhere. Nasty.

By the time of the 16th century, it had a large ornate gatehouse on the top. The original owner who built it up essentially worked his way up to becoming the Lord Chancellor (head of the bank) of England, was made the Marquis of Winchester, and was extremely wealthy. When he retired from the position, at the age of 101, 40,000 pounds was discovered to be "missing", or about 12 million in today's money! But instead of confronting the guy, they wrote it off "due to his advanced age". Hmmm.

The "new house" was built below the old house, on the left. It was huge. The two houses combined had 3800 rooms! It rivaled Hampton Court Palace for opulence and size. Henry the 8th stayed a few times. Once he stayed for 3 days, and the Marquis (mentioned above) grumbled in the margins that it was costing him 2,000 pounds to entertain the king with parties - equivalent to 600,000 pounds in today's money! For just three days!

What made it particularly expensive was that the visiting monarch didn't just bring themselves and a few people - they brought the entire court! The royal locksmith would go around before the visit, and change all the locks to the monarch's chambers so that only the monarch had a key.

Queen Elizabeth I also visited the house twice, once for 13 days, and she brought 1400 people with her as well as 400 French men! There wasn't enough room for the French to stay in the house as well, so they had to stay down the road at someone else's house at what was considered substandard accommodation. A separate banqueting hall had to be built for them in the garden! She was particularly fond of the gatehouse in the old house (in the picture below), and requested it.

Eventually the sons and grandsons of the original Marquis, who weren't quite as wealthy as he had been, had enough. They decided to discourage royal visits by demolishing some of the new house!

Here are the toilets of the gatehouse. The 'gong farmer' would clean them out at night through the small gate at the side which is filled up with stones. Alan Turton said that they must have been very clean, because the archaeologists were hoping to find interesting artifacts that had been accidentally dropped in the waste, but found nothing.

The kitchens were built into the hillside. It would have been so hot because of the huge ovens used, that only men were allowed inside. Since everyone was nearly naked, it was considered improper for women.

The area in the centre above was the dining room. The archaeologists surmise that they were actually built on the original Norman castle ruins, which were built on Roman ruins, but they don't want to have to destroy the existing ruins to find out.

It was lucky that we attended this talk, actually - the ruins are next open to the public at the end of 2010!

Dreaming of a White Christmas...

2009-01-03T08:22:00.018-08:00

The weekend before Christmas, Brendan and I met up with our lovely friend Lina from Bath, and went iceskating at Winchester Cathedral. It's a lot of fun. Even if I was the only one who fell over (and cracked and bruised both knees loudly).

Even Sheepie got involved. I think he got scared though.

It's a super-cute Lina!

The sessions here are around 10 pounds each for a one-hour session, which is really quite expensive given we went iceskating in SF last year for US$7 for a two-hour session. The ice rink was less crowded, though, which was more enjoyable. We both feel a bit more confident, too. Although I don't think I'm ready to skate backwards yet.

But first, we needed something to give us energy... so we looked around the Christmas market.

Until we found this.....

Belgian Waffles! With chocolate sauce!

Winchester is a really picturesque old market town which used to be the capital of England. There were people dancing in the high street to raise money for some charity or other.

We toured Winchester Cathedral, which was amazing. This cathedral was built in the 1100's, but the original church to the left of it was built in the 600's AD!

The front of the church.

The inside of the cathedral is absolutely gorgeous, with a high vaulted ceiling, and the carved quoir (wooden area at the front of the photo) where the choir sits. The organ can be seen on the right of the photo below.

The high altar features a carved 15thC screen. (Click to see bigger images.)

On the left and right of the altar, on ledges, sit little boxes with crowns on top. These are apparently the bones of the first bishops here, dating back from the 600's. The cathedral also includes St. Swithin's shrine, who was an early bishop (800's). There's a saying here that if it rains on St. Swithin's day, it will rain for the next 40 days. He apparently wanted to be buried out in the grounds, and was not pleased that he ended up inside instead in 971 (the ceremony was delayed by 40 days of torrential rain) and split between several different churches.

These paintings date from the 12th and 13th C, and are unique. The 13thC ceiling panel shows Christ in majesty.

Look for the 1578 graffiti!

The cathedral contains the graves of many famous people, such as the writer Jane Austen. She's buried in the floor near the entrance. There are also two enormous folio-sized books containing the names of those killed in battle, from the Winchester area. A surprising number (4-5 per page of maybe 100 names) were killed accidentally!

Next, we drove to Salisbury via what had obviously been an old Roman road. You can tell, because the road will go straight for miles and miles, disregarding all hills. Then it will suddenly turn a corner, on a hill, and go straight again. Apparently that was how the Roman surveyors were able to get their sight-lines. Anglo-Saxon roads wriggle all over the place!

Salisbury is another picturesque market town, similar to Winchester. We parked at the point which was once one of the gates into the town.

Everything was decorated for Christmas.

We stopped in at Salisbury Cathedral, and listened to the choir practice, but unfortunately couldn't stay long since Lina needed to catch her train back. Hopefully we can come here again soon.

Primark: Where the Seconds are Firsts

2008-12-27T05:08:00.005-08:00

Primark is a very cheap clothing retailer in the UK. You can buy a pair of jeans there for around £5 (NZ$12). A t-shirt is around £3 (NZ$7.50). And not just on sale, that's every day.

About a week ago I bought a grey jersey there which I quite like (it was £5.87), and so yesterday I decided to go back and get another one of the same style, but in a different colour.

I bought it, took it home, took of the tags, put it on, and then immediately took it off again because it was inside out. Unfortunately, when I pulled it through the other way, it was still inside out.

My tan jersey, not inside out.

During the making of the jersey, someone had obviously forgotten to turn it inside out before sewing the trim on. So the sleeves, the shoulders and the strip around the bottom were all overlocked on the outside rather than the inside. Just to be sure, I compared it with the grey version, which had no such problems.

We still had the receipt, so we decided to take it back this morning. Since I did like the style, I decided to get a replacement. However, when I went to pick one out, they were all sewn like that.

It's too haphazard to be an intentional design, so we think the mistake must have been made on the whole tan-coloured line. Primark just decided to just go ahead and try to sell them anyway. Still for £5.87, it's hard to complain.

The British Christmas Tree Adventure

2008-12-21T05:01:00.015-08:00

It was a bright and sunny day. Freezing cold. Everywhere, white frost sparkled and crunched underfoot as we made our way across the long grass of the paddock, to the stand of Christmas trees by the creek.

We were undertaking a British tradition, as introduced to us by Mike: the yearly finding of the Christmas tree.

Apparently, the traditions are:

1.) You actually have a *real* Christmas tree. And it's not a Radiata (North American) Pine, either. It has short little needles. The same type of tree seems to be standard throughout Hampshire, if not most of the UK.

(Here is the one we eventually chose.)
2.) Taking a tractor ride to the stand of pines grown for the occasion.

I thought he was joking, and that it was just for the kids. But, no. Everyone climbs on the back of a trailer pulled by a tractor with straw bales for seats. The tractor is decorated. Cheesily.

3.) Picking a tree takes a long time. Actual arguments break out over which is the "best" tree. One with the perfect blend of symmetry, an even "spread" of branches vertically, and strong top branches to put angels on.

4.) The company lends you spades (so you can literally dig up your tree and plant it in a bucket) or a saw.

It's a huge family affair, and everyone takes photos.

The Christmas tree farm also doubled as fishing ponds stocked with fish, where you could sit and fish, for a fee. (I think that's cheating, but the Brits are big on fishing and who has a fishing licence and who gets what spot. Meh.) The night before, the temperature had been around -6*C after midnight. A hoar frost. The pond had ice on it. Mike threw a stick into the water. It skittered across the surface and came to rest. The top of the pond was solid ice, about 2cm thick.

I wanted to put Sheepie on top of the ice for a photo, but I didn't want to fall in. So Brendan was leaning down to put him on the ice when the old man who had been driving the tractor saw us from the other side of the paddock, and bellowed, "Oi! Don't break the ice! You'll scare the fish!" I think he misunderstood what we were doing, because Brendan was holding a small saw in the other hand.

After looking at many, many trees, eventually Mike was satisfied he'd found the best one, although it was slightly bare at the back. It was surprisingly light to carry.

(Mike had a Christmas party with 60 mince pies and most of the village attending. The village kids absolutely loved decorating it! Brendan and I are not huge mince pie fans, so we ate far too many Roses chocolates instead and had to buy Mike a new tin! And then we ate half of that one in one day too. Oops...)

I hope y'all have a fantastic and safe Christmas holiday - we're going to be spending Christmas Day with Brendan's aunty Yvonne, uncle Andrew and cousin Turner (and friends) down in Southampton. Which will be fun, I think. We're having a no-present Christmas this year, owing to cost of postage>funds.

Basingstoke, home of the 'chavs'

2008-12-18T14:29:00.022-08:00

Apparently. 'Chavs' is technically a British word for street kids, but it seems to generally connotate people of low class/ intellect, who are 'trashy' and wear baseball caps and sweatsuits. Or something like that. Think the character 'Vicky Pollard' ("Yeahbutnahbutyeah") of the TV Show 'Little Britain' or groups of Cockney 'lads' ("innit?").

Popular consensus is that there are a lot of 'chavs' in Basingstoke, according to this Hampshire Chronicle article about the wonders of a Primark (cheap clothing shop) coming to Basingstoke. (The comments section is priceless, and fascinating from a cultural point of view. It very clearly shows British class distinctions - here, where you shop and what you buy is far more important than NZ, or even than the US!)

Anyway, we are very pleased to have moved back into civilisation last Sunday, chavs or no chavs. To a place with streetlights. Public transport. Being able to walk 10 minutes to shops. And most importantly, *warmness*. I was permanently cold at the last house. Especially so before our clothing arrived from the US, as we assumed we'd retrieve it the same month (summer). So I'd brought just one pair of jeans and one jersey/sweater. The house was heated only late at night and early morning, and was often colder inside than out. My hands swelled up so much from chillblains I couldn't wear rings. Within about 3 days here, in a warm room, the swelling had gone down.

Basingstoke itself is boring, but has been 'prettied up' by the local council. (Reminds us of Milton Keynes, actually.) It won 9th in the "Crap towns" survey in 2003. Probably the NZ equivalent would be Palmerston North.

While it doesn't have the charm of nearby Winchester or other 'market towns', Basingstoke does have a cute "Top of town" market area of shops in the original village style, and a nice railway station. The park by our house has also been improved with fountains in the ponds, and it has great running/walking tracks similar to the MK 'redways'. The large mall is the key feature (Top Gear apparently spent a day a few weeks ago, racing cars inside it!) and has obviously had a lot of money spent on it.

However, the houses in the suburbs are ugly, with a same-ness of white walls, a flat roof and golden bricks. Or red bricks. Entertainment options are about average for a city like this: we don't care to experience the nightlife in Basingstoke's four clubs, or check out the local neighbourhood pub, called 'Skewers', or visit the Vue movie theatre. (We're incredibly boring by most people's standards, aren't we?!)

So while I'm honest about Basingstoke's flaws, it's not a bad city, contrary to the 2003 "Crap Towns" survey. And I'm sure it's improved a lot since then. It has low unemployment, and seems to be OK for safety, as long as you're not in Popley. It's 45 minutes to central London by express train, and has lots of good points. The supermarkets are only 10 mins walk away, parking in our area is not an issue (although you do have to pay in the downtown area - hence why supermarket proximity is important) and there are plenty of places for me to run which don't involve narrow,unlit roads with hedges on either side,with cars doing 60mph along them. And we're not 4 miles from civilisation. We're looking forward to exploring Basingstoke more.

Marathoning

2008-12-07T15:35:00.002-08:00

Today I reached a marathon-training milestone: I ran 10 miles. It's the longest I have ever run, and I'm surprised at how much it wiped me out to do an extra mile. Now I just have to add another 3 miles (approx 30 mins running time) to get to the half-marathon (in March)!

I had to run most of the way in the dark, along the narrow roads, unfortunately. I had a little torch so I could at least shine it at cars and make them slow down for me. I know someone else who drives a few miles away to the New Forest so she can run there instead, since she also worries about the cars.

Town and Country

2008-12-04T14:40:00.004-08:00

Famous last words... before we arrived here, I mentioned to Brendan that I might like to live in a quaint English village. Now, after almost two months of living in a quaint English village, I am ready to give up and run screaming back to the city again. Why? Because of streetlights. Yes, streetlights. At 4pm the sun has already gone down, since it's winter here, and by 5pm it is pitch black. And apparently the villagers don't want streetlights, since it means they would then be a town, forbid.

So I end up doing my marathon training between 3 - 4:50 pm, before it gets too dark to see the road. It's a bit worrying running along the country roads here sometimes, since they are mostly one-way and very narrow and winding, with tall hedges on either side.

Unlike New Zealand, where 'living in the country' really means that you can live at least 30 minutes from anywhere, living in the 'country' in the UK means that you live in a sort of suburb next door to about 50 houses, interspersed with maybe 5 paddocks on a 3km stretch of road. So it's really more like living on the outskirts of a town, but without the benefits of access to shops, street lights or public transport. We're trying to juggle two people, one car at the moment, made easier since I mostly use the car to attend job interviews in Southampton.

Add to this our landlord issues, and you have a recipie for Brendan and Tina moving again. Of course this was always meant to be a temporary fix until we could find a house in town, but it's a bit more urgent now. So we'll let you all know when we move.

A weekend in Paris: Part 2

2008-11-30T05:04:00.044-08:00

We got up bright and early in the morning. It was cold, and the small patch of blue sky above us soon closed over to gray.

This small dog on the Metro was unhappy. I don't think it liked the noise and movement. We were lucky - because we were under 26, and it was a weekend, we could get all-day Metro (subway) tickets for E3.20, the price of a return ticket. Paris seems to have quite a few discounts if you're under 25 or 26 - good for frugal backpackers!

We were following a suggested walk on Wiki Travel, which quite often has useful suggested itineraries. The first stop was the Arc de Triompf. It's bigger than it looks.

Built by Napoleon to celebrate his war victories, the Arc is at the centre of a large, 6-laned roundabout. Driving around it is completely chaotic, as we shall later see, and it has no specified lanes.

It was freezing cold as we walked from the Arc de Triompf to the Champs Elysees, the main shopping street in Paris. It started to snow! Tui was very disappointed as all her friends told her about it, but she was inside working.

Because I was travelling with two boys, we had to stop off at the Peugeot showroom to look at concept cars. This is the back of one. I think it looks like a bug. A very shiny bug, but still a bug.

This is my favourite shop in the world. I'm so disappointed they don't really have Sephora in the UK. At least, I've never seen it there.

It's probably also worth mention the number of scams we came across at this part of our trip. Brendan had read up on them before we left, and pretty much every one described happened to us! I guess the problem with big cameras is that it always marks you as a tourist, even when I try and keep the camera itself inside my bag and just wear the strap showing. My hands were freezing, because unlike Geoff and Brendan, I had to keep one hand on the camera and my bag at all times.

Anyway, the most common one was that a young woman or boy would come up to us and ask, "Do you speak English?" If we had said yes, they would have started a sob story about how they were trapped in Paris with no money to get to their child in another city. This happened to us at least 6 times in the one day, at various places. After the first three, we just said "No" in Spanish instead, or ignored them, and they didn't pursue anything further, even though they would have heard us speaking in English.

Another scam was a man who asked Brendan to put his finger in this loop of string. The idea being that you couldn't step back as easily when he asked you for money, as your finger was caught in the string.

Here is the Grand Palais. I assume the glass fountains are usually on.

This statue in front of the Grand Palais celebrates the French Revolution, or something similar.

It was really cold, as the snow turned from huge flakes swirling occasionally, to full rain. We searched for hats and Brendan for gloves, finally finding some on the street markets at the end of the Champs Elysees.

This woman was cooking sausages and things in what looked like a giant wok, complete with massive handle.

The Square at the end of the Champs Elysees was quite pretty, and contained a lot of fountains and monuments.

From here we headed past the Square and into the gardens at the end. Although it was a bit too cold for lovers today, Tui said that it normally was filled with the stereotypical "lovers in the park".

Geoff took a rest while I stressed to Brendan about the camera and how it was getting fogged up and wet all the time and couldn't take good photos and the sensor wasn't working again. (Can you tell I am obsessive about being able to take pictures?!)

At the end of the gardens lives the Louvre Museum, home of the Mona Lisa and many other amazing and famous paintings.

We were quite frozen by now, so we went into the Louvre to have lunch. Unfortunately though we didn't have time to stand in line and look at paintings - we'll have to save that for next time!

Next, we met up with Tui and headed along the Seine river. It would have been very nice to walk along here in summer, but at the time it was windy and raining, and our umbrellas weren't impressed.

On an island in the Seine, is the cathedral of Notre Dame.

Inside, half the church was shut off for a Mass at 4pm, and tourists wandered around the rest. It was very beautiful.

The famous stained-glass windows in the nave.

This is just before the service started - I got in the way of the priests - oops!

View from the front of the church:

The choir hang out before the service. They're surprisingly small, a chamber choir. I felt very lucky to hear them.

At the back of the church, behind the altar, there were a series of rooms which were the graves of wealthy people buried there. The stained-glass windows here were incredibly detailed.

Mass in progress.

From Notre Dame we said bye to Tui and went to the Eiffel Tower. It's one of the few famous monuments that's actually far bigger than we expected! The elevators go up and down on an angle up the legs.

Obligatory tourist photo...

There were a lot of police around, and soldiers with automatic weapons. I guess the Tower is a bit of an obvious target. I still can't get over the amount of security in other countries compared to NZ sometimes. It's a pain, because people don't understand that you're just a tourist, and freak out when you take photos. Argh.

There was a little pond at the back end of the park.

The Arc de Triompf beckoned as it started to get dark. We managed to get discounted tickets (E5.50 instead of 9.00) for being under 25, yay! You can climb up inside the Arc onto the roof, to get a fantastic view of Paris. It was well worth it.

The French version of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is under the Arc. The only time the flame has ever gone out was when a drunk Mexican guy peed on it! Yucky.

The stairs are a bit like the ones in Gaudi's Sagrada Familia - narrow, spiral and many. There are 285, I think.

We stood out on the roof and watched the crazy chaotic roundabout that the Arc sits on. With traffic coming from 6 directions, controlled only by stoplights onto the intersection, cars tend to bunch up in lanes of three.

After a while we decided to go back inside and wait for it to be a little darker. Here are some views to compare, between early and later evening:

Looking towards downtown Paris (in the second photo you can see some of the crazy roundabout antics)

The Champs Elysees

The Eiffel Tower (lit up in blue, with the Euro flag)

Finally, as we left the Arc, there were some soldiers standing silently at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was pouring with rain. The enormous flags flapped. One of them had to catch his red beret as the wind took it.

We drove the long journey back to Calais, arriving around 11pm. I got out of the car on one street to take a photo, and rapidly got back in the car when I saw a group of 6 guys walking down the street a little way off, towards us. Unfortunately I lost my beret, and it was too late to go back and get it since we were already through customs.

Here is the famous town hall in Calais. I am extremely sad about my beret. Maybe I can get Tui to buy me another one when she comes over at Christmas.

A weekend in Paris: Part 1

2008-11-27T11:38:00.016-08:00

Lying awake in bed at 11pm, we were too excited to sleep. In just a few short hours we had to get up again and drive to London.

At 3am on Friday night, we were meeting Geoff on the outskirts of London, before driving to Dover, and catching the ferry to Calais, France. From there we would drive to Paris.

As well as driving on the right hand side of the road again (not a big deal for us, of course, but more so for Geoff who forgot twice), driving in France is more of an expedition than in Britain. For a start, there are a whole lot of additional requirements under "Things you need with you in the car":

reflective roadside triangle
fluorescent vest
spare bulbs for your headlights
first aid kit
mini fire extinguisher
GB sticker for the back of your car (denotes RH drive car)
headlight covers/ stickers (to point the headlight beams in the opposite direction)

Also, the signs were in km not miles, so they required mental calculation sometimes. Entering roundabouts on the right took a bit of getting used to.

Dover is very picturesque, with the white cliffs towering over the houses all stuck together. We went through customs on the UK side first. The sailing was at 6am. I stood outside on the deck in the cold, watching the sun rise, for much of the hour-long trip, since I didn't want to feel sea-sick.

The English Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world. I counted about 9 boats on each side just heading out of Dover!

We decided to avoid the toll motorways and drive through the French countryside instead. It was absolutely gorgeous. Little villages every few miles, each with its own church and houses stuck together. (I don't understand why there is so much space and yet the houses are still stuck together.) The sky was dark and heavy. It snowed the first snow of the season, splatting on our windshield.

We stopped off in Arras, about 2 hours' drive from Calais, to see a site of particular interest to New Zealanders. The Wellington Quarry was one of a number of chalk quarries around the town of Arras. In WWI, New Zealand sappers were tasked with linking up the quarries with a series of tunnels so that 25,000 men could hide in the tunnels undetected for several months, before a successful attack on the German front lines. The New Zealanders were all "bantams", guys who were too short for the army. They named the quarries after their home towns, e.g. Wellington, Auckland, Blenheim, Christchurch. The Wellington Quarry has been restored, and turned into a museum. (I think they confused Australia with NZ here. The koala on the left is not a NZ national symbol, but an Aussie one. The Kiwi is, however.)

The black writing and numbers are how the men found their way around.

In WWII, the tunnels were also used as air raid shelters for the townspeople of Arras. The writing on the walls from that time is red.

Soldiers drew graffiti on the walls. This one commemorates a fallen comrade. Look for the crucifix and the sad face.

It was very damp and cold in the tunnels, and the chalk walls were wet. Occasionally a large drop of water would fall. One can only imagine the plight of one soldier, who complained that his bunk bed was dripped on constantly and he had to sleep under a waterproof sheet! Above ground, it was snowing.

Here's a tunnel dug by the sappers, with one of the original mining buckets. British engineers built a small railroad to take the rubble out.

When it was time for the battle, the men were told to leave their greatcoats (heavy jackets) behind, even though it was freezing. They went up these stairs, and a hole was blasted to the open trenches. The sign on the left you can see in the photo, says "No 10 exit to circular trench". Many men died in this battle.

When we finally got into Paris in the evening, we called our friend Tui and met up with her. It was awesome to see someone we actually knew! It's a bit lonely out here in the country.

English Road Trip! Or, how much can we fit into our car?

2008-11-19T14:03:00.018-08:00

Doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "American Road Trip" now, does it?

Twenty-two roundabouts (I counted), 3.5 hours and 164 miles later, we had traversed the English countryside and arrived in Mildenhall, Suffolk, to collect our boxes which had been carefully shipped from San Francisco to what had been labelled "London" by the geographically challenged moving company. The small town of Mildenhall, Suffolk, is *not* "London". It's twice the distance from Southampton to London, actually.

We pulled up to the warehouse after paying a bunch of extra shipping charges the company had conveniently "forgotten" to mention originally. The three young guys at the warehouse eyed our tiny car critically. "Why didn't you get it delivered?" asked one accusingly.

Our boxes arrived. The three guys looked at the hatchback car, then at the boxes. (1.5m of cubic space). The boxes looked smaller than I remembered. The three guys looked at the car. "You're not gonna get all that in, innit," said one.*

By careful packing, and a bit of jumping on the boot for the last backpack, we did indeed get it all in without resorting to tying things to the roof or holding things on laps. We can now confirm that a Ford Fiesta has a back space of 1.5 cubic metres exactly. The three guys watching cheered. They'd been convinced we'd never fit it all in.

We took this photo after we got in the car. I'm driving.

As we were near Cambridge, I convinced Brendan we should visit. So I set "Kings College Cambridge" on the GPS, and started driving. And rapidly had to do some "creative" driving in the face of blocked-off streets and angry buses who could go over bollards that we couldn't. Oops.

Cambridge is super-cute, an old city with lots of historic places. It's divided up into "colleges", effectively halls of residence for students as I recall. They're all hundreds of years old and look extremely imposing. It also has the cutest shops ever.

You can take a "punt" on the river. It's very pretty.

We went into Trinity College. This is especially exciting for me, since it's the source of my piano exams!

We found this amazing room, I think it was the Trinity Chapel. (Here's some more info about it.) Right behind the viewpoint of this photograph, the organ sits above the door. On the other side of the door is a white room with white marble/ plaster statues. Dust motes shone in the air in front of the painting above the altar at the far end, with a black grand piano below it. (Click on the photo for a better look.) Apparently the painting is by American artist Benjamin West.

Cambridge is very student-y. Everywhere students were hurrying around to class or biking around. It has an enormous bike population - everywhere you looked, bikes were lined up along railings and walls. Some weren't even chained up!

Finally we got to Kings College, and the Kings College Chapel. "Chapel" isn't really the right name for it, as "Cathedral" would be more suitable to describe its size. Unfortunately we couldn't go inside - will have to come back!

A dear friend of mine (and former organ tutor) was actually Organ Scholar at Kings College Chapel as a young man, at least 60 years ago. Unfortunately when WWII broke out, he had to join the airforce and fly planes instead! So it was especially cool to see the chapel.

It's very large. And hiding behind a tree in this picture, but it was the best one I had to show the scale.

Then we rushed back to grab our car before our parking meter ran out, and braved the awful traffic, 4 hours and 50 roundabouts to get home. (Going via Cambridge meant we had to take a different route, which involved a lot more roundabouts. The British love roundabouts to the exclusion of any other kind of intersection. It's a national obsession.)

*("Innit" is Cockney for the NZ "Aye/Eh/Ae" quantifier. Other UK variations include "Yeah", but we think "innit" is the funniest.)

Car Experiments, Mark II

2008-11-11T13:34:00.008-08:00

Today was an experiment in bunny-hopping. Or actually, avoiding bunny-hopping. And, for the most part, we did pretty well.

Brendan and I bought a car. A manual, or "stick shift", to be precise. The last time I actually drove a manual for any distance was at 17, so I have somewhat limited experience. Brendan had never driven a manual car. In the US, we always drove automatics, partly because almost all cars in the US are automatics, and partly because we preferred them. (Especially in the Fat Kiwi.) It was up to me to drive it home. I was a bit nervous. Would I forget how to do it? Would I stall at inopportune times? Would people honk at me?

We met outside the acres of car parks at IBM. The car seller was an Indian man who was switching projects and leaving the country. He showed us his Texan licence (he'd worked for IBM in Texas once), and we showed him our Californian ones. I looked at the car. It was clean and well looked-after. There was a "Baby on Board" sticker on the back. I wondered how long it had been on there. (Brendan ripped it off almost immediately.)

Apart from accidentally changing into 2nd at highway speeds and freaking out the cars behind us, we managed to get home with only 3 stalls (and one accidental red light run) in various parts of Romsey, and zero honking. The last part amazes me. If I stalled somewhere in the US, I can guarantee that at least 3 drivers behind me would be honking in a New York minute.

This is me right after I drove it home. Isn't it awesome that we live right by the red phone box?

Once we were safely home, Brendan's driver education began. We drove around a little 3-mile circuit around the country roads, while Brendan practiced stopping and starting and changing gears. He picked it up very quickly!

Next, we headed back into "town" to go shopping, with Brendan driving. We set the GPS to find Tesco in Eastleigh. We arrived at the Tesco, to find it was a dairy-sized "express". No problem, we'll find the next Tesco. Also an "express". Oh dear. Then we spotted a Lidl, which is something like Aldi's, supermarkets which only sell about 300 of the most commonly used products and foods but are generally very cheap. So as long as you don't need something specific, like baking powder, you're OK.

I drove on the way back. The GPS took us straight on the motor/freeway! Luckily we've had a lot of practice at freeway driving, but it's still a bit scary nonetheless.

Drivers seem to be mostly very considerate about giving right of way, which I guess is how they avoid having head-on collisions on the tiny, narrow, mostly one-laned roads. Our landlord, Mike, absolutely hoons along the roads here in his Mini. I felt quite carsick when I got out of his car this morning.

It was actually sunny for once, and the trees in autumnal colour are amazing.

Overall, we're incredibly pleased to finally have a car. It's been quite hard (and expensive in taxi/ bus costs) living 4 miles from town, and both of us felt quite isolated here without a car. To quote Brendan's favourite song of the moment, "I've got freedom...."

We're Going on a Gaudi Hunt!

2008-10-31T14:59:00.052-08:00

We're going on a Gaudi hunt - are you scared? Antoni Gaudi was a Spanish (Catalan) architect famous for his fantastical, organic-looking buildings and awesome mosaics. His buildings are some of the "must-see's" of Barcelona. (Apologies that this is such a huge post!)

Since many of these buildings required an expensive ticket to get in, we decided to simply focus on the ones we were most interested in.

Casa Mila ('The quarry)
We decided not to go in, based on the ticket price and that the roof (which contains some of the best features) was closed due to the rain. (Spot the line of tourists waiting to get in.)

Here is the cool front door:

Casa Batllo
("Baat-yo", based on a skeleton - can you see the "ribs"?) Casa Batllo is covered in amazing mosaics, like much of Gaudi's work.

Parc Guell
A 20-hectare park designed by Gaudi, it also features two gatehouses which look like gingerbread houses! I love them. They even have lollipop glass windows.

This is the opposite side, taken from the bottom of the steps in front of the gatehouses.

Pavillion - I can't tell where the ground starts or ends, and the buildings begin!

Huge butterfly gate of wrought iron, built by Gaudi.

The inside, right behind the gate in the above photo... I seriously wonder how he built this?

And the outside....

Gaudi designed this marketplace (the white top is the plaza, the bottom with the columns is the covered marketplace).

One of the gargoyles/ drainpipes from the pavilion:

The ceiling of the marketplace is made up of a series of mosaic domes.

This is the dragon "guardian" of the park. Everyone wanted its photo!

Gaudi's apartment in Parc Guell
This pink candy-floss coloured apartment was Gaudi's home,and is now a not-too-informative museum. It features furniture designed by him.

Cute furniture!!

I've saved the best for last: La Sagrada Familia (Atonement Cathedral of the Sacred Family)

This cathedral is has been under construction for the past hundred years, and still has 30-80 years of construction left. It defies belief. Some people love it, some hate it. We're in the first camp. Amazingly, the cost of construction is funded entirely by tourist ticket sales and patrons.

Here is what the cathedral is intended to look like once completed. It's almost like a giant cross in layout, with the nave being the long arm(leg?) of the cross.

Here is the Nave, looking towards the back of the church. It's still under quite a lot of construction. It's still open at the back, and water can come in. In this picture, you can see that Gaudi intended the pillars to be like trees - can you see the branches and leaves/ flowers at the top?

Only a few of the stained glass windows have been installed. This one is the first in the series near the Passion Facade.

Gaudi devoted the last 40 years of his life to the Cathedral's construction. He died in hospital three days after being hit by a tram in Barcelona. For the first few days, no-one recognised him, as his clothes were held together by pins and he was sleeping in the workshop on-site. (He was probably a bit wild and woolly!)

Unfortunately in the 1935 Spanish Civil War, his plans, models and a lot of the cathedral were smashed, so people are still debating about how to solve the complex engineering issues faced in construction. Other sculptors have created new sculptures and artworks in a different style.

The Nativity Facade is the one which most bears Gaudi's influence - it's a riot of animals and people looking at the Christ Child. Stone turtles are carved in the base of the pillars at the front.

If you look carefully, you can see the Christmas tree-like cypress tree in the centre of the towers, with doves on it.

Here is Brendan in front of the Passion Facade, which depicts the last few days before Christ's death and resurrection. You can see the style of the sculptures here is different because they were done by a different sculptor, although the anchoring pillars are Gaudi's.

After waiting in line for an hour and a half, we paid 2.50 Euros for the lift (in addition to the entry ticket), to take us up the 350 stairs inside the towers. From there we wandered around, enjoying the amazing views of Barcelona and the tiny stairs!

The towers are covered in gauze wire at the top to avoid birds nesting in them.

The towers are so narrow, they barely fit one person in! Not for the claustrophobic.

Looking down inside the bottom of the towers. When they're all completed, huge bells will hang in them.

Here is the central dome - an even-larger tower is planned for behind it!

Gaudi used nature as inspiration - here are some mosaic fruits by the Nave.

The views of Barcelona are fantastic!

The little balconies are a bit disconcerting, though.

Here is a secret view of the church, not usually seen by tourists, who are behind the blue barrier on the right.

The coolest part of the stairs is the end, where they wound around in a tight spiral with a gap straight to the bottom. Lots of people got a bit nauseous and wobbly at this part.

One OysterCard, two uses

2008-10-27T09:46:00.009-08:00

Part of the fun of low-cost travelling is organising food. Last weekend, Geoff, Brendan and I were in Spain for five days. Rather than visit restaurants all the time, we opted to browse the local markets and supermarkets (aka "La supermercat"), for bread, cheese, pepperoni and fruit.

Boqueria Markets, Barcelona

Which is all well and good, of course, except when you're missing a knife. Supermercats don't stock disposable knives, and all pocketknives have been left behind to avoid confiscation at the airport. What are a group of hungry travellers to do?

Enter the humble OysterCard: your versatile travel companion. Not only for intra-London transport!

(Geoff assures us it's been in his wallet, and is therefore clean. We wash it anyway.)

It slices toughened salami, cake, three different cheeses of varying density, and the fragile sensibilities of the locals.

The car saga: Or, how we gained and lost a car on the same day

2008-10-16T11:48:00.009-07:00

"The car's broken down and I'm just standing here on the M3."

Geoff sounded a bit lost. The night before, he'd been out to East London to check out a car for us, and had decided to buy it. We needed a car because we now live in the country, 5 miles from civilisation. We also needed a car because we were flying out of Luton Airport to Barcelona on Thursday, along with Geoff, and arriving back home around midnight on Tuesday. Luton Airport is 3.5 hours away by various trains, and buses to our place from Romsey are sporadic, at best.

So, Geoff was helping us buy a car. He'd already test-driven it the day before without incident. But after 30 miles, it died completely at the start of the M3 (motorway), leaving him stranded! Geoff was still around 100 miles away from our house, and it was rush hour. Picking him up with our flatmates' car was not an option.

After careful scrutiny of our car insurance policy (bought at 11pm the night before!), I realised that it included free breakdown insurance. I relayed the news to a very relieved Geoff, who was still stranded on the M3 watching the cars whizz by.

Unfortunately, the tow company would only tow for 20 miles. Dumping the car back on the seller's doorstep wasn't an option, as much as we wanted to! I found a garage 20 miles towards London, gave the address to the tow company, and the car was there for the night. It also happened to be the closest to the Tube Station.

The next morning, Geoff arrived early at the garage. It refused to repair the car, saying it would only break again. Also, the cost to repair would be more than the cost of the car. We were leaving for Barcelona about 8 hours later, and the car would almost certainly be towed if we left it on the street. Geoff managed to sell it for scrap about 3 hours before we were due to be at the airport, just to get rid of it.

To summarise: we bought, and lost a car in one day. We never actually saw it, only a photo from Geoff. And now we don't have the money to buy another car, since we spent it on train tickets to Luton Airport.

Here is a gratuitous photo from our day.

2008-10-09T16:31:00.006-07:00

Actually, several photos. This is the little park behind our house. We've never been in it before. Usually the man-screams of basketball or soccer games are broadcast from here.

The park mostly consists of a half-basketball court, and an obstacle course. I've just been for a run here (4 miles) so you can see my workout gear and my brand new running shoes. I always wear this little shrug (grey jacket) when I run, since my arms get cold.

Out of nowhere a blurry grey shape with bright blue eyes jumped all over me and then onto Brendan. It looked like a wolf. Here they are playing. (My white t-shirt wasn't happy with the muddy claw marks.)

The dog was ecstatic, running around the small park and playfighting with Brendan. The owner came along, and explained the dog was a teenage puppy, and it had escaped. Dog and owner left at a run as the dog pulled on the leash.

Oh no, not Waitrose!

2008-10-09T15:56:00.008-07:00

It's horrific. The only supermarket in Romsey is Waitrose.

Not that there's anything particularly wrong with Waitrose. However, supermarkets in Britain tend to be either expensive (Marks & Spencers, Waitrose), or cheap (Tesco, Sainsburys, Aldis). If you buy the supermarket brand products, it's way cheaper. E.g. I found most packets of 500g penne pasta in Sainsburys were around 1.56 pounds. Similar penne pasta labelled "Sainsburys Basics" cost 18p. Pasta, after all, is just duram wheat flour, water and egg white made into pretty shapes. Now, if only they could make wholemeal pasta at that price....

For Kiwis, this is a bit like the only supermarket in town being Woolworths or New World. Or even the Organic Shop. Bummer, it's expensive, small and mostly stocks organic goat cheese and twelve different kinds of Belgium hot chocolate powder. (I counted. The one in Milton Keynes.)

However, for Brits, it's not just about price and access to twelve different kinds of hot chocolate powder. Marks & Spencers is more like a department store with a grocery tacked on the side. It sells things like organic, (presumably happy) chicken meat for NZ$40/kg. It also has Simply M&S, a standalone shop in the rail stations and chemists/drugstores (seriously) offering gourmet packaged meals at equally gourmet prices.

As our friend Becky once observed about British life, where you shop for your groceries apparently defines you. How else to explain how keen everyone is to lug around a cloth shopping bag emblazoned with 'M&S' and a suitably arty black and white image of a woman's head or green stenciled leaves? Marks & Spencers: the only supermarket for the hipster. It's hip to be green.

Luckily for us, we just care if it's nutritious and cheap. Being new to a country has its advantages. Now we definitely need a car! Winchester's only 11 miles away, and I hear Sainsburys calling.

The village of Romsey

2008-10-09T07:17:00.004-07:00

... is apparently our next housing destination. We've had no luck finding something in Winchester itself, or even Eastleigh for that matter. We confirmed the details with the landlord today, and we're moving in on Sunday! Thanks to everyone for thoughts, prayers and general sympathy. (I was going to show you all where Romsey is on the map, but you'll have to look it up yourself. Google Maps and Blogger are both non-cooperative today.)

We're also looking into getting a car. I'm in two minds about this: on the one hand, I'd prefer to support public transport for the environmental aspect. I'd also prefer not to deal with the hassles of a car, and car insurance and ownership is far more expensive than the US. We'd pay the same amount in insurance per month here as we did in the US per six months!

On the other hand, it's hard to get around without a car, especially since we'll be living in a village, and public transport is extremely expensive. (E.g. travelling by train from here to Winchester is 64 pounds each!) So if we want to do any travelling, a car will pay for itself in train tickets over a year. Also, I may still end up working in London, although I'd prefer to work closer to home to avoid a two hour commute.

G, our ex-flatmate currently living in London, and used-car mogul par excellence, is helping us search. It would be great to find something by the weekend, so we can move all our stuff. G's also graciously agreed to teach us "the ways of the Force", as he calls it: driving "stick" shift. Last time he tried to teach me, the story became a Wellington urban legend amongst certain New World Thorndon (supermarket) workers .... F

Thoughts? Car? No car?

... as soon as we find a house

2008-10-05T07:22:00.003-07:00

It's a little harder than we expected to find a new place in Winchester - we really need one by this week so Brendan can start work down there. Either there aren't many rooms available, or we're just looking in the wrong places. I'm sure we'll sort something out soon.

For the past month, I've been training for a half-marathon (exact one TBA). Today I'm about to do seven miles, the longest run this week. It's cold and raining - should be 'interesting'. Hopefully Brendan will be brave enough to come with me on his bike!

We're moving!

2008-10-02T09:19:00.003-07:00

Brendan has been offered a job in Hursley, a little village down near Southampton at the bottom of the country. So we're leaving Milton Keynes and our obsessively tidy Sri Lankhan flatmates* behind and moving to Winchester.

Winchester has apparently been voted "Best Place to Live", and was the ancient capital of England. I'm particularly interested in Winchester Cathedral. It's the longest cathedral in Europe. Building started in 1027 AD, and by 1100 the monks had moved in.

Winchester Cathedral is also famous because Jane Austin, writer of "Pride and Predjudice" is buried there. Plus, it has ice-skating! (Brendan jokes that it combines two of my favourite things.) Unfortunately I won't be able to sing in the choir there, but oh well. The Girls choir is limited to age 17 and under.

So this weekend we hope to do some intensive searching for a new room, and collect our many boxes where they have languished for the past week on a London dock somewhere. Wish us luck!

*Only one is obsessively tidy, but it affects everyone. "Tee - na! Never, never [put dirty pot in sink, etc. etc.]."

Bedford

2008-09-25T13:14:00.008-07:00

About two weeks ago, Brendan and I took the bus to Bedford, a town about 14 miles north of MK. We went to jump through official hoops to get a National Insurance Number. This is your tax number.

However, unlike the US, you're not considered a non-person without one, and you can still work. You just end up paying the maximum tax rate (which I think is around 25% in Britain - hardly a lot compared to NZ's 40% max rate!), and companies are a bit shy of hiring you in case you're not 'legal'.

In the true tradition of UK weather, it was lovely and cloudy (note: not actually sunny) the whole 40-min trip on the bus. As soon as we got off the bus, the heavens opened and it poured with rain. It did this on the return trip to Milton Keynes, too, with even more vigour. Luckily Brendan insisted on bringing both umbrellas.

Compared to NZ or the US, there are so many little villages. You only have to drive about 5km most of the time before getting to another little village with its own strong sense of community. Most of the little towns have satellite villages all around. It's very picturesque. Milton Keynes itself is made up of 3 larger towns and 15 villages combined! (I have the feeling I may have mentioned this in another post - apologies if so.)

This house was for sale opposite the Job Center - it even has a tiny clock! I love it.

After, we went for a walk around Bedford to find some food. Brendan ate fish'n'chips while I was in my meeting. By the time he came out of his meeting, after mine, the shop was shut!

We couldn't find any other fish'n'chip shops, so instead I bought chocolate biscuits (cookies) and we wandered around a central shopping street until we arrived back at the bus station. Another fish'n'chip shop had been there at the bus station all along! So I had my first chips in the UK with salt and vinegar on them. Overall they were OK, but I felt rather off-colour later since I hadn't eaten chips for about a year! Plus the bus driver was rather mad since we arrived just as the bus was leaving (we didn't know the timetable), and had to eat hot chips not-so-secretly on the bus....

Milton Keynes sightseeing...

2008-09-20T09:52:00.011-07:00

Today Brendan and I biked up to Stony Stratford, the Marina (posh shopping area) of Milton Keynes. There was much village-y quaintness. I love village-y quaintness. There was even sunshine!

We stopped for lunch at the Secret Garden, a small piece of green in the middle of Wolverton, next to the canal and the railway lines.

In 1999, some residents of Wolverton managed to convince the railway to sell them the land to make a garden, for £1. The garden is shaped around the contours of the remains of three villas, called the Limes and the Hawthorns, the homes of senior managers in the early railways era. They cost only £400 each in the 1850's... a steal nowadays!

Wolverton has a cute village area, and a 24-hour Tesco (supermarket). Except for Sundays, of course, where by a curious quirk in Britain, all shops close at 6pm.

Wolverton is actually one of the three towns which amalgamated into Milton Keynes, as is Stony Stratford and Bletchly. As a town centre, the town dates back to Roman times!

Look, cute village!

Stony Stratford is also cute village-y. It has two pubs, the "Cock" and the "Bull", which apparently gave rise to the phrase, "a cock and bull story". The Bull was advertising its service as suitable for wakes and weddings. Stony Stratford has lots of other pubs as well. The British love pubs.

Brendan is standing underneath the sign for the Bull.

Self-explanatory.

Brendan is trying to convince me to have fish'n'chips for dinner, since our flatmates are cooking for 12 tonight so getting into the kitchen might be an issue. I had chips about a week ago, and felt quite ill. I hadn't really had chips before that for about a year, if not longer, and I think I'm ready not to have chips again for another year.

Over here, they call it "The Slug and Lettuce" for a reason......

2008-09-18T13:40:00.005-07:00

The unpleasant thing about the UK is that everywhere you walk, especially after rain, there are huge disgusting slugs. These are not the little greyish slugs you find in New Zealand, crawling around in the bottom of your salad. Oh no. These are usually between 2-4 inches (5-10cm) long, thick and brown, sometimes with an orange or yellow mantle along the bottom. They remind me of the banana slugs you find in Californian redwood forests, except brown instead of bright yellow.

I got a bit of a shock tonight when I ventured outside to grab my mini pot of various baby lettuces. Glancing at the pot, there was something sitting in it, munching away at my lettuces!

Look at that trail of devastation!

Brendan had to get rid of it for me. While I generally class myself as a strong, independent person, insects are pretty high on the "disgusting" list for me. Especially slugs. Especially these slugs. He couldn't get the slime off afterwards.

Exploration of space

2008-09-13T11:54:00.018-07:00

Today I dragged Brendan out of bed (at 5pm!) where he'd magically disappeared again post-lunch, and we went on a walk/bike ride around Milton Keynes. I'm calling it a walk/ bike ride because we only have one bike (borrowed this week from Brendan's boss, thanks muchly!) so we alternated.

The "redways" in Milton Keynes provide a means of walking/ biking around the city - otherwise, the only navigation would be via cars, a la most American cities. I'm using them to train on for my half-marathon in March. (1 week of running down, 25 to go.....)

They mostly consist of red tarseal walkways with grass or small parks which look all the same, and not that many signposts.... There are an awful lot of small parks / playgrounds around here. This one is down the street from us. The area to the left is suitable for soccer, but the guys here seem to prefer to shout loudly and play soccer in the tiny park behind our house instead.

Today we discovered many things about Milton Keynes, most of them comparatively dull, including "The Concrete Cows" sculpture. A woman I met here told me she once joked she would chain herself to the cows when the council wanted to remove them to London - it sparked a huge media storm ("Pregnant woman threatens to chain herself to cows!") and even Parliamentary ministers got involved... but the cows remained.

We also discovered a cute little church called St. Lawrence Church. The lady who had the key had just locked the building, and offered to let us look inside. The church dates back to the 1200's, and has many original features. It also has two of the oldest church bells in the country, apparently. It seems to be a busy little church.

Some of the graves in the cemetery surrounding it were so old that you couldn't see what was written on them anymore.

Here is one of the stained-glass windows, relatively new aged mid-1800's.

Where are all the dryers?

2008-09-09T03:42:00.002-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me in Britain, given that it has rained on and off every single day thus far, that houses don't come with dryers. Even Californians have dryers, and they have perfectly hot, dry weather for line-drying! They don't even have the excuse of the possibility of snow. (It seems that given the current state of the US economy, some people have rediscovered the clothes line.)

Today, I discovered the British equivalent to dryers. It's called a hot water cupboard.

The Ten Commandments of Public Transport

2008-09-08T02:49:00.003-07:00

I think this comic perfectly sums up the frustrations of US public transport, and UK public transport to a lesser extent.

(Metrocard is the New York Subway method of paying for your tickets - it's designed so that you can swipe and get through at a run, if need be.)

London sightseeing.....

2008-09-06T08:51:00.020-07:00

The day after we arrived in London, we went sight-seeing with Geoff and Donna, who was visiting from NZ as well. Geoff lives right in the centre of London, so we managed to see quite a few places in one trip! We absolutely love London, and can't wait to move there once we sort out job situations.... Here is a snapshot (OK, a few) of our adventures....

First we went to Buckingham Palace, but it was somewhat closed off with the Visa 2012 Party. This was a huge concert held in the grounds (GBP40 per ticket, as I recall) at the Mall in front of the palace to celebrate the UK Olympic medal takings and the fact the Olympics will be held in the UK in 2012. Lots of patriotic statements about how awesome Britain was.... *gag*.

Here is a palace (maybe Whitehall?) on the left, and the London Eye on the right. The palace looks like a fairytale!

About 40,000 people watched the concert on free screens at various locations, so we watched for about twenty minutes as well in the palace gardens. We saw Il Diva (whom Mealz loves) singing a Mariah Carey song in Spanish, James Morrison and the band McFly.

We stopped and looked at the memorials to Florence Nightingale and Sydney Herbert, just as air force jets roared overhead with red, white and blue smoke streams.

Here is Picadilly Circus. It was hopelessly touristy, like a lot of London. The large ad billboards remind me of Times Square in New York. The fountain on the right is famous - Eros (Cupid).

Coffee at Starbucks on Oxford Street, the Lambton Quay equivalent for you Wellingtonians....

The coffee was our first introduction to London prices - the equivalent cost of US$11 for two small coffees!

Almost fluorescent flowers in Hyde Park: these are real.

We went to Wellington Arch, commemorating the Duke of Wellington I suppose! The New Zealand War Memorial is just to the left of the picture below.

Here's a London taxi - they're usually black but can be any colour with advertising. What distinguishes them is their distinctive vehicle shape. No boot (trunk), just a very large back seat area which can fit luggage.

Here is Leicester Square, where a woman in red with pursed lips and a thin face, was having her portrait drawn.

We then walked past the Prince Charles Cinema, featuring "Braindead", an early Peter Jackson movie from NZ! On to London's Chinatown, a few winding, bare streets. I get the feeling this "Chinatown" is as Chinese as Grant St in San Francisco has become.

Past the National Portrait Gallery and the church of St Martin in the Fields, to Trafalgar Square, just as the sun was setting.

Note Big Ben in the far right background...

Here is the other side - we're standing in front of Marble Arch, which is the entrance to the Mall road which leads to Buckingham Palace. The statue of Trafalgar is to the left behind us, with the National Gallery behind that.

Then we walked down past Whitehall Palace, the one we'd seen earlier. Here is 10 Downing Street where the British PM lives, well-protected. They won't even let you on that street any more!

Here is Big Ben itself, with the very ornate Parliamentary buildings.
Across the road lies Westminster Cathedral. A lot of famous people are buried here! I was pretty excited to see this!

Finally, we walked back across the bridge to Geoff's.

Now, that must be almost all of the tour of London done in one swoop! :) Just kidding, there's more to see yet!

I think we got off lightly in Florida.....

2008-08-31T02:05:00.005-07:00

Currently there is a Category 4/5 hurricane, Gustav, heading towards New Orleans, only about a week after we left. The whole city is being evacuated. And we thought our Tropical Storm Fay was bad enough!

So we left poor Geoff alone on Tuesday morning, and moved into our new flat in Milton Keynes. (Geoff has very graciously been putting up with having both us and Donna in his room at his flat - there was no actual floor space left!)

Carrying two huge bags each onto the Tube was a bit of a hassle, since there are lots of steps. The British are actually really nice - at each set of steps, strangers have helped us carry our bags down each time! In America, people are very friendly, but they don't usually offer to help you.

Our new flat is in Bradwell Commons, one of the nicer areas of Milton Keynes apparently. We also looked at Fishermead and Eaglestone, both of which are dodgy areas, but decided the slightly cheaper rooms didn't really compensate. We have four guy flatmates from Sri Lanka. They cook really yummy-smelling curry each day. We have the downstairs room, which opens onto the patio outside. It also has its own bathroom next to the kitchen. It's about 15 minutes' walk to the railway station from our house, and about 5 minutes' walk to the city centre.

Milton Keynes ('MK') as a city is the most American of British cities. It was manufactured about 40 years ago from three different villages, so it's a series of roundabouts arranged in a grid. The city centre itself is essentially a huge mall surrounded by various bland office buildings. Walking around, you mostly see car parks. It's a car city. In fact, the whole city is rather bland and boring for our tastes.

But we do feel that we've missed the interesting bits, and the "English village" look - maybe they're in Bletchley (part of MK) or something. MK is supposed to be an extremely hip and vibrant place to live for young people, but neither of us can see it. Although David Beckham occaisionally rents out the whole of the Xtreme building, which has the largest indoor ski slope in Europe. So I think we'll have to try that out at some stage.

We're at Martha's for the weekend, since Brendan has a course in London on Monday. We're about to go to the British Museum - it's incredible! Hopefully we'll have internet and a phone by Tuesday.

Sitting in the airport....

2008-08-22T15:00:00.006-07:00

In an hour, we depart for London! Being at the airport always sounds so glamourous. But the reality is that all airports look basically the same, and the minutes blend into one another in an interminable series of waiting in line, doing security checkpoints and sitting in bland waiting areas trying to find something to eat which is simultaneously remotely filling and healthy, yet not exorbitantly priced.

This is our third flight today - we didn't sleep last night. Miami to Charlotte, North Carolina at 6:30am, then an hour's stopover, then Charlotte to JFK Airport in New York. Now we're in New York, having not actually left the airport for far too many hours.

This afternoon, while Brendan ran some errands, I stayed with our baggage. I attempted mini-naps so as to both gain valuable sleep, and still keep an eye on our luggage. Usually I awoke with a start to find my arm somewhat damper than I remembered, and different people having lunch next to me. But an hour and a half of this game did actually help. The trick was to get yourself just to the point of sleep, and then to wake again so as to scare away any passing people of nefarious character. I probably won't know whether I was successful until we go through UK Customs, but all the bags are there at least.

Brendan's point of view on this: I went to do various important errands, and left Tina to protect the luggage. Tina fell asleep. Several times.

So, this is our last post here from America. See you in London!

Tropical Storm Fay Update

2008-08-19T13:33:00.004-07:00

We are currently staying in the lovely home of Brendan's boss, in Vero Beach, Florida. We're watching the rain and the wind outside - the tropical storm has spawned several tornadoes in the area. But the most serious casualties so far are a whole bunch of people without power, lots of broken sea turtle eggs (very sad), a pygmy sperm whale rescued by surfers down at Vero Beach and a vet clinic which got squashed. (The one horse inside was unharmed.)

It really is raining a lot - already 8.5 inches in the past few hours! There's a flood and tornado warning for our area, and the side of the storm is predicted to pass right over us! The whole street is a river of water. Brendan and I really want to get going to New Orleans (we're going to skip Miami for now for time reasons), but the tropical storm just isn't predictable. Although it seems that it might follow us across to New Orleans at the moment! We only have a few days left in America, and a lot to do.

The poor Fat Kiwi isn't liking the rain - the wood on the floor and backing over the stove have warped and buckled with the leaks pouring in. Rather upsetting.

Irony: Florida... the Sunshine State

2008-08-17T18:26:00.001-07:00

We've just this minute crossed the Florida state line. The sign says, "The Sunshine State". It's dark, pouring with rain, and we may not be even able to go to Miami since a hurricane is about to hit Florida, and we're about to be in it! Brendan wants to see the hurricane. I want to go swimming. Conflicting goals.

What's it like, being on the road?

2008-08-07T08:44:00.004-07:00

In a word, hot. The Fat Kiwi isn't really known for its air conditioning, although it works in a pinch (we got it fixed before we left). But America in general is pretty warm in the summertime. We're using up a lot of sunscreen. It seems you need to have SPF 50 or 70 for it to have any effect. And neither of us can live without sunglasses, particularly in national parks. The higher up you go in elevation, the clearer the air is, and hence the light is harsher. It's not for nothing that everyone in America seems to wear sunglasses.

The second word would be, busy. We imagined we'd have more time on the road to do blog posts, email etc, but in reality we get up reasonably early, make breakfast, and get on the road to our first destination of the day. We spend time at our destination, make lunch, get back in the car and drive some more to our next destination, rinse and repeat. Then around 10pm we start working out where we'll sleep for the night. Unless we're in a national park, when the problem should have been solved hours earlier (i.e. before lunch) or we're in trouble! By 11pm we make dinner, and fall asleep. This is our day. There is also lots of time spent stoppng for petrol.

At present, we only have one power point available. Usually this is taken up with the GPS charger and the power inverter to run the laptop. Except we're usually out of cell range somewhere in the wops so there's none or sporadic internet for blogging, and the laptop only charges when the Fat Kiwi is stopped. (Quirk of the car battery - don't ask.)

We're also spending an awful lot of time etc at the mechanic's! In the paraphrased words of a couple who did a year-long road trip around America: an RV is both a car, and a house. This means you get all the problems of a car, plus all the problems of a house. We just got out of the mechanic's in Mineapolis, and I think they did something to our house battery. Now when we wake up every morning, the house battery has drained overnight. Which means our fridge is a bit unhappy.

Overall though, it's fantastic that the Fat Kiwi is more like a house on wheels. Even if just for the fact of having a stove, a toilet, and running water. It means you can do things like park in a rest stop or Walmart car park for the night. And we're having lots of fun. More blog posts to come, promise.

Corn Palace!

2008-08-04T10:58:00.013-07:00

We've spent most of yesterday and part of today driving through South Dakota and Minnesota. It's very green and flat, with lots of lakes. It features corn fields interspersed with what I suspect is potatoes since the leaves are so dark; windmills (it produces 60% of the country's wind power, I think); rustic farm buildings and cottages; and little small towns with a few hundred people. The main streets have hundred year-old buildings. It's really cute.

Minnesota is one of the main producers of ethanol, probably since the corn is all right there.

The humidity has also shot up to almost 100%, according to the guy outside the Walmart oil-changing area yesterday. (We've already hit 4,000 miles, so we wanted to change the oil.) We felt disgusting and sticky, and made sure we found a campground with showers. It was probably only 32 degrees C, but it was unbearable heat. Today is luckily overcast and much cooler, but still slightly sticky if you trail your hand outside the car window.

South Dakota has a Corn Palace, in a town called Mitchell. The outside of Corn Palace is covered in murals made from twelve different colours of corn.

The inside of Corn Palace functions variously as a basketball court, auditorium, marketplace and gift shop for the town. It has the cheapest concession food either of us have ever seen. We bought some corn on the cob to eat at Corn Palace, and some "cookie dough" candy. It was yummy. It also features the only "one-way traffic" toilets I've seen.

Various corn-related paraphernalia and associated festivals lined the walls inside.

In South Dakota, babies come from corn fields.

Somewhere last night we also crossed the time zone barrier, because when we woke up late and thought it was 9am, it was actually 10am. Oops. The Fat Kiwi is going back into the mechanics again, while we go to the Mall of America.

Travel Snippet: Old people discover the Continental Divide

2008-08-02T07:20:00.005-07:00

The Continental Divide is essentially the point at which the US waterways split - the water on one side runs down to the Pacific Ocean, and the water on the other runs to the Atlantic. We crossed the Divide three times in Yellowstone.

At Craig Pass, Isa Lake actually drains into both oceans at once! (Granted, it should be called Isa Pond, since it's not that big.)

But it was hard to get a photo: there were elderly people wandering aimlessly around the sign and blocking it from view!

When we stopped at the next sign, I took a photo. I turned around - the same people were advancing rather fast. I almost, but not quite, ran.

Yellowstone!

2008-07-30T21:52:00.013-07:00

After a hot afternoon of driving, we finally arrived at Gardiner, a town at the northern entrance to Yellowstone National Park. It was very touristy.

The park had a suitably grand entrance, the Roosevelt Arch:

We had to drive all the way (30 miles each way!) to our campground first, to make sure we had one for the night. On the way, there was a huge traffic jam on the narrow, two-lane road. Everyone was stopping to look at something we couldn't see. The guy in front stopped, and refused to move even when Brendan got out of the car to ask him. Finally the ranger came and told him off, which was nice.

After securing our campsite, we went down to Tower Falls. Tower Falls is 132-137 feet high (height is debatable with waterfalls, it seems), and is named for the pinnacles around it.

Unfortunately the trail is now closed to get to the base of the falls, but we still walked down to the river which Tower Creek joins.

We stopped at the overlook - the canyon is sometimes called 'The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone'. The hexagonal-shaped rocks in some layers are from lava flows.

Then we returned to Mammoth Hot Springs near the entrance to the park. On the way back, we noticed the traffic jam was still there, two hours later! I asked one of the rangers what everyone was still looking at - apparently a black bear was sitting under a tree. We decided not to add to the fray.

The white calcite deposits of Mammoth Springs have created a huge, squat mound over thousands of years. The hot springs move every so often, so new springs appear and others stop working.

The blue colour means the water is close to boiling temperature! The calcite slowly seeps into the trees and smothers them as it solidifies inside the tree.

Here is part of the sign warning visitors not to step off the boardwalks. Every year, people die or are seriously injured when they step off the trails and fall through the thin crust.

In praise of rest stops....

2008-07-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

State "rest stops" can take a variety of forms, it seems. They're very useful as emergency campsites for the night. Our favourite so far is one in Montana. It looks like a park, with restrooms. But any restrooms which are heated at 6am on a cold morning win, in our opinion.

An afternoon in Liberty Lake, WA

2008-07-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

The Fat Kiwi decided to break in several important places: the electricity, the water pump, the grey water and the sewage (especially worrying!). So it became a van for a few days, which was very inconvenient for us. In a small town just out of the city of Spokane, called Liberty Lake, we were holed up for an afternoon on a hot sunny day while the RV mechanics worked on it. Another couple we met had been waiting for parts for three weeks for their RV to be fixed!

Liberty Lake was a sort of Everynewtown, USA. There weren't many people about, and the town itself consisted entirely of the traditional strip mall pattern with an Albertsons, a Walgreens, Pizza Hutt, Starbucks, about five fast food places and various other chain stores. Another store was being built. It looked like a toy made of plasterboard. The air was hot, and dusty. It was a long walk between the RV place and the mall area. While someone had at least made an attempt at a pavement in some places, this wasn't really a town made for walking.

The houses had that cookie-cutter look when an entire town is stamped into being by the same developers in a matter of months, which can't develop 'character' with simply a coat of paint and some different lawn ornaments.

Lacking anything to do, we got haircuts. The hairdresser who did Brendan's hair was large, cheerful and had blonde highlights pulled into two small buns near the top of her head. She chatted away amicably to him. The hairdresser who did my hair thought we were from England, despite repeated statements to the contrary. She stopped at one point to take a phone call from her pre-teen son, suggesting if he was bored that there was plenty of garden out back which needed weeding.

With the Fat Kiwi back in action, we drove through the northern part of Idaho. The Fat Kiwi really didn't like all the hills here. This part of Idaho used to be one of the main silver mining areas in the States, as well as metals such as gold and lead.

On into Montana, which is mostly rural. A town called Rock Creek Lodge had just finished holding its annual "Testicle Festival". One can only surmise what goes on there!

Here is a typical roadside sign. All along the freeways, at each town the signs look like this. They show which companies offering fuel, food or lodging are available, and have been a real lifesaver for us many times regarding fuel. Sometimes you can see the petrol stations from the freeway, but often you wouldn't know they were there and have to rely on the signs for guidance. This sign is from Montana.

The girl in the gas station we stopped at was blonde, and couldn't have been much older than 18. She was taking out frozen doughnuts to drop in the deep fryer, setting them in neat rows on a metal tray. She looked at me. We had a short conversation about the doughnuts which wasn't really about the doughnuts. It was underpinned by the unspoken feeling that she was incredibly bored. Having worked retail, I could certainly commiserate.

I sat in the car and tried to imagine spending a lifetime in a small, bland city like this, a lifetime spent making doughnuts in a service station just off the highway. I wondered whether she had much option. I hoped it was simply her summer job for college.

Grand Coulee Dam, the largest dam in the US

2008-07-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

After leaving Seattle we headed east. Along the way, a sign pointed to Grand Coulee Dam, the largest hydro-electric dam in the US and the largest concrete structure. Since we'd already seen Shasta Dam, the second-largest, we thought, why not? We were slightly surprised to find it was a 75-mile detour, but totally worth it.

Grand Coulee Dam blocks the Columbia river, a really wide river bordered by gorges in a desert setting. We stopped at the Wild Horses Monument, an iron sculpture above the river made by David Govedare. The actual title refers to an Indian legend, called "Grandfather Cuts Loose the Ponies", and is only half-finished. From the bottom, you could almost see the horses' tails blowing in the wind.

It was incredibly windy at the parking lot. The steep trail up to the horses was extremely slippery, especially in the hot wind. Dust swirled around and into our eyes. Brendan lost control of the Fat Kiwi's driver's door, which now needs a solid slam to close it.

The land here was desert, which had been tamed for farming by means of irrigation from the river. The small towns were a good example of rural America, with their little lettered signs advertising hamburgers or motel rates. (Click on the photo to enlarge it.)

The desert scenery on the way to Grand Coulee Dam was gorgeous. The rocky cliffs of the gorge loomed on one side of the road, and the blue waters of the Columbia River lay on the other. We saw tumbleweeds!

We arrived at Grand Coulee Dam just as the sun was setting, but left before the advertised nightly "light show" started.

Exploring Seattle.....

2008-07-28T12:01:00.000-07:00

Pike Place Market in Seattle is rather famous as a large farmers' market, one of the oldest to run continuously in the US (about to celebrate its 101st birthday). It's situated along the waterfront of Seattle in a long, two-storied building with the front open. Stalls line the inside, selling fresh flowers, fruit, arts and crafts, and fish.

Pike Place Market as a whole is reasonably touristy, and has a slightly seedy grunge undertone. For you Wellingtonians, it's the Cuba Street of America! It also has the most worrying bathrooms I've seen so far, with each stall having only the bottom half of a door for modesty.

One of the Market's attractions is the "flying fish" performance. Essentially, the vendors got tired of walking to the front of the store and then to the back every time someone wanted a fish, so they invented a little song to sing as they throw the fish in question from the attendant at the front to the one at the back, who catches it.

Hopefully you can see the fish - it's a blur in the middle, just to the right below the lowest lamp.

Pike Place Market is also home to a lot of little shops, amongst them the first Starbucks. So we decided to visit. It was packed with people, most of them tourists like us.

Where it all began! Note their present logo has now tamed itself.

After some lunch we hopped on the Seattle monorail, which goes from Seattle's downtown area to the Space Needle and Seattle Center, a tired amusement area next to the artistic Sci Fi Museum.

The Space Needle is one of the most recognisable landmarks in Seattle, and was built in the 1960's along with the monorail for the World Fair. It was interesting, but we thought both attractions were slightly over-rated, and certainly not worth $17 each to go up to the top of the Space Needle. We did wish we had more time to explore Seattle - it seems to be one of those cities that only yields its best secrets after a lot of searching.

Mt Rainier, land of the wild flowers

2008-07-27T22:49:00.011-07:00

The problem with knowing only approximately where you'll be at any given point, and also with the National Park Service operating campgrounds in national parks on a first-come, first-served basis, is finding a place to stay for the night in national parks. Unless you drive immediately to your campground (on the other side of the park!) in the morning and reserve it, you'll have to leave the park at evening to find a campground if they're all full. So in the morning, we drove back in to Mt Rainier.

Mt Rainier is the highest peak in the Cascades mountain range, which stretches from California to the top of Washington. It's also, like Mt St Helens, a sleeping volcano.

Christine Falls

Narada Falls

The Paradise area of Mt Rainier lives up to its name; that is, if you like snow in the middle of summer. Amazingly, the weather is warm enough for shorts and t-shirts only, an odd combination in the snow.

But the real attraction here is the wild flowers - hundreds carpeting the alpine meadows which were slowly appearing out from under a blanket of snow.

It was like walking in a wild rock garden....

We took the trail up to Panorama Point - it was beautiful!

A man coming down the trail told us to watch for marmoots. We found one really close in the lower meadows! It's changing colour here from white to brown for its summer coat.

Next, we drove to the Sunrise area of Mt Rainier, and walked along part of the trail. The weather was threatening to rain, and the mountain had closed in with cloud. But the views were still great.

Honey Bucket!

2008-07-26T22:56:00.007-07:00

It seems that everywhere in Washington, all the stores and parks use portaloos. Lots and lots of portaloos. If you go to a gas station, they only have portaloos. The rest areas use portaloos. The campgrounds use portaloos. The national parks have longdrops (i.e. non-porta portaloos). I can only surmise that the frozen winters mean there isn't much water available.

Somewhat disturbing that the predominant brand of portaloo here is called....

Honeybucket.

Mt St Helens

2008-07-26T22:50:00.017-07:00

We decided to rent some lanterns and explore Ape Cave in Mt St Helens. Ape Cave is essentially a lava tube formed when hot lava sank through the earth as it rolled down the mountainside, forming a tunnel as the rocks closed again over it. It's the third longest in the country.

(Here we are with our lantern. I'm looking a bit touristy here with my energy drink. Normally it's Brendan who has the energy drinks!)

We had only a few hours, so we decided to walk through the lower cave only. It's a long passageway about twice as tall and once as wide as a person in most places, so it's relatively easy to navigate. We also walked a little way up into the upper cave, to a place where the rock is actually only 8cm thick above another lava tube. The cave stays at a constant temperature of 43*F, or 6*C. Hence we have red noses.

One of the interesting features of the cave is called the Meatball - can you see why? It's a block of rock which floated on the lava 'river' until it became wedged in this narrow gap.

We also explored an area where lava had flowed around the trees in an old-growth forest. Because the trees were so large and old, it took them a long time to burn. During this time, the lava cooled, leaving tree-shaped holes in the ground.

One of the trees left a crawl-space where two tree trunks crossed. We crawled through it. It felt smaller than it probably was, since you could actually sit up in the middle. (I'm not good with small spaces, so this is an achievement for me.)

Here is Brendan in the centre of the two trunks...

and here I am....

After driving around the side of Mt St Helens (it was a long drive along a few winding roads), we discovered the road to the mountain was closed at Bear Meadows. When the mountain erupted in the 1980's, a man taking photos here managed to capture quite a lot of the spectacular first explosion on film at this spot. Then he and his friends realised just how fast the cloud of ash and rock was moving....

You can see where the eruption blew a huge hunk off the mountain on this side. The trees and vegetation are only just starting to recover.

On the plus side, Mt. St. Helens is probably the only place in the world where amphibians (e.g. frogs) are thriving, not declining, due to less predators.

Here is a bonus pretty waterfall we saw....

Snippet: Red, the Most Racist Hair Colour

2008-07-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

Passing through Newport on the coast of Oregon (a town roughly the size of Masterton) we stopped to buy a new headlight (having been pulled over by the police, not realizing it wasn't working). At the same time I decided to check out "Dollar Tree", which is a super-sized version of New Zealand's 2-Dollar Shop. They stock enough food and housewares that you could reasonably do most of your shopping there. Providing you don't eat fruit, vegetables, meat or milk (to name a few key items). Attesting to this was a large sign outside announcing that they now accepted food stamps as payment.

As I was checking out* I met one of people to whom that sign was addressed. She was around 50 and was informing the woman at the counter that she would only buy her paint roller covers at Dollar Tree because they were 12 cents less than elsewhere, but that she would be heading down the road to Ace Hardware to buy brushes because they offered a 3-pack that worked out cheaper. She didn't actually need three brushes, but she apparently intended to store the other two. Presumably so that she could avoid washing the first one for reuse.

As I pulled up behind her she immediately turned and related the same set of details and cost comparisions to me. She then said "I love your red hair. You know that shows the most pure, um ... " she fumbled over the word, "... genetics. Yes, everything else has had brown mixed in with it." The way she said this made it quite clear that brown was not simply a colour but a whole concept that she found deeply distastful. After a pause she added "See, you know there were no black slaves in your past." And then, she took her bag of discount roller covers and departed, leaving behind one bewildered Kiwi tourist and a checkout girl whose face had turned a deep shade of mortified.

A birthday in two states

2008-07-25T12:22:00.001-07:00

We woke up at the rest stop we'd parked at, and saw it in daylight. It was a little gravel road area next to a gorgeous inlet. Mist was rising along the right hand side, and scooting along the surface of the water in little flakes.

We wound our way along the cliffs of the Oregon coastline to Newport, where we stopped to buy two 5Gal gas containers to fix the problem of the dent in the gas tank, and a new headlight. (See the previous day's post for more on this headlight.) It was surprisingly cold.

The Oregon coast is gorgeous. It's a lot like California's coast, i.e. rocky with sandy golden beaches, but with a lot more lakes. The lakes have lillypads! I like this, for some reason. It seems so cliched for lakes to have lillypads, but there we are.

So many of the lakes we passed were small, and totally still in the early morning. They mirrored the trees around them. I wanted to stop and take photos but I was aware that we were already behind schedule and needed to catch up.

We also passed through many little sea towns which were a lot like California beach towns. Every so often there would be a warning sign for tsunamis. It featured a scared man running away from a huge wave.

Newport was the main town along the coast. A few miles north of Newport was the "Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area". An area has to be pretty outstanding for them to name it something like that in all the splendour of the Oregon coast!

The historic lighthouse was the main attraction. We stopped and waited in line for ages to climb the 5 small flights of spiral stairs which wound around the inside of the lighthouse. The stairs had been installed 150 years ago, for the use of no more than two people at a time, and had never broken. Until 5 years ago, when tourists were admitted. Now around 5 stairs break every year!

The lighthouse is still in operation. All the lighthouses along the Oregon coast have a different light pattern, so a traveller could tell their whereabouts on the coast by looking at the lights. It was very cold and windy at the lighthouse, even in the middle of summer. I wouldn't want to be there in winter!

Another attraction at the Yaquina Head area was Cobble Beach. Waves crashing against the shoreline roll basalt (volcanic) rocks around, until they become round and smooth. There's some local legend about how they check the cobbles for roundness daily. Larger rocks were on the surface of the beach, with smaller pebbles underneath. Walking on them made a sound like walking on a crunchy rainstorm as the cobbles moved around your feet.

We finally arrived in Portland around 3:30 pm. We spent most of the time (around two hours!) at FedEx doing paperwork for the UK. Afterwards, we grabbed coffee at the University of Portland. I really liked Portland, I could easily live there. Although it was too hot for Brendan's liking, and like most US cities, probably gets very cold in winter. It had tree-lined streets, with brick buildings and lots of green park space.

We arrived at Cougar, Mt St Helens, just as the sun was setting. We couldn't see anywhere to park for the night, so we decided to check in to an RV park and figure out this whole "hookup" business (i.e. water, sewage and electricity mains access). The RV park owners had the fattest cat I've ever seen. It didn't so much walk as drag itself along. I told it, "You must be the fattest cat in the world!" just as the owner walked out. He looked slightly annoyed.

It was Brendan's birthday. He really wanted steak, so we went to the little pub/ gift shop in the village. It was the only thing open out of a grand total of two eating places. It offered "chicken-fried steak". Brendan ordered that. The waitress went to get it out of the freezer in another building, and slipped over in the kitchen with a thump. She swore loudly. There was lots of muffled talking about how she'd cut herself and was it serious and did she need a doctor and more yelling for the owner to come. Eventually she reappeared with a huge bandage on one shoulder.

A random friend of the chef's walked in and was told off ("Don't be so loud, we have customers!"). We were the only ones in the restaurant, as it was about 10pm. My burger arrived with chippies ("potato crisps") next to it. Brendan's steak arrived, essentially a kind of minced steak in a long flat patty "the size of [Brendan's] face", covered in some kind of batter and deep-fried. It sat on a mountain of mashed potato. Brendan pronounced it odd, but nice.

The cuteness quota

2008-07-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

Here is your dose of cuteness for the day. It's a chipmunk at Crater Lake. (They look like mini squirrels.)

Travel Snip: Carbo Load

2008-07-24T19:41:00.000-07:00

After a short hike up to Watchman's Point in Crater Lake, we returned to the carpark to have a snack and head off to the next location down the road. Across from us was a family preparing for the same hike we'd just completed.

The father was in his mid thirties, pot bellied, and wore a bright red t-shirt. He was eating from a large bag of potato chips. As he proceeded in his mission to the bottom of the bag he stopped at regular intervals to offer the bag to one of the other family members. "Hey, Tom", he would say, "Wanna Carbo Load?". Or "Jenny, Carbo Load?". Said family member would then take the largest handful of chips they could manage and, with the air of someone undergoing serious preparation for some arduous task, cram them into their mouths.

I couldn't decide which was more ridiculous. "Carbo Loading" for a 30 minute walk, or attempting to do so with potato chips. The father had obviously heard of the concept of athletes carbohydrate loading in preparation for endurance events. The fact that he was walking a 30 minute trail, not running a marathon, eating 3 minutes beforehand, not 3 days, and that he was using potato chips, not pasta or bread, was not going to deter him from a wonderful excuse to eat chips and feel good about it.

Crater Lake - the deepest lake!

2008-07-24T18:20:00.000-07:00

In the morning, there was something on the windscreen of our car....

There was a similar piece of paper on the windscreen of all the trucks next to us, too.

The mechanic disconnected the cable on the speedo. (Lester back at SF Auto had rigged one up for us since he couldn't find the right part, and it was making the hot feeling underneath the car as the cable rubbed against the transmission.) Now we had no speedometer or odometer (again!). But that was OK, we had the GPS. It even has an odometer.

We managed to see some of Mt Shasta in the smoke, which was amazing considering how thick the smoke was. (Probably best to click on the photo to see Mt Shasta.)

The "Volcanic Legacy" highway between Oregon and California was beautiful.

We knew we were in Oregon only because we stopped for gas, and could see a little station for the attendant. And, there was a deep blue lake next to the gas station. Lake Klamath! Lake Klamath is the largest lake west of the Rockies. We stopped along the road to take a few photos and admire its amazing blue colour.

Here are some volcanic fumaroles in Annie Creek Canyon, just outside Crater Lake in Oregon. The fumaroles were formed when hot gas bubbled up through lava and made little vertical vents.

We headed on towards Crater Lake, our main destination for the day. It was gorgeous! Crater Lake was formed when Mt. Mazama blew its top, quite a long time ago. Wizard Island is in the middle, a volcanic cone.

First, we tramped up to Watchman's Peak, where there was an historic fire watch station. It was amazing that there was still snow on the ground in some places, but the air was very warm.

We walked to the top of this peak!

Here is the view from the top - can you spot the Fat Kiwi?

The subalpine flowers were very pretty.

We took the Cleetwood Trail down to the shoreline and dipped our feet in the water. It was cold!! The lake only gets fed by snowmelt and rainwater, and there is no outlet, so it's some of the purest (and bluest!) in the world.

In the evening we drove towards the coast of Oregon. As I was driving, I looked ahead. There on the road was a bunch of three racoons eating something. My mind raced. At highway speeds, swerving to avoid them would almost certainly cause the van to roll. And braking wouldn't stop us in time. There was only one thing to do. I aimed the van right at the centre of the racoons. There was a thump as one made a break for it and raced towards the left. The van passed right over the other two harmlessly. I felt bad.

Going into [small town below Dunes City where 138 meets 101], I turned left towards the gas station since we were running low on gas, instead of heading north on the 101. Suddenly I saw blue and red flashing lights behind me, in the mirror. I turned in to the gas station, and stopped. I looked in the mirror again. The flashing lights were still there. Oh, dear.

Brendan got out and talked to the police officer. He said he'd pulled us over since our headlight was out. What? I hadn't noticed. He allowed us to grab gas since the gas station was about to close (Oregon has a silly law that you can't pump your own gas. and the guy at this gas station lost our gas cap!) while he wrote us a warning. I was still surprised that the headlight was out. I'd chalked the very low light on low beam up to the Fat Kiwi being an older car.

... But didn't get too far

2008-07-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

We didn't get as far as we'd planned.

After staying the night at the Frank Llyod Wright-designed Marin Civic Center (which I'm sure I talked about in another post somewhere), we headed up to Shasta Dam. Along the way, I noticed my heel was getting rather hot, pressing the pedal. Burning, in fact. But I chalked it up to the fact that it was usually a bit hot under there and we'd just removed the disgusting old carpet which covered it. Still, it was hot.

So we arrived at Shasta Dam, our first destination. All the way up, the air was thick with what we initially assumed to be fog. Then we sniffed it. It was smoke. Huge wildfires were burning in the area, and there was thick smoke clouding the air. It was difficult to see more than a mile or so at a time.

Shasta Dam is the second-largest dam in the US, and is very impressive. We walked out onto the dam and looked out over the lake. The lake edges were more like extremely high cliffs of orange stone. Far on the other side of the lake, waterskiers zoomed. It was surprisingly hot considering the amount of smoke covering the sun, and muggy by California standards. Water cascaded halfway down the dam's spillway in two small white stripes. We were very high up.

On the guided tour of the dam, security was tight. No cameras, bags or electronics were allowed. A uniformed police officer asked us to take out all our metal objects before walking through the metal detector. (We'd previously stowed our USB keys and pocketknife from our keyrings back in the Fat Kiwi, at the advice of the warden in the information centre - they would be confiscated.)

(We went down there on our tour! The pipes carrying water to the turbines are about 1.5 times the height of a person.)

Our main guide was a plump black woman with short, fuzzy hair. She rattled through the introductory statistics about the dam with the air of what we initially thought was boredom, but then realised was intense concentration and rememberance. It must be her first day, we decided.

We walked into the elevator at the top of one of the dam towers. It plunged down 12 stories, one story per second. There were 15 stories in total. We stepped out into a cool, green-tiled passageway lit with fluorescent lights, and turned the corner. The passageway stretched out in front of us. The guide led the way. As she talked, the echoes reverberated and came back. "...We are now walking through the thickest point of the dam," the guide was saying. Suddenly she shouted. "DAY-AM!" The ten people on the tour jumped. The echoes came back. "I always wanted to do that," she said apologetically. Everyone laughed. Yep, definitely her first day.

We also got to see the five huge turbines which generate electricity. Each was so large that the top rotator alone was three stories! Most of it was underground though. The water roared through the turbines with enough force that every second there would be enough water to fill a swimming pool. Here are the statistics for all you people who like big, impressive numbers.

We left Shasta and drove to Weed, the next town. The engine overheated, so we had to stop. The needle on the speedometer also was jumping up and down around the 55mph mark, which was odd. We waited in Weed for an hour at the petrol station for the radiator to cool down so we could open it, but it was full. So, it wasn't the radiator which was making the speedo jump. So we decided to park down the road from the mechanic's in Weed for the night, and go there first thing in the morning.

Just as we were about to go to sleep, there were strong lights outside and a loud knocking on the van door. It was the police! Apparently we were parked on private land. Oops. The officer suggested we stay at the truck rest stop down the road. (We already had looked at it, but decided it was too full of enormous trucks for a little Fat Kiwi to squeeze in there.) So we went back to the rest stop and parked in the corner of a blocked-off road, next to about 5 trucks. We were supposed to already be in Oregon!

The Fat Kiwi Flaps It's Wings

2008-07-22T10:56:00.004-07:00

Of course, being a Kiwi, it stays firmly and slowly on the ground while it does so. Monday was a long day finishing our packing and cleaning, and we didn't get the van back from the mechanic until 7pm! So our original goal of leaving at 5am for our first day was missed by a few hours.

Now, however, we're on the road properly. We essentially decided to drive part of the way to our first destination last night, and then to start tomorrow as if it were our first day.

Currently we're en-route to our first destination, Mt Shasta: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Shasta. We'll be there for a few hours to take a look around and will then continue north over the border to Crater Lake in Oregon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_Lake, where we'll stay the night.

We are temporarily homeless!

2008-07-20T10:18:00.002-07:00

We have to move out of our house by tonight / early tomorrow morning, but the Fat Kiwi needs to go back to the mechanic's since they couldn't find a part. So we'll be temporarily homeless for a few hours while it gets fixed. We grabbed the Fat Kiwi out of the mechanic's last night so we could put some stuff in there and do some cleaning. At least I finished off all the curtains yesterday. It looks much homelier.

Brendan is going to go to the hardware store today and rent a drill so we can set up the lights, which need a recessed area drilled in the sides of the car. We tried the lights out last night - they're surprisingly bright!

Our house is looking more and more empty. It's like a game - what can we sell on Craigslist?

The Great American Road Trip. And packing... ick.

2008-07-18T01:33:00.005-07:00

The countdown is 3.5 days until we leave. The Fat Kiwi is visiting various mechanics (with much expensiveness!), trips to San Jose and back are being made with alarming frequency (for said mechanics and work-related things), and tomorrow we send off everything we're shipping to the UK. Except we're not completely packed yet. So Brendan and I are sculling caffeine while we finish off computer issues and paperwork. (I specially made mine earlier as an iced "mocha" [mo-ka] - "mochaccino" isn't actually a word in America, apparently, yet "cappaccino" is. Brendan prefers RockStar energy drink.)

So the short version of our itinerary in the Great American Road trip is thus: San Francisco to Seattle; Seattle to Yellowstone to Chicago; Chicago to Boston to New York; New York to Philadelphia and down the East Coast to Miami; Miami to New Orleans. If you need us, email first then call our cells second. Just cos it's cheaper. ;)

Yesterday we had an open house to find someone to rent our apartment. We didn't actually manage to attend! We were in San Jose at the RV mechanic's, learning how to make the Fat Kiwi work. We just made sure to hide the electronics before we left. Brendan arrived home around 7pm to find a man sitting forlornly on the steps outside the building, looking at his watch. He was an hour or so late to the actual open home, so Brendan showed him round. He was very grateful.

Our house is looking rather bare right now - we don't have any couches any more, just a small wooden chair and my computer chair. (Guess who stole that! ;)) We're trying to sell our car, which is always a frustrating exercise. People call at all hours of the day and night, and don't seem to have taken the time to read the ad. They make obscenely low offers in the hope that you're desperate enough to accept, or make appointments and don't show up. Someone called last night at 2am, and asked near the end of the conversation, whether we had cocaine. Um, no. We're selling a car.

The Fat Kiwi is on Google Maps!

2008-07-17T12:03:00.005-07:00

You can only see it if you look exactly at the intersection between the two streets. If you move up or down, you can't see it anymore. The cars are different. I love it!

Name the sheep

2008-07-17T11:04:00.005-07:00

OK, so we have a mascot for our road trip. It was given to me by the Bishop of California at Easter-time (it was meant for the kids, don't ask - there was whining involved), and just happened to be a sheep. If you squeeze it in the middle, it makes a rather annoying "Baa-baa-baa-baa-baa" sound until you press it in the middle again, but it's very cute. It's also still quite white, but we'll see how long that lasts in our dusty Fat Kiwi van.

Since New Zealand is famous for its sheep, what better mascot could there be for two Kiwis on a road trip? Anyway, it's very cute and needs a name. This is where I need your help. Please leave a comment with suggestions!

(Nice/ funny names, please!)

How to break bus doors using only your foot

2008-07-17T08:53:00.003-07:00

Yesterday Brendan and I were travelling on the #30 bus on the way down to the Caltrain Station. (More on this in another post.) Sitting on the bus once the crush of people had trickled off at Market St, I noticed a woman wearing large, bejewelled jandals (aka "flipflops") sitting a few seats away. They were the platform kind, about an inch thick at the bottom. Around the fork in the jandal strap, she had wrapped some kind of white padding to protect her feet, and it stood out against the bronze of the shoe. She also was on the larger side, and wore an orange shawl like a spiderweb over her shoulders.

When she stepped down to get off the bus, somehow this woman inexplicably managed to get her foot caught in the door. Since the doors open outwards, and she put her foot in the middle, I don't even know how that was possible. But there she was, stuck. Other people behind her urged her to push on the doors. She made a small attempt. Nothing happened.

People yelled to the bus driver to wait. The bus driver opened and closed the doors. Nothing happened. A man managed to push himself out of the space the stuck foot had made, and pull from the outside. Still nothing happened. The bus door made a continuous loud hissing sound. The bus driver sighed. People behind the woman urged her to push on the door again, and she made a half-hearted attempt.

Eventually the man who had pushed himself outside was heard telling her, "Let go of the... no, no... let go of the shoe, no, no, the shoe... let go of it!" But she refused to take her foot out of the shoe to get out. The man grabbed the shoe and pulled. With a pop, the doors swung open, hissing. The woman slowly climbed off the bus without even a thank-you. The man climbed back onto the bus and pushed the doors shut, since they were now broken and all the air which powered them was leaking out. The bus driver barked an order at everyone to get off at the front of the bus.

And that is how you break a bus door using only your foot.

Tina and Brendan: Meta Tourists

2008-07-14T08:48:00.005-07:00

San Francisco is generally cold. In summer, it's generally a little bit colder. Unfortunately, it's also in California, which conjures up visions of palm trees swaying in the warm humid breeze.

This means that when tourists arrive in the city, they are, almost without fail, under-dressed and cold. The result is that roughly half of the tourists in San Francisco at any time end up wearing large hoodies or jackets, emblazoned with "San Francisco" because this is the only souvenir you can buy which will also keep you warm. You can purchase these hoodies almost anywhere, even Walgreens (a convenience store).

For the past couple of weeks, Tina has been saying that she really wanted one of these tourist hoodies as they are such a symbol of general San Francisco streets. So while I was in Chinatown buying eggs, I decided to pick one up for her. You can buy them from around 15 different shops all down the main street of Chinatown and its alleyways, and the price is almost always $14.95 as if agreed upon by committee. The problem was finding an extra small on a very busy day. The style I wanted was apparently the most popular, and no-one seemed to have anything less than a small (which looked just a little large for Tina, even considering the fact that hoodies are supposed to be loose).

The last shop I went into was run by an Indian man. He was calmly informing a woman that she was not allowed to return her hoodie. The woman was not quite so calm. Apparently her partner had bought it for her and it was too small (guys, remember, always err on the side of too large). And, as it turned out, it was an extra small and it was the exact style I was looking for. So when she came out of the shop I offered her $10 for it, and she accepted. She was not particularly happy about it, but she accepted and seemed to think $10 was fair enough.

So there you have it, we bought our tourist icon from a tourist.

Here's Tina looking happy with her new hoodie. Not included: photo of the woman looking unhappy without her new hoodie.

Good news!

2008-07-12T21:23:00.005-07:00

Yesterday we received an email confirming our UK visas. I am extremely relieved. Brendan is less relieved because he stressed less about it in the first place. ;) We are also very impressed with the UK consulate here - it only took one day to do the actual visa processing, compared to seven weeks for our friends in New Zealand!

Our house is currently being emptied via Craigslist (the table and chairs and a host of other things are already gone!). It looks very odd. And large.

I also finished my last day at work today! I was sad - I really like the people I worked with. But it was a nice day overall. So the next week is likely to be pretty hectic while we get everything organised - we're leaving just over a week from now: next Monday! We're really excited. (Obviously.)

The Fat Kiwi is taking a short stay at the RV mechanic's down in San Jose. He basically said, "Oh this needs a lot of work," (no kidding!) so it looks like we won't have any hot water on our trip. No matter, it will be extremely hot most of the time anyway. We also probably need to go back to the first mechanic in San Francisco, and get a new gas tank since the old one is apparently mangled! It only holds a quarter of a tank, which is not enough range to get through the middle of the country.

Only eight days left to go!

Grand Canyon Scale for Wellingtonians

2008-07-11T08:15:00.008-07:00

Photos never quite seem to convey just how massive the Grand Canyon is. Even seeing it in person you have the impression that there is far too much of it to comprehend all at once - it's simply too large for your brain to get a feel for how large is actually is.

For the sake of comparison, I drew up a little diagram to make a uniquely Wellingtonian size comparison.

Wellington Landmarks compared to the Grand Canyon. Roughly to scale.

Neither the BNZ building (Darth Vader's pencil box) or the Majestic Center (with it's tiara of lights) even make it out of the small inner canyon. In other words, if you placed the BNZ Center in the Grand Canyon, it would completely disappear from view. Even if you stood at the edge of the canyon and looked down.

If you're wondering, Auckland doesn't fare too much better.

Sky Tower compared to the Grand Canyon

At least with the Sky Tower, you could probably catch a glimpse of it's spike if you stood in the right place.

Fourth of July Party

2008-07-09T10:01:00.003-07:00

We'd planned to climb on the roof to see the fireworks. But it was really foggy! We could only see a few little ones near the ground. It would have been far worse for all the people at the Embarcadero, though - they could see even less! And they waited (in the fog) for hours....

At 4pm I walked down to Fisherman's to go to Trader Joes (supermarket) as the buses weren't running due to the enormous number of tourists. The whole area was packed with people getting ready to watch the fireworks. (I had to walk all the way home, as well. I was running late. I was not amused.)

There were also a lot of people camped out at the top of our street. But I think we had the best deal - the view was better, and we could just go back inside! It was a shame, because we could hear everything but not see it. Neither could anyone else in San Francisco, I think.

A tall building a few streets away caught on fire at the corner - I discovered our landline doesn't work when you try to call 911!

Overall, the party was a success. We had lots of fun.

If you're in America, we have some stuff to give away just before we leave - we're still using it! Come and see us on the 18th.

A sunrise in the Grand Canyon....

2008-07-02T19:45:00.017-07:00

After getting to bed around 12am the night before, we dragged ourselves up at 3:30 am to see the Grand Canyon at sunrise. We were on the road before 4am. I watched the horizon getting lighter and lighter, with colour appearing along the rim, while Brendan snoozed beside me.

On the side of the road, barely visible in the dark, some female elk bounded back onto the grass verge. There were no fences between the road and the Kaibob forest. It extended as far as you could see, on each side. "Forest" was really a misnomer, as it was more like "grass with scattered trees". Signs warned to watch for elk. There were actually two different signs, depending on which part of the park/ forest you were in and hence which kind of deer lived there - mule or elk.

Cruising along the road which meanders along the edge of the Grand Canyon inside the park, on the way to Grandview Point, I saw a male elk with huge antlers. He lifted his head from the side of the road where he was grazing, and stared at the car as we went past.

Signs in this part of the canyon warned "(mountain lions) next 10 miles"! I wanted to see one, but I didn't. And we were running out of time to see the sunrise begin. Already, at 5am, it was substantially lighter, and the sun would soon be up.

The sunrise was totally worth driving over an hour each way for. A few people were already there when we arrived, sitting down on the rocks overlooking the canyon in the early morning stillness. We felt like such intruders, setting up our tripod and disturbing their quietness with whispered conversation and camera clicks. The only other sounds were a few birds, and the lazy hum of a large fly nearby.

We watched the sun climb slowly over the horizon, and the colours change on the canyon walls. It was beautiful. Gradually more people came and took photos, too.

Driving back to the hotel, I saw an elk lying dead on the road! It was huge - it looked like a horse. I have to wonder about the state of the car which hit it - the woman in the Circle K convenience store told us that people have been killed hitting elks in the early morning on that road. About three seconds after I saw the dead elk, I almost hit two gophers (I kid you not) which were attempting to cross the road. I swerved around them into the other lane. Luckily it was a deserted road, so it was OK! I woke Brendan up and made him take a photo of the road (no dead elks included, sorry! Wish I'd stopped, now.)

We arrived back at our hotel and slept for a few hours. When we woke up, we found the Safeway supermarket, and stocked up on food and more ice for the chilly bin.

We stopped off at the Dairy Queen "milkbar" - we'd heard of it but never seen an actual shop. The town was based around the old historic Route 66 freeway, and there were lots of truckers and motorbikers visiting and getting sundaes. I don't think they even had fish sandwiches on the menu anymore!

We drove to Flagstaff, which was a small, cute town with a historic downtown area. It had this fantastic road sign: (I made Brendan drive around the block back to it so I could get a photo!)

Finally, we drove back to Phoenix. On the way, we stopped in the Sonoran Desert, at this little deserted petrol station (the sign said "Jack Ass Acres"). It was hot outside - the car meter said 112*F which is probably around 45*C! Even with SPF70 sunscreen, I could feel the heat rising from the baked ground and burning my legs! I don't know how they survived out here before a.) sunscreen and b.) air conditioning! If you didn't have enough water, you'd be toast in a few hours.

A giant Sonoran cactus. I liked them a lot. They had red fleshy flowers which apparently Indian tribes competed with animals and birds to eat. Since there were lots of flowers on the ground, I don't think there was much competition at that spot! A brown dove flew around and poked its head out of a nest in a hole in the cactus, peeking around the corner at us.

We had an hour or so to kill in Phoenix, so we found (fashionable) Scottsdale's fashionable downtown area, which was very touristy in a cowboy style, and almost deserted because of the heat. It was hotter in Phoenix than in the Sonoran desert - 115*F! It was fun to wander around, but eventually we got too hot and had to jump back into our air-conditioned car.

Finally, we flew home to San Francisco. We circled a bit, waiting for the plane to be able to come into SF airspace again, so I think we took a detour over San Rafael and Richmond while the pilot waited for the runway to clear. We did lots of turns. I like taking off and landing, but the rest of flying is not my favourite thing.

Desert, desert and more desert - Sedona and Red Rocks

2008-06-30T18:22:00.018-07:00

Driving up to the Grand Canyon, our first stop was Montezuma Castle. A cliff dwelling of ancient peoples, it was perched so high in the cliff that access has always been by ladder. Obviously the logistics of getting thousands of people daily (who all need paved trails, apparently) up that distance, and the importance of preserving the ruins, mean you can't see inside the ruins themselves, but the view is pretty cool. There is apparently 19th Century graffiti inside!

There were also the remains of an even larger dwelling next to it. You could see where other rooms had been made in the rock cliffs. On the bottom left of the photo, you can see one of the stones they used to grind corn. It even has demonstration corn!

There was a reason not to feed the squirrels!

Our second stop was to see the Red Rocks from a vista point in Oak Creek. They were absolutely spectacular....

(OK, doesn't look too red here...)

The middle rock is called Bell.

We then drove down a 5-mile winding, red dirt road to Red Rocks Crossing at the creek. The views along the way were incredible, and mostly private land.

The view was worth it though. The red dust was very fine, and stuck to everything. Our legs and the car were covered! Here are Cathedral Rocks, one of the most recognisable landmarks.

Brendan saw a very tiny frog at the creek - it was about 2cm long! At first he thought it was an insect, until it started hopping. There were lots of tiny fish in the water, which I thought might have been the tadpoles for the frog.

We then drove up to Sedona, and Red Rocks Park itself. We very gingerly drove along the second half of the road, which was dirt again. Sedona itself had cheap ($3.99/gal) petrol (California is at $4.80/gal - but one day that will probably be really cheap!), and was a resort town modelled on the old-fashioned cowboy look.

Red Rocks viewpoint from the park - how crazy cool is this?!

We headed into Williams, a town about an hour away from the Grand Canyon, and checked into our hotel. It was a historic motel along the old Route 66 (now the 40) and was, well, quaint. The floor in the hallway sagged at different angles. But the owner was nice. (Look at the mats for a clue.)

Finally, we drove up to the Grand Canyon to see the sunset! It was incredible beyond belief. It's pretty hard to describe the feeling of dangling your feet over that vast space. It's actually too big for the brain to process - on an intellectual level, you know it's big, but "grand" is an understatement. It was awesome. We walked around and found a spot to climb out on the rocks to take photos. The whole canyon is incredibly open, unlike most American parks - if you fall off, it's your own fault.

(Click on the photos to make them larger... then walk away and read a book while it loads... kidding!)

The other side. There are lots of tourists - can you see all the little figures? That's a viewing platform. We wanted some alone time, so we found a spot away from everyone else. We're standing on a long ridge similar to that one.

Off to Arizona!

2008-06-30T17:56:00.012-07:00

But first, we had to check on our cars... sure enough, there was a tow notice on the Fat Kiwi. We had to call AAA to jump-start it, and found somewhere in South San Francisco to park it. I really hope it's OK, since Brendan realised later that he'd probably left his cellphone on the dashboard in plain view, in a slightly dingy area of town. At the airport, there was a huge line. We only just made our plane by one minute! And my expensive sunscreen was forgotten in Brendan's backpack when we checked in, and hence trashed due to US airline safety regulations. Sadness. The TSA agent didn't really want to throw it out, either.

Stepping out of the air-conditioned airport and onto Arizona soil was like walking into a hairdryer on full blast. 41 degrees C! We were very grateful for the car's air conditioning.

Maybe this picture will convey some of the heat....

The rental car happened to be a knock-off of a Chrysler PT Cruiser, which in our view is one of the ugliest cars imaginable. It was rather ironic! At least it didn't have wooden veneer panelling on the outside....

First stop, Baskin Robbins. Purpose: to eat the largest, most calorific milkshakes in America. Brendan and I had a competition to see if we could eat it all. (Videos were taken....) Brendan had the Heath Bar Shake, and I had the Chocolate Oreo Shake.

Everything was going fine, until about 2 hours later.... I was pretty sick, in the mall. So much that store assistants asked me if I was OK. Brendan thinks it's hilarious. It was... for him. Although he was nice enough to buy me bread to eat, but I was too sick to eat it. Luckily I eventually felt better.

Second stop, find sunhats. You really need them when you go outside for any length of time in Arizona. We couldn't find any suitable shops. So we headed to the largest mall in Arizona, Scottsdale's Fashion Square. It was reasonably small by California standards, I thought. Probably around the size of San Jose's Valley Fair. It had a nice fountain. It's apparently one of the largest in the SouthWest of America, but Brendan and I weren't that impressed. We have "mall-bias". Or something. Maybe we just didn't see all of it.

Finally, we headed up to Tempe to visit a friend, Kristin, from New Zealand. It was great to see her and her partner, Gene, and to hang out with them for an evening at their house in Phoenix. They're both very interesting and talented people, and we had a great time. They've just returned from Wellington, where Kristin was teaching at uni, so it was nice to talk about familiar things.

They also had a lovely pool, an absolute must over here in the heat! We went swimming....

Fat Kiwi Progress

2008-06-22T21:56:00.006-07:00

Today Brendan and I laboured long and hard stripping off the carpet in the front seat area of the van, along with the rubber steps on the doors. We tried using straight mineral spirits on the rubber cement under the carpet, but it just wouldn't budge. So we had to try and scrape it off with a wire brush. Very slow going. One half of the passenger side has been done - it took me ages!

We then drove up to somewhere around Marin County and got petrol. We stopped for icecream next to the Frank Lloyd Wright Civic Center building, which is extremely long and bizarre. From space it looks like a robot spider leg.

Brendan found the biggest can of Rockstar energy drink ever! I had a giant Trumpet-style icecream, which in America is called a Drumstick.

Once we got back into San Francisco, we spent ages driving around SoMa (South of Market) trying to remember where we'd seen the car-wash place. Finally we found it right opposite Costco, one of our local supermarkets. I knew we'd seen it somewhere obvious.....

We vacuumed the van so it's nice now. It feels less grimy. I still want to spray it with the strongest sanitising chemicals available, though. The carpet is really disgusting.

Lastly, we painted the wooden part of the floor with nice shiny decking paint.

I persuaded Brendan to drive me out to the Broadway Tunnel, so we could see some street art created recently using soap and a high-powered water blaster to blast away the dirt. The image is surprisingly detailed.

Exploring SF's Civic Center

2008-06-22T09:02:00.010-07:00

Last night Brendan and I went down to the Civic Center, which is the main City Hall and government buildings area. We took the tripod to take some night photos as well.

We had dinner at Naan and Curry, a local Indian restaurant chain. It was sooooo good!

The site of the recent controversial gay marriage protests. I drove past on that day, and was horrified at the hate expressed by some of the protesters.

A man reading on the theatre balcony. The building was hosting a ballet performance.

Brendan walking by a statue of Abraham Lincoln, whom it seems Americans consider a minor god.

It was the end of the Juneteenth Festival, which celebrates the end of slavery in the States. There wasn't really much to see, though, save for a Starbucks-themed van and some empty marquees.

One of the final shots of the night.... When I manage to make all of the shots into a video, I will post it here.

David Beckham was here... and I was not

2008-06-20T20:08:00.003-07:00

This post is just to state my jealousy that my colleague got a photo with David Beckham at Union Square, and I was working. Humph. Last time Beckham was in NZ, I was not. How does this happen? Guess I'll have to wait til he comes back to London sometime. Maybe Geoff will take us to Real Madrid game. Or something.

The moon!

2008-06-20T19:15:00.007-07:00

Last night was the night before the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. Today it is extremely hot, which I partly blame on the Solstice. I love the hot weather, so only Brendan and the rest of San Francisco is complaining! It's actually 91* F right now, and it's 7pm. Love it.

Last night the moon was extra-big, a special optical illusion. So we went and took some pictures around our house....

When photo-monsters attack!