My favourite quote recently is from the host of Gardening Australia. Yeah, I’m watching a few more housey programs since we got back. Anyway, this guy, Peter Cundall, is in his late seventies, and a bit of a comedian as TV gardeners go. He said: “If you cut a worm in two with a shovel, you don’t get two worms, you get one dead one. And they don’t forgive you.”
So use a garden fork, and don’t risk the wrath of the worms.
Yesterday we bought whitegoods: a new fridge and an older Volvo station wagon. We didn’t want a boring or ugly car or fridge, and I’m pleased to announce that neither is either. The fridge is big, cheap, looks good and is made in Queensland. And the car: if you’re looking for a not-too-old station wagon, the Volvo is a hell of a lot less boring and more comfortable than the Camrys and Subarus we looked at first. And the stereo rocks. Today we’ll be taking it down the coast, playing Flaming Lips, Scissor Sisters and Tricky very loudly.
So laugh long and hard: we aim to change the world’s view of Volvo drivers. That won’t happen, so at least we now have an excuse for any driving quality lapses.
Swings and roundabouts.
So we’re back and finding our feet. Almost three weeks back in the country and we have a new (to us) scooter, a deposit on a new (to us) car and we get to move into our house in six weeks or so.
I’m now going to be teaching at a Brisbane university for a short time, which is exciting. Great new campus, fun things happening, and the potential for a career in academia, probably what I’ve been gravitating back towards after these several years in the cruel, dull, real world.
Life here at my mother’s place is settling down, though you never really want to move back in with your parents, do you? Normally, this event would be an admission of defeat, a mark of failure, but I promise you we have not; this is simple convenience. Plus it saves on rent and moving twice.
Brisbane is still the lovely place I remember, no rose-tinted glasses required. The weather is stunning every day, the traffic not an issue, the trees everywhere and the people relaxed and friendly. Some things are more expensive than we remember, but not many. These days, there’s more of an air of sophistication as the town becomes a city.
Air is clean. Cats and kids have space to play. Fruit and veg still taste like food and cost (more or less) what they should. Haven’t found any decent French bread yet, but will continue the search. Across town on a weekend morning, crap is sold from garages instead of car boots.
Friends are found at parties on verandahs, at their houses up hills, or not at all if they sleep right through the plan. Family is close, or close-ish. But they’re nearer than they have been, just a quick drive and a long chat away. That’s a valuable thing. Apologies to our other friends and relations to whom we are no longer near; hope to talk to you soon.
By the time you read this, the grand trip will be over. It was… 4997 miles driven by us in the USA, more as we were driven, more on trains, more in the UK. Of course many more miles flown. This trip has been an orgy of energy use, consumer activity, pay-before-pumping gasoline purchases, scouting out motels and campgrounds, gazing at amazing things, and movement of all kinds.
As another travelling friend has recently written, travel broadens the mind, makes you a better person, and gives you plenty of stories to bore people with at dinner parties. I’ve been a fish out of water for so long that I’ve nearly forgotten how to have a conversation that somehow doesn’t lead to a discourse on the different ways people in different countries interact, how weird this country’s food is or how bad this other country’s weather is. I’d like to be in a place (mentally and physically) where I can just shoot the breeze and talk about simple things like how good this beer or that movie is or was.
This message is being written in an appropriate place to assist: I’m sitting against a pillar in LAX, gate 25, with the Mac plugged in and Nic sitting across from me. A gentle American voice is warning us to maintain visual contact with our personal property at all times, a girl is mouthing along to a song on her iPod mini. There’s a mobile phone call or two, a few empty water bottles scattered, and two other laptop users sitting at a pillar nearby. They may be writing something insightful, balancing their chequebooks, or playing chess; I don’t know.
Most travellers here have that resigned look that you get waiting in airports. We all know we have an hour until boarding, and then another fourteen hours just for this flight. We have another three and a half hours of flying to reach Brisbane. This flight is an interesting one; you’re meant to sleep. Takeoff is at 11.30pm, and arrival at 7.15am, but there’s six hours time difference, and if you can sleep that long, good luck to you. And maybe we’ll be woken up stopping in Honolulu in the middle of the night.
None of that really matters. Flying is like a fast bus journey with increased security. OK, it’s very much faster, but it’s not as fashionable as you might expect. Lots of sitting about waiting. The end product, though, is that you get to go around the world, passing through timezones like a hot knife through soft cheese, and return home in a flash. In less than twenty four hours, in fact very likely before this message is posted, we’ll have finally seen, for the first time, the house we bought about a year ago. (Ask me if you don’t know the story.)
That’s a big, big thing. We’ve been counting down for what seems like months and has, in fact, been that long. Now, we get to see it, and my mother, and my parents-in-law, and Bianca the cat, and other friends, and all the Brisbane stuff I’ve lost touch with. Here’s a handy comparison chart from a couple of days ago which you can try yourself: fire up weather.com and check out the ten-day forecasts for “London, United Kingdom” and “Brisbane, Australia”. London was rain or showers every day, though warmish (11-25°), Brisbane was slightly cooler (9-24°) but sunny daily. Don’t do this if you want to stay in London, it’ll only depress you further. Do it if you need encouragement to leave.
Actually, the weather in LA’s been great. We’ve spent the last day and a half hanging out with Amy and Cam, two Aussie expats spending a few years away from home. Amy showed us around the nice bits of LA (Venice beach, Santa Monica, Rodeo Drive, Hollywood) and took us to nice restaurants and cafes. We swam in the Pacific, in pools and jacuzzis, drank beer. Hung out at their place, talked about TiVo, politics and music. An entirely pleasant way to leave the country, and the only way to enjoy LA. It’s worth a visit if you have a guide, as you need to know where to go and a car.
But that’s LA, and though we’re still here, an airport doesn’t count, it’s anonymous, international ground. The same overpriced food, magazines and duty-free liquor, the same symbols and the same blank looks. Nobody wants to be at an airport, unless, like Singapore, there’s a game show and a massage to be had. Here, they make you pay for internet access and trolleys, so we’re simply leaving.
This post, though, isn’t the last post, simply the last for a while. There are people to see, jetlag to defeat, parties to go to and family and friends to hug. More emails to write, new connections to forge and old ones to strengthen. A knitting book to design, websites to maintain, DVDs to plan, meetings to attend. Colours to pick out, contractors to hire, cars and bikes to buy, consumer advice magazines to read closely. There’s a long trail to follow, and I’m sure I’ll be waylaid. We’ll be more stationary, but hopefully not less interesting.
I’ll let you know.
What we did yesterday: watched the sun set over the ocean from the table at our campsite. Drove down the Big Sur, which is a pretty bit of coastline, if inaccessible and unswimmable. We also witnessed price gouging on a massive scale, in a shop in Lucia on the coast. $4.50 for four crappy rolls? $2.75 for a take away beer? I don’t think so.
Today, we saw more of the coast and experienced even heavier price gouging. There’s a place in Gordo which wanted $3.59/gallon for regular petrol; this in a country where the price has varied from $1.80 to $2.24. What an utter bastard. The next place down the road wanted $3.30, and we needed a safety net, so we bought $3 from that guy. Actually, the Big Sur was one of the least friendly (no trespassing! private road!) and most expensive areas that we’ve visited in the whole of the US. Very pretty, but the people who run the shops are not our favourites.
Right now, Monday night, we’re in Santa Barbara, which is a lot like Noosa with larger roads. Fun shopping, friendly vibe, beaches you can swim at. This is our last independent night, as we’re hooking up with friends in LA for our last night in the country, Tuesday night. (As it’s past 1am, does that mean it’s tonight?) There will be a grand summary post soon, so keep your eyes peeled. Tiredness means no more writing for now, but we’ll see some of you soon. Write to the rest of you soon too.
What we did today. Since we’re staying in Silicon Valley, our first two-nighter for a while, we had to explore the computery things around. A geek pilgrimage was made to 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino: the home of Apple. (As a contrast, Microsoft’s HQ is at One Microsoft Way.)
Nasa was next up, and we visited what we could of the NASA Ames Research Center, which is not a whole lot. No more tours of the facility (much has been decommissioned anyway) and unfortunately the immersive theatre was closed. So a few interesting exhibits and rovers to play with, but that was all.
The Computer History Museum was pretty fantastic, though. They have an Enigma machine(!), part of ENIAC, several CRAYs, many Macs, Commodores, ancient hard drives, tape drives, the world’s first RAID (Frankenraid) and so much more. Just north of the 101, west of the NASA Ames campus. Very knowledgeable guides show off all the cool gear, and it’s heavily recommended.
Oh, then shopping. Dungeon Siege, we’ll see how it goes; bought mostly to turn it into a reborn Ultima V. Enjoyed Neverwinter Nights already.
Hidden in the mazes of freeways and expressways just south of San Francisco are many restaurants, motels, hotels, university campuses, computer giants and upstarts. It’s an interesting place to spend a couple of days, to rediscover what a city has to offer after a long time away. Portland was cool, but you could walk around… familiar, easy. You drive here, fast, and it’s a different thing altogether. It’s like a very, very big suburb, with the interesting things you’d expect in a city. Because it is a city, squashed and stretched, run through with arteries carrying their precious cars.
Odd.
Time is now rapidly running away from us and we have just a few more nights after this one. The best part about the flight home is the seats we’ve requested: the two at the back of the plane with no third person adjacent. More room, more privacy. Making a sixteen-odd hour flight bearable.
Hopefully more from the road, otherwise from the other side.
Something should be said about the food in America. In some ways it’s like the food anywhere: when you’re not cooking your own, you’re stuck with sandwiches, fast food and restaurants. But the art of producing the most food for the least input has been honed fine here. Too many diets, too many “treats”. Too much salt! The fine art of making food sound new and different when in fact it’s very much the same (ie. marketing) is very well developed. So many drive thrus, so many chains, so little true variety.
The major problem is that much food here is far removed from reality. There are a great many additives “to preserve flavor” or to make life convenient for producers or retailers. Many ways to remove some part of the food while trying (and failing) to preserve the original taste. Of course the whole western world does this, but nobody else chases the impossible dream of the taste without the sugar/calories/fat/refrigeration requirements with the zeal shown here. You couldn’t fill warehouses with food if you couldn’t stack the products as long as you needed to.
Coffee creamer? What? It’s ubiquitous, accepted. Partially hydrogenated palm oil? Why? Bread? What bread? There’s no such thing as proper bread from a supermarket here, it’s all terrible, sweet, plastic airy crap. And bakeries here are mostly delis, so you have to really search to find someone who actually knows what a loaf of bread should look, feel or taste like. Of course, Atkins and its sugar/carb counting will probably kill them off now as well. Weirdly, there’s not much actual “sugar” in food here. There’s a lot of corn produced, so “high fructose corn syrup” is the major sugar source. (An enormous percentage of American calories now come from corn syrup.)
Perhaps the worst example of food abuse is in dairy products – for starters, it’s nearly impossible to find whole milk yoghurt. Semi skimmed milk is common, as is fat-free milk (like water with chalk). Full cream milk wouldn’t sell called that, so it’s called Vitamin D milk and has added Vitamin D. (Similarly, all orange juice sold anywhere has added Vitamin C to keep up the fiction that oranges are especially high in the stuff.) But for coffee, some people do prefer fresh milk. Actually, they’d prefer richer than that, but cream would be a bit too indulgent, so you can buy “half and half” which is half milk, half cream. Never the real food, just processed to either extreme.
Cheese is pretty funny too. Yellow is the colour cheese is expected to be, so yellow it is. If you want it in slices, you can purchase “Imitation Process Cheese Food” or Cheez Wizz, which is squeezable. Even worse, you can buy spray-on cheese, and that’s really wrong. Heard of Twinkies? Small sponge cakes with cream inside, except: it’s the worst, stalest sponge ever, the worst imitation cream, with a distinct aftertaste of old grease. Once, I worked on advertising for a product that coated the insides of pipes to protect them. Their slogan was “so safe, it’s in stuff you eat”. Twinkies was one of the products featured as containing this miracle pipe coating.
Hamburgers are the easiest meal to find, but all chains taste the same, are terrible for you, and leave you feeling like you’ve eaten something that should never have been made. Subway’s better, as is Blimpie (a similar chain) but they’re not terribly variable. Most “ethnic” foods are pretty pale imitations, though you can get lucky. Wraps and salads are the burgers of the new low-carb world, but as people still want all manner of dressings without the carbohydrate content, they’re covered in artificial imitation crap. It’s like people don’t want to eat anything at all. Read the Daily Value percentages on the side of a packet of anything, choose the one with the smallest numbers. Then buy three.
Health food stores are like little oases where you can buy nuts in bulk, or traditional grain cereals that make you fart. And a million different kinds of vitamins. It is a costly privilege to eat real food in the land where if it can legally be produced cheaper, it already has been. People would like to eat real food, but fast food’s cheaper and available now. With cheese. With salt. With 33% more. Here’s an interesting diet idea: no food with more than five ingredients. Fine cuisine may demand many ingredients, but butter shouldn’t. And don’t get me started on the sugary water, I’ll just become a grumpy old man.
OK, more now. That was quick, wasn’t it?
Newport was followed by a great campground at Cape Perpetua. Near the beach but in the forest, by a burbling stream, campsite 14 offered privacy and quiet. Yachats down the road is a perfect small beachside town, and had a net connection we could borrow plus a fish and chip shop that sold the food we needed.
Nearby, fascinating tidal pools were at their most exposed, and we went a bit mad photographing starfish, barnacles, mussels, abalone and weeds. There’s nothing unusual in us going a bit mad photographing things, but it was good to have a stationary, photogenic subject.
Cape Perpetua itself has an incredible view. We drove to the top, wandered off to the viewpoint, and looked west. We’re gazing over the same ocean seen from Brisbane, but the sun crosses its horizon at sunset, not sunrise. That’s a far more civilised time of day, especially without daylight saving to even the playing field. The event itself was unusual, just a small patch of neon pink in the centre, with a gradual fade over the rest of the sky.
Next, onward via the Sea Lion Caves, where we descended to one of the largest sea caves in the world, observed sea lions flopping about doing their thing and guillemots doing theirs. Outside on the rookery, many more sea lions relaxed in the sun or moved out of a bull’s way. Not the most appealing animals in the world, and pretty smelly, but the distances were sufficient that we felt we could point and stare without fear or hankies.
From there, we came here, which means I’ve caught up, and the next time I feel the need to type for a couple of hours I’ll have to delve into memory and relive some of those past glorious moments. But right now, we’re enjoying the Oregon coast. It’s beachside, which means it’s nice, and it’s familiar. There are some houses near us, just up on the point, which belong near Byron Bay. Modern wood housing surrounded by plenty of space is a definite novelty.
The coastline is varied and mostly beautiful: State Park is followed by Federal Park, is followed by Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, is followed by industrial drive-by (North Bend/Coos Bay) which is followed by Wildlife Refuge. Lots of nice stretches of beach, but more predictable now as we’ve left most of the rocks and bends behind us and straight sand mostly remains.
Just a few more quick notes. It’s pretty late here as I type and we need to sleep.
Portland was pretty cool. Bits of it felt very familiar; it was the right temperature in the evening, there was a food festival on, people were friendly and open, and of course Oregon has no sales tax, so for once the price on the sticker is what you actually pay. (A good place to buy a computer, you might think.) The festival had live music (we missed They Might Be Giants by a night) and a good vibe by the river. A paddlesteamer went past and the scene felt like a Brisbane summer evening at Southbank.
Our motel was a bit scungy, but for many dollars more you essentially get slightly nicer linen and a longer queue (well, a queue in the first place) at check in. Shame the HI was booked out, because it looked good. Either way, the laptop purchase blew any savings out of the water and Nic hit the Columbia store the next day and took care of any spare bills still floating about.
Post-Portland, we drove to the coast and began the final stage of our journey south. To Newport, and another slightly scummy motel. Here, a few dollars more would have got us a little closer to the fog banks rolling in from the ocean. Odd that this stretch of the coast is set up just like any Australian beach town, but this one is a) too cold to swim and b) foggy if it’s hot inland. So if you live inland and think “Wow, what a nice day – I think I’ll head to the beach” you’re almost guaranteed a cold, miserable spell indoors.
On the way to Newport, in Lincoln City, we proved the practical use of our internet “borrowing” plan. It goes something like this: write emails on laptop away from internet, park outside hotel offerering free wireless internet, open laptop up, wait five seconds, send and receive emails, close laptop, leave. Assuming we’ve pulled the same trick today, that’s how you’re reading this blog entry. Sneaky, underhanded, but a victimless crime. (Note, this message is late because this trick hasn’t worked. Oh well.)
More soon on and from the Oregon coast.
Let’s knock this down in a few stages so it’s not so scary.
Grand Teton National Park. Just south of Yellowstone, this small park feels almost alpine; majestic peaks reflected in a string of blue lakes. Perhaps worth more time than the short shrift we paid it; the main problem here is the unreservable, very popular campgrounds. Arrive in the morning, grab a site fast, and you’re OK. Arrive late and you’re stuck in the open site by the entrance, or out of the park entirely. Alpine weather, of course, is changeable. The lovely morning was too hot for kicking back in a boat, and the wind had picked up by the afternoon, but we did manage a pleasant day of not very much. Building cairns of balanced rocks on the beach, and so on.
Onward, ever onward, to Craters of the Moon National Monument, and possibly the best damn campsite (site 13) in the best damn campground ever. Where? The whole area is black volcanic rock of different types and flows. It’s an alien environment, very different from the other places we’ve visited and definitely worth a stopover. Also off the beaten track; we saw few other visitors or campers. This day we explored the park, walked up a cinder cone, peered into spatter cones (one with snow inside, at the base that never sees sun), gazed into a crater, and clambered around caves. (Not, alas, the main caves, which were all closed. Bummer.) Our site this night is enclosed, invisible from the main road, single file access past enormous boulders. Anyway, we finish the day with some wine, some food that wasn’t as bad as expected, and glorious stars shot through with a meteor shower.
On the way to CotM we dropped in on ERB-1, the world’s first successful prototype nuclear reactor. You have to wear shoes to enter to absorb the minor residual radiation from the floor. (I really like the idea of safe free energy. Shame about the waste that lasts for millions of years and risks of a serious accident. Maybe fusion will be worked out soonish.) Regardless of mixed feelings today about nuclear power, back then it was a brave technological leap, and it’s an exciting place to visit, like the place that first broadcast television or seeing the first Gutenberg bible.
The really cool thing about the place, though, is the fantastic 50s industrial industrial design (you know what I mean) and the fact that you can touch pretty much everything that’s not radioactive. All the switches and buttons are touchable, including a satisfying one labelled “REACTOR SHUTDOWN”. And they’ve set up manipulator hands to play with, so you can pretend you’re moving dangerous substances from vial to beaker.
So. After CotM we flew through the pretty Sawtooth National Recreation Area (goodbye Idaho) and an extremely scenic river on our way to Ontario, Oregon. A small town with lots of motels and not much else. A cheap sleep, our first night in a bed in over a week. Long driving, so we needed a rest. Unclassy Asian takeaway with beer and some astoundingly bad TV. I taped some of a rotating-hair-dryer-brush informerical that must be seen to be believed.
On again, driving a long long way, we made it to the so-retro-it’s-almost-hip-but-not-quite Econo Inn (nee Scandian Motor Lodge) which had seen better days but at least had beds available. It was in Cascade Locks, along the Columbia river, which is a long way, but moving through was what we needed. Portland beckoned. This was where we watched the Olympic opening ceremony, a long and boring event which sorely lacked Roy and HG’s natter. Sydney was better, wasn’t it?
Anyway, Portland can wait, it’s bedtime. We’re in a tent by a splashing stream in a National Forest on the Oregon coast, a few days since Portland, and less than ten days until we fly. This message should go up tomorrow, which should give you time to digest the last two postings. Sorry about that, and more soon.