Garden amateur

USA Ya'll – traveller's tips

2011-11-10T14:10:00.038+11:00

Well, we're back here in Sydney and the long and amazing eight-week holiday is over – already! We started off as novice travellers but we did pick up a few tips along the way to share with anyone thinking of setting off on a trip to the USA, especially a road trip like ours.

So here, in no particular order, are some random notes aimed mostly at my fellow Australians, but which might be handy for any 'foreigners' visiting this wonderful country. (Warning: it's not a short posting this time, and there are no photos, either!)

1. ESTA

Apply online: instead of all the hassle of obtaining a visa, Aussies merely need to get an ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorisation) certificate, which is like a visa, and all of which can be done online, and printed out on your own printer at home. Here's the link to the ESTA home page. The only time we had to quote our ESTA number was when checking in online for our flights from Sydney to the USA. At the US end, they never asked for them.

2. Immigration/customs/flying

Relax! We entered the US via Hawaii, and it was quick and easy getting through customs/immigration (having the immigration/customs officer at the desk in Honolulu greet you with "Aloha" did put me at ease). Everyone knows security is tight with air travel, so my main tip is to bear with it, and wear slip-on shoes, as you always have to take them off at each security checkpoint.

The other main thing to remember with flying inside the USA is to get there 3 hours before take-off, to give yourself enough time to get through check-in, security, immigration, etc. Cut it too fine and you might not be allowed onto the flight. That 3-hour limit was emphasised to us a few times, so take it seriously.

3. Hotel/motel tips

Making coffee: Aussies accustomed to finding hotel or motel rooms equipped with electric kettles, instant coffee and teabags are in for a disappointment in the US. We stayed at more than 20 hotels/motels, and all had the same set-up of a little drip-filter coffee maker, with 2 single-serve normal coffee sachets, and 2 decaf sachets provided. No fresh milk, just milk powder (called 'creamer') and a mix of artificial and real sugar sachets.

Ice: every room has an ice bucket and somewhere down the corridor will be a machine dispensing as many ice-cubes as you need. We got into the habit of getting our ice, and in the warm weather we experienced the ice certainly cooled down a glass of water or soft drink very quickly.

Showers: Pammy and I had several mini-committee meetings in bathrooms soon after arriving at our hotels, trying to figure out how each shower worked. Almost no two shower faucet systems were the same in our 20 hotel/motels, but they all had one thing in common: you cannot adjust the pressure of the water, you can only adjust the temperature. In the end they all worked fine, but good luck!

Check in/check out hours: they're different in the US. Check-in time is usually 3pm, sometimes 4pm, and check-out time is usually either 11am or noon.

Electricity/lamps: you probably already know that US power points are different from Aussie ones, and you'll need a special adaptor if you bring Aussie electrical gear (like camera or laptop battery rechargers) with you.

In hotel/motel rooms, the lamps can take getting used to. The switches on 80% of the lamps we encountered are little black knobs near the light globe itself which you twiddle around. Just keep twiddling in the same direction and they go from off, to on, to brighter, to brightest, to off again. Most power points don't have 'on-off' switches. If you plug it in, it's on.

3. IT on the road

Mobile phones (ie, cell phones): I can't quote figures, but using your Aussie mobile phone in the US can become very expensive very quickly and most people advise against it. So, for our long holiday we bought two cheap $19.95 mobiles from AT&T (you can also get them from Walmart) and loaded each up with $25 of calls, which was more than enough for our needs. My only reason for choosing AT&T (instead of the Virgin mobiles and others sold at Walmart) was that AT&T had the better signal coverage in the southern states where we were travelling. Check out the signal maps for each of the mobile carriers you are considering. Virgin, for instance, was great for the east and west coasts (where the big populations are, and most tourists go) but for our lonely little travels down south we chose AT&T. When looking at phone costs in the US, remember that you get charged to both make a call, and receive a call, which is a big difference from Australian mobile phone plans.

WiFi: most hotels offered WiFi, some free of charge, some for a fee. It was free in our two Hawaiian hotels, and that included all the uploads I needed to do my blogs. On the mainland it was more common to be charged for it, and it wasn't cheap ($14.95 per day, about $60 a week was typical). I had my own WiFi modem (through AT&T, casual use plan $50 for 1GB for a month) for my laptop and I used that more often than not. You can also access free WiFi at Maccas and Starbucks, in some hotel foyers and other places, so if you're not blogging and just emailing some howdy-doodies to friends back home, you might be able to cross the country without paying for your WiFi.

Skype: this is definitely the way to go for phoning home. Tip: if you're a Skype newbie like we were, download it (it's free, just Google 'Skype') and install it before you leave, and do a few practice runs to get the hang of using it. Using it online to call other computers is free, but you'll need to pay a fee ($16 minimum) to set up an account for calling home phones from your Skype-equipped laptop.

We loaded up Skype with the $16 and used it quite a bit to phone people back home on their phone lines, and we still have about $12 of credit left after all those calls. It's super cheap. As for Skyping home for a video call to another person's computer, it's great in theory and worked fine for us sometimes, but we found the images, delays, dropouts and other techie problems made the experience only OK, not great. (However, as we were away for a long time, Pammy loved being able to see her mum and sister Laura, who isn't well right now, so Skype was priceless for those reasons.) I noticed that some people got 'stage fright' talking on screen with the video running, and when we just used Skype as a cheap telephone service, the conversations flowed a lot more smoothly. However, whatever you do, use it.

4. Restaurants/ordering/tipping

Terminology: everyone knows the food serves are big in America, so that isn't anything new to tell you. However, the names of courses are different in the USA. What Aussies call 'entrees' or 'starters' are 'Appetisers' on most American menus. And what Aussies know as 'main courses' are called 'entrees' in the US. Desserts are desserts, but watch out for 'cordials' with the dessert menus, these are liqueurs such as Baileys, Frangelico, etc.

Tips/extras: wages for US wait-staff are low, so the tips you give them are more important than they are in Australia – the staff live off the tips, so don't be stingy! The standard tip is 15%. In New York, many restaurant 'checks' (ie, the bill) included a handy reckoner printed out on the bill showing what a 15% tip would be, a 20% tip, and so on. However, also factor in that the bill will be larger due to state taxes. These vary from one state to the next, can be as low as 5% or as high as 12%. So those cheap prices on the menu, when you add in the state taxes and tips, will often turn out to be not as cheap as they first seemed.

Restaurant bookings: you might find that restaurants often will only take bookings for larger groups (five or more) but won't take phone bookings for just two people.

However, one great website we used several times for making bookings in the US was Open Table. We found this initially via a restaurant website, which had a 'book a table online now' button. Open Table seems to be the market leader, as we used it in Santa Fe, Austin, New Orleans, Savannah, New York and San Francisco, in some cities more than once, and it never let us down. You can nominate the time you want to book your table, it's confirmed online and via an email back to you, and every time we showed up the system worked just fine. After we made our first booking (in Santa Fe) Open Table had our details, and so with each subsequent booking I didn't have to type in my contact details again. Quick and easy each time. And in New York one night we were running late, and online I was able to put our booking back 45 minutes, almost at the last moment, without any problems. Finally, Open Table emails you a day or so after each meal asking for your restaurant review, if you want to give feedback. I enjoyed doing that!

5. Breakfasts

Continental breakfasts: Americans love their cooked breakfasts, but almost all the time healthy alternatives such as cereals and fruit are offered as well. Their cereals are quite sweet (Froot Loops are popular, God forbid), and muesli isn't available (the closest they get to muesli is granola, and it ain't muesli!). The good news for porridge-lovers is that oatmeal is offered everywhere (either the slow-cooked stuff or the instant variety) and oatmeal aficionado Pammy says it's pretty good.

Toast is always available, coffee plentiful, juice also. The usual butter provided for toast is a strange, whipped white concoction that I don't think really is butter. There's usually a selection of very sweet muffins and other pastries as well.

Cooked breakfasts are a bit regional in nature, so what we were offered in New Mexico was different in Louisiana, and different again in Georgia, etc. However, eggs are always on the plate, so too potatoes (cooked in a variety of ways, and never as the crappy little 'hash brown' brickettes foisted on Aussies in Australia). Sausages are common, too, but they're often skinless, and they like their bacon plentiful and super-crisp almost everywhere. Omelettes are worth considering, as they are usually cooked to order and come out warm and fresh. And there are always pancakes, which are both sweet and savoury, often served with a sweet sauce plus something like bacon or sausages on the side.

6. Lunches

Try sandwiches: the Americans love sandwiches and do them well. If you're in a strange town and spot a Safeways supermarket, check it out as it probably has a deli which makes sandwiches to order, and as long as you avoid the extra-cheesy ones with special sauce (ie, creamy gunk), there usually are a couple of healthy-enough sanger choices on offer.

Burgers and fries: we never ate at any major fast food chain stores, so I can't say anything about them, but in the little diners and other lunch spots on the highways the burgers and fries are pretty good. The fries in the smaller diners are almost always hand-cut and the potatoes usually aren't peeled, so every fourth or fifth fry has a bit of skin on it. The burger quality varies with each establishment, as it does here in Oz, but if you see the words 'Green Chili Cheeseburger' and you're standing in a place called 'The Romero Street Grill' in Albuquerque, New Mexico, you would be certifiably insane if you didn't try one. Best burger in the US, possibly the world.

7. Wine/beer

Talk about plentiful and cheap! I love New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs, and almost everywhere I could buy NZ Sauv Blanc in the US (Australian wines are nowhere near as plentiful). And it was fairly cheap, too: in restaurants it was usually around the $22-$30 mark, which is cheaper than most Sydney restaurants. I'm not a fan of the Californian whites (a bit bland) but many of their reds are just fine; however, the quite plentiful Chilean reds and whites in the US were always a good choice at a good price.

I can't remember going to a restaurant or even a cafe that didn't have a wine list, so you don't need to BYO (bring your own). Should you want to buy some wine or beer for your hotel/motel room, it's readily available as well. Pharmacies sell it (must be for medicinal purposes?), so too virtually every supermarket.

8. Toilets/restrooms

Plentiful and clean: as well as being freely available at roadside places like McDonalds and other fast food chains, restrooms are also found in shopping malls and in supermarket chains such as Safeways. Not all gas stations have them, though (try the bigger ones, especially those selling food as well). Almost everywhere we went, the restrooms were fabulously clean and civilised. The only trouble you might have is in the crowded tourist trap areas, such as the French Quarter in New Orleans, where a restroom can be hard to find (same goes for New York, come to think of it). In that case your best bet is to slow down for a half-hour, find a nice cafe somewhere, sit down, order a coffee or Coke or juice, enjoy that, and visit the restroom before you leave.

9. On the road

Driver's licences: I went to the trouble of getting an International Driver's Licence and I didn't use it once. My Australian driver's licence was fine for all rental car companies, and with its photo ID it also came in handy when checking in to hotels and as ID for using my credit card in shops.

Left-hand-drive cars: it took me ages to get used to driving on the 'other' side of the road. My natural instincts after driving on my side of the road for 40 years were very hard to shake off, so my advice is to drive slowly and carefully and treat each intersection with the greatest of respect. Busy roads are the easiest, as there are cars aplenty showing you where to go. Lonely quiet roads are the places where you might absent-mindedly head off in the morning down the wrong side of the road.

Gas stations: in most US gas stations we visited they want you to pay in advance (or at least by swiping your credit card before filling up). The trouble for me was that my Mastercard wasn't recognised by their machines (they wanted a 5-digit pin number, and mine only has 4) and so I had to pop into the cashier and either leave a cash deposit before pumping gas or at least have the cashier say 'no problem' and OK it for me to start refilling. It was never a major hassle, and as soon as they heard my Aussie accent they were friendly with me every time.

Don't be fooled by US octane ratings for gas, either, as the US numbers are different from Australian numbers. I used octane 89 all the time for my Mazda 6, and it was fine. Apparently US 89 octane is about the same as Australian 92 octane.

Interstate highways: my advice is to avoid them wherever possible, as the views of the countryside from most interstates were somewhere between limited and non-existent. You see very little from a US interstate.

The quality of backroads is high, and passing through all the countryside and the towns is well worth the extra time spent driving a bit further, and slower. I only travelled on interstates a few times in the southern states, but I found them dangerous due to the high traffic loads travelling at high speeds. Apart from short stretches leading into and out of cities, where the interstates could be up to four or six lanes wide in each direction, they soon got back to being two lanes in each direction, separated by a very wide median grass strip (sometimes up to 100 yards wide). What that means is the slow lane of a two-lane interstate is full of slower trucks, and the fast lane is full of faster trucks overtaking slower trucks, plus a few even faster cars trying to get by unscathed.

Speed limits/police: I saw highway patrol cops everywhere, and they're especially vigilant coming into or leaving towns. The solution is simple, though: stick to the speed limit. My car had cruise control, and so whatever was the speed limit was my setting for the cruise control. However, when traffic is busy or roads are winding, cruise control is not a safe option, so just stick to the speed limit then. In the quiet backroads the limit is often 55mph; on the better backroads 60-65 is the norm; on the interstates 70-75mph is the usual top speed (it varies from one state to the next).

Road rules: it's your job to find out what they are, but commonsense rules in the US, just as it does in Australia. One thing to remember is that at a set of traffic lights, if you are sitting at a red light, it is OK to make a right-hand turn if the way is clear. Early on I didn't know this and wondered why people behind me were honking.

Their 'Yield' signs are our 'Give Way' signs. However, the simple rule is not to be an aggressive driver. Generally, I found US drivers all through the South to be forgiving and unaggressive (well, when compared with manic Sydney drivers) so if you take it easy you should get through just fine. In the bigger cities (Las Vegas and Atlanta, for instance) they were more rude, aggressive and willing to honk their horn in displeasure, just like Sydney drivers.

Navigating: unlike most modern people, who rely on a GPS thingy, we used maps (I also do organic gardening, and make my own soup stocks, so I am old-fashioned sometimes). Pammy was the navigator, and she did a great job doing it the old-fashioned way – reading maps. However, we did use the Internet to help us sometimes, even if Pammy handled 99% of all the navigating the paper-based way.

Google maps directions: what really came in handy was the 'Google Maps Directions' feature (on the left hand side of the Google Maps window. It was particularly useful for either getting into cities and finding our hotel, or for finding the best way out of a city, back out onto our chosen highway. All you need to do is type in your starting point address (if leaving town) or hotel address (if arriving) and Google Maps then tells you the right exits and streets to get you your next objective. Very, very often the Google directions proved to be right, and not what we would have chosen just by staring at the map. It was a Godsend helping us find our hotel in the high-speed, multi-lane, dodgem car madhouse of Atlanta, Georgia!

Highway exit numbers: you probably already know all about how US cities and towns are often logically ordered into street and avenue numbers, for easy navigating. Well, the highways are similar, and what we found most useful out on the highways was the system of Exit Numbers. Each exit off a major highway (and interstates) is numbered, and so knowing that we had to take 'Exit 67' to find XYZ town really helped, and driving along, counting down the exits, helped us not miss our exits, too. Good system!

10. Money

Travel Money Cards: before leaving Australia we organised to have two 'Travel Money' cards through our bank, then we bought a few thousand dollars in US currency. Once in the US, we could use these cards in any ATM machine to withdraw cash, in pre-paid US dollars. They worked without a hitch everywhere, as our bank's cards were Mastercards. However, they aren't a credit card. They're a cash card, and at the ATM machine we withdrew our money by choosing the 'Savings' account option, after entering the PIN. We miscalculated how much money we would need (ie, we ran out) so I was able to get onto my online bank and transfer more money to my Travel Money Card. It took a couple of days for the transaction to go through, so remember that delay if you're running low.

Credit cards: this proved to be a shock when we got home. We used our credit cards to book accommodation as we drove around, and each and every time the banks whacked a hefty 'International Transaction Fee' onto our card. All I can suggest is that you find out what competing banks' International Transaction Fees are, and go with the best deal. I didn't know about the extent of the rip-off beforehand, and am a few hundred dollars worse off as a result.

American cash: get used to having bulging wallets or purses. The US dollar is still a paper note, so 15 single dollars isn't worth all that much but it takes up a fair bit of space. Be wary of having large denomination bills (ie, $50 or $100) as some shops will simply refuse to handle them, forcing you to use your credit card instead.

Also, if you are likely to be tipping porters at hotels, etc, try to remember to keep a stash of $1 notes handy for tips. While the $1 notes are a bit of a pain to live with, at the same time they are handy in the area of tipping.

Expedia: we used Expedia.com to book ahead for accommodation sometimes on our road journey, but it has its pros and cons. One positive is that the room rates are cheaper. One negative is that you pay in advance, so changing your mind might be expensive.

11. The people

I love 'em! Finally, let me put in several good words for the ordinary American people you're likely to meet in your travels. I really liked them all. I have a big soft spot for Texans (hi, y'all!), but everywhere we went people were welcoming and helpful (even the busy New Yorkers were friendly – time and again they helped us out with the Subway maps).

All the Americans we met loved the fact that we were from Australia, so maybe Aussies get a particularly warm welcome? In some small towns they were just astonished that Australians were even visiting – "what on Earth brings you here?"

I noticed that time and again, not just when I was dealing with people, but when I watched others interact, that politeness is a very important thing, and it's how people in America like to talk to each other, at least for starters. So that's my only tip: be polite, be friendly and there's every chance the lovely Americans you meet will be polite and friendly back!

San Francisco stories (2)

2011-11-06T15:38:00.005+11:00

We simply cannot believe that eight weeks could go so quickly. At the beginning of this amazing holiday, the idea of taking two whole months off work and just motoring off into the desert to places beyond seemed like a plan that might go on forever. After a couple of weeks on the road, that feeling was almost stronger. We wanted to run away and do this forever! And yet here we are in San Francisco with no more sleeps to go before we jump onto our long flight home. We fly out today!

One thing we are really glad about is the quality of San Franciscan weather forecasting. They've got it wrong more often than not. When they forecast showers for Friday, we got a beautiful, sunny day. And even this Sunday morning is meant to be cloudy and wet, and unless they have blue clouds here in California, I think we've got another sunny one on our hands.

While I have another blog posting in mind about travel tips for Aussies in America (to be done when we get back to Sydney) for this last posting here from the USA I'd just like to tell you a bit more about how wonderful a place San Francisco is to visit. Come on over some time: it's only a short 14.5 hour flight across the Pacific from Sydney!

For starters, my last pan shot (sniff...) of the holidays. The view from our hotel room.

When I watched this pan shot a second time, I realised the Golden Gate Bridge is virtually invisible in the picture, so don't strain your eyes looking for it.

Here it is, in one of Pammy's mega-zoom shots taken from our hotel room balcony. One of the tourist brochures I picked up tried to describe the colour of the Golden Gate Bridge as 'vermilion-orange'. Nice try, but I think 'pink' still hits the spot, as this photo shows.

"Make sure to visit the Coit Tower," said our good mate Zora in one of her emails to us. And so I went to Wikipedia to find out all about it, and it has a remarkable background story, which you can read here. The short version is that a wealthy San Franciscan woman, Lillie Hitchcock Coit, bequeathed a large sum of money to the city to help beautify it, and the first thing built was this tall tower on Telegraph Hill, from which you can enjoy the very best views the city has to offer. Do read the Wikipedia entry when you get time, as she was a wonderful eccentric who had quite a 'thing' for firemen. The allegation about the size, shape and symbolism of the tower is just scuttlebutt, probably. This photo of the Coit Tower taken from the waterfront streets shows what a prominent landmark it is.

Inside the Coit Tower, which was built during the years of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, a team of artists with Socialist sympathies decorated the walls with murals.

Naturally enough the murals caused quite a bit of controversy at the time – workers revolution and all those threatening bears – but now they are an essential part of the fabric of the building.

After travelling up the super-slow lift which takes you near the top of the tower, you then need to climb another 37 steps to get to the top and enjoy the views, which are spectacular. In the distance you can see the Golden Gate Bridge spanning San Francisco Bay.

We didn't know there was a bus which takes you up to Coit Tower, and so we climbed the steep streets and the thousand or so steps to get there. Phew! Once we had taken in the views, we discovered the bus's existence and caught it for the ride down to Fisherman's Wharf, on the harbour. At Pier 39, these sea lions have set up a permanent colony on these pontoons, entertaining the crowds.

We retired to the Crab House Restaurant on the Pier and were lucky enough to be given a good window view.

The decor of the Crab House is all white tiles, with decorations of hand-painted crab shells all around the walls. It felt like a really big bathroom. Almost everyone there ordered, devoured and enjoyed the restaurant's famous crabs, but quite frankly folks, if there's one type of seafood I cannot be bothered with, it's fiddling around trying to get meat out of a crab. Too much hard work (although yummy USA-style crabcakes, which are almost all-crabmeat, are another delicious thing altogether). And so I tucked into a superb plate of mussels and shrimp, while Pam had a crab omelette, which was excellent.

The next morning, a Saturday, we wandered down to the Ferry Plaza Markets to check out what is claimed to be one of the largest and best farmers' markets in the USA. It certainly lived up the hype: it was huge, covered several areas, starting with the large, restored Ferry Building itself then spreading out into the streets and squares nearby, under the cover of countless marquees. Buskers entertained the throngs at this waterside setting, while dense, busy crowds of locals and tourists shopped for gourmet foods and fresh produce.

The quality of the produce here was really impressive, and extensive. Specialist in all sorts of goods provided whatever you wanted in their chosen field (wait till you see my 'Tasty Salted Pig Parts' T-shirt!). The peppers and chillies stands were both colourful and rich with variety.

The mushroom specialists had over a dozen different varieties in artfully arranged profusion. This is a colour photo by Pam, but it looks like a painting already.

And the fruits! Persimmons, figs, pomegranates, grapes and lots more in abundance. You really could come here and buy all the ingredients you need for a gourmet fantasy. The only thing I noticed the markets lacked was fresh Asian ingredients. I saw no Chinese cabbage (wombok), choy sum, pak choy etc, and no lemon grass or Thai kaffir lime leaves, etc. I know they're probably all available up in Chinatown, but it seems the local mainstream Californian cuisine hasn't fully embraced traditional Asian ingredients yet.

Everywhere we went as we wandered around San Francisco (and we love to wander!) the charming variety of houses adds so much character to each and every street. We liked the way these simple, plain clapboard houses went all out on showing an impressive facade. Keeping up appearances, as they say.

And as you can see in the photo here, the wires of the cable cars, and the cable cars themselves are another constant in many views. We ended up not going on any cable car rides, alas. The crowds to get on the cable cars, especially those cute old-style ones where people 'hang-off' the sides, were so huge that we couldn't be bothered queuing for 40 minutes for the ride, when we could walk the distance required in the same time.

And so that's our last posting from here for this incredible journey across the United States of America. We've had such a wonderful time, the weather has been outstandingly kind to us everywhere and the people we've met along the way have been a pleasure to talk to as well as being very friendly and and helpful. I really like ordinary, everyday Americans!

Just doing this blog itself has been a buzz, too. As well as all the terrific (and often very helpful) comments posted here on the blog itself, we've had stacks of personal email messages from friends and relatives who've been taking the journey with us from the day we started. So, a big THANK YOU to everyone for coming along with us on the trip. You've been great company, and we look forward to seeing and actually talking with so many of you when we get home in a few days' time.

And an especially big THANK YOU to our support team back home who kept things ticking over superbly while we swanned around the place over here: Colin and Barbara for looking after transport, logistics, mail, bills and unexpected problems; Fraser for house-sitting in the wilds of Marrickville; our neighbour Katerina for watering the garden; Zora and Sean for mopping up operations after Pammy's art show, and much more. And Benno, master Photoshop guru, for the beautifully tricked up photo of Pam and I at Grand Canyon, which has served at the top of the page for almost every posting on this trip.

Bye for now, see you soon, from Jamie and Pam.

San Francisco Stories (1)

2011-11-06T12:06:00.017+11:00

Opening scene: Japanese restaurant in Japan Town, San Francisco, where we're staying. In the booth next to us, a family of mum, dad, 10-year-old daughter and mum's sister are talking.

Mum (to daughter): "Don't you want to learn Chinese?"

Daughter: "No, I don't like Chinese."

Mum: "But you ARE Chinese."

Daughter: "I don't like Chinese, it's stupid."

Mum: "But honey, there are over a billion Chinese people in the world, and if you speak good English and good Chinese, that's a big advantage for you, honey."

Daughter: "OK then, Mum, what's 'cactus' in Chinese?"

*Stunned silence from the adult end of the booth next to us.*

Daughter: "Like I told you, it's stupid."

That's what I like about America, they've made a success of multi-culturalism in so many ways. Every time I turn on the TV and see that they're about to interview the Chief of this government department, the spokesperson for this group or that, or the person in charge of XYZ corporation, the weather person on TV, the news reporter, or the whatever responsible for something: you don't have a clue who is going to show up. It could be a person of any ethnicity, either sex. It could be a Romirez, a Wong, a Kowalski, Gutenburg, Smith, Lorenzo, Mobutu, Malouf, Sandeep, Papoulis, Kim – whatever. Sure, the multiculturalism is of the 'integrated into the mainstream' sort, but I really like the fact that this is a country which doesn't seem to have a problem with where you come from.

Anyway, now that I've got that little editorial off my chest, it's time to tell you about San Francisco. First up, steep streets, then Chinatown. I'll save up the rest for San Francisco Stories (2).

Steep streets. San Francisco has more really, hugely, steep streets than any place I have ever been to. Walking around here is like mountain climbing on asphalt.

This remarkable shot taken by Pam looks as if it's taken from the top of a building, but she is standing on the sidewalk at the top of Fillmore Street (major shopping zone, well worth visiting), looking back towards the harbour, and back down the peak she had just climbed.

Look at a simple street map of San Francisco and you think "That's only four blocks from X to Y, should be easy" but when you do that short walk it includes two urban Matterhorns along the way. Good exercise for legs, San Francisco, but not sure about hearts, though.

The other wonderful discovery here in San Francisco is Chinatown. For starters, it's big, much bigger than Chinatown in Sydney and way, way way bigger than Chinatown in New York.

Chinatown covers a really substantial area here, stretching several streets in all directions. While it is in parts a tourist trap with lots of the usual shops selling the usual crap, it's also a very old Chinese community that bustles with business activity and is aloud with Chinese voices chattering in their familiar, staccato way. Old men sit in groups noisily playing some kind of game that's not Mah Jong nor Checkers: not sure what it is but they all have an opinion on what the next move should be, or at least should have been.

It's a fabulous place to just wander around aimlessly, looking up at the balconies with the clothes drying, the murals on the walls, the vivid colours in the posters, lanterns and advertising banners.

There's so much to cover with our brief San Francisco visit and so we'll tell you a bit more about our very enjoyable stay here tomorrow. A few friends who have been here mentioned that San Francisco (Edit: thanks Michelle!) is a bit like Sydney, and we know what they mean now. It is like Sydney in many ways – both are harbourside, scenic cities with a gay-friendly culture and breezy interest in all things new and fashionable – but San Francisco is its own town, so is Sydney, and so we'll look at a bit more SF-ness tomorrow, just before we fly home.

Traveller's trivia

2011-11-05T11:25:00.010+11:00

Almost home, but not quite! We're in San Francisco now for a very short stay, prior to jumping back on a (non-Qantas, thankfully) plane for the long haul home across the Pacific. All the while we've been travelling round we've been accumulating quite a store-house of trivia about the USA that didn't quite fit into any of the other blog topics we've done so far, so this is the Trivia blog, a miscellaneous grab-bag of stuff we've noticed along the way.

America's famous, or more likely infamous, for its gun laws and gun law enthusiasts. So how many guns have we seen (apart from those on the hips of police and security officers)? None! That's right, not one. We kept an eye out for gun racks in the back of pickups all through the South, and not a firearm in sight, folks. We saw plenty of gun shops and huntin' ads, but no guns anywhere. The only place where we actually saw a sign saying "no guns allowed in the cafeteria" was in Grand Canyon, and we didn't see anyone packing a piece there, either.

Now, one thing we did see everywhere was yellow School Buses like this one. Apparently there's an act of Congress specifying how a School Bus should be designed, and different companies make them according to this design. There's a strict road rule with School Buses: when the bus stops and pokes out its arm with the red 'Stop' sign, traffic in BOTH directions has to stop. Everywhere we went, all drivers obeyed this rule. One really lovely example was out in Cajun country in Louisiana. The School Bus in front of us stopped in a country road. Cars in both directions stopped. The first little boy got out of the bus: he was the big brother, he looked about 7. Then his little brother climbed out. He looked 5. Then the School Bus driver got out, held the boys' hands, walked them across the road to their front gate, the boys ran in to Dad on the porch, everyone waved. The driver returned to the bus, the traffic was still waiting patiently, then once the bus was underway, so was everyone else.

If School Buses are ubiquitous, then Winnebagos – also called RVs or Recreational Vehicles (truly mobile homes mostly driven by retirees keen on spending everything they own before the kids inherit it) – are a very common sight out on the highways. And around 90% of all Winnebagos we saw were also towing another car behind, usually an SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle) like this Honda.

To keep ourselves amused on our 4000 mile drive, Pammy and I played an informal game we called 'Numberplate Spotto'. As we drove along the highways we'd call out the first sightings of numberplates from different American states as we spotted them. "Hey look, Arkansas plates!". The rules are strict and ruthless, however. We both had to see the plates. It was no use saying "I just saw an Illinois plate" if the other person couldn't also see it, because we'd just accuse the other of making it up and would scotch any pleadings that "I really saw it, I did, truly ruly." Hee hee hee. As the weeks went by, we had probably spotted about 40 or so out of the 50 plates on the list (or 51 counting Washington DC). "Oh wow, Rhode Island" was spotted in Georgia – that was a biggie. But in the end we never spotted North or South Dakota (don't they ever go travelling, those guys?) or Vermont, or Wyoming, or Idaho, Nebraska or Alaska, plus a couple more. The prize? None, of course, silly. If it helps anyone to understand these rather odd rules, they're loosely based on those used on Stephen Fry's TV Quiz Show, 'QI'.

Cottonfields: we saw stacks of these, from the bone-dry northern parts of Texas all the way through the South and on over to the counties around Savannah Georgia on the East Coast. While most of the fields were big things, where mechanical harvesters munch through them in autumn, there were also lots of little cotton fields tucked into corners here and there, where the big machinery couldn't possibly go. I wonder if they still hand-pick these little patches of white?

Italian motorcycles: in all of our 4000 mile trip on the roads of America we didn't see one. And then in New York, in a shop window, a Ducati, used as a prop to sell Ducati luggage to Manhattan yuppies. How humiliating! The day after I took this shot I saw my first Italian bike on the streets, and lo and behold it was my bike – a Moto Guzzi V7 Classic. It's not a common bike anywhere, and there it was, turning off 5th Avenue in New York. As we pottered about the streets of New York we spotted more Guzzis and Ducatis in roughly equal numbers, but the total spotted was still less than 10. I tell you, American motorcyclists, with their love of Harleys, are missing out on some nice machinery.

Here's another rarity: one dollar coins. These are the only ones we spotted: spat out of an automated parking lot payment machine in Galveston, Texas. I didn't even know that one dollar coins existed over here until then. Everywhere you go there are greenbacks – one dollar notes. These are such an anachronism. You can have a wallet bulging with notes and still have less than $20 on you. I watched a TV talk show where the majority liked their paper money just as it is and didn't want $1 coins, so in the end I decided that until America ditches the greenback and replaces it with coins, it's not really serious about economic reform. It's my litmus test. I'm waiting, America!

Ice: it took me a while to get into this, but hotels everywhere have ice machines on most floors. And ice buckets in every room. We mostly stayed in fairly nice hotels everywhere we went, yet not all of them had fridges in the rooms. But all had ice buckets and ice machines. After a while I got into the same routine as the other travellers here. Once settled into the room, I wandered down the corridor, filled our ice bucket with ice, brought it back to the room and used that to chill our drinks. It feels like a remnant of times gone by, when no-one's room had a fridge, which everyone has gotten used to now and doesn't want to let go of.

Art galleries. I could say quite a few things about the art galleries we visited here, but this photo was taken inside my favourite on the trip, the Museum of Modern Art – MoMA – in New York. Like the wonderful Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I love MoMA's embrace of design as art. It's where I'm at with art, too.

And here's to all those museums and galleries with strict "no photography" rules. Blahhhhhh to them all! This photo of Buddy Holly was taken outside the Buddy Holly Museum in Lubbock, Texas, so I could photograph it, legally. But I couldn't show you any more of the Buddy Holly Museum, because they're protecting copyright in there. Same goes for the Guggenheim

Finally, this is one of those pleasant discoveries which has come from eating out for breakfast so much. We've both developed a taste for eggs cooked 'sunny side up'. We always just thought of these as fried eggs, but cooked in a teflon pan, they're just sunny side up, with nicely runny yolks. We cooked these eggs for ourselves in our little Manhattan hotel room for breakfast: the 'bread' is two bagels, split in half, then halved again, and pan-fried too. We've always been poached eggs or scrambled eggs kids for our Sunday breakfasts, but every now and then we'll have them sunny-side-up, and each time we do so we'll think of this wonderful holiday.

One more blog post to go before we fly home, a little report on our short stay here in beautiful San Francisco which we'll put up here tomorrow.

New York Stories (8) – Central Park

2011-11-03T08:08:00.008+11:00

Bravo, New York! What a marvellous thing is Central Park, for dozens of healthy, green reasons. However, I couldn't help marvelling that on an island as jam-packed with enormous buildings and millions of people, somehow New Yorkers have made room for well over 800 acres of parkland in the centre of it all. Millions of locals and visitors use it every day, all-year-round, to walk or jog through, to sit and talk, paint, play or just relax in. Just like the big, vibrant, complex city around it, Central Park also has many distinct sections plus varying moods. It really is several parks in one, and maybe to its thousands of visitors it represents a thousand different parks.

You can read a lot more about Central Park itself here at Wikipedia, but in the photos below, taken on a beautifully sunny and warmish Autumn day, here's what we saw and enjoyed in this peaceful green island within an island.

First of all, the Autumn colours were coming on beautifully. By the way, one little surprise for me here is the frequent use of the word 'autumn' to describe the season. I thought American used 'Fall' exclusively, but not so. The word 'autumn' appeared in the heading for a story on the front page of the New York Times the other day, and in one town in Georgia the streets were lined with 'Autumn Festival' banners.

The various lakes, reservoirs and ponds throughout the park add so much to the atmosphere while also opening out the tree-filled surrounding spaces to the air and blue sky above. The first one pictured below, the largest body of water in Central Park, is now called the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir.

We expected pathways aplenty through Central Park, but there are a few roadways here as well, though most of the time the traffic is slow and light. There's much to discover and explore here; at one stage we found a castle on a rocky outcrop.

The thousands of trees in the park had a bittersweet story to tell. At first glance you'd think "what's the problem, they're magnificent?" but as we wandered around there were dozens of mature trees damaged by the snowstorm last weekend. As I mentioned in an earlier posting here, the October snowstorms set new weather records for New York. Unfortunately for the trees, which were still in relatively full leaf in mid-autumn, the enormous weight of the heavy snowfalls were too much for many branches to bear, and down they came. The local news reports said the snowstorm brought down more branches in many districts than the hurricane which hit two months ago.

And so everywhere we saw piles of fallen branches, clean-up crews lopping limbs from trees and pushing fallen branches through noisy industrial mulchers. The mounds of mulched trees in some areas were 10 feet high and wide.

Our visit to Central Park on this, our last day in New York before we fly out tomorrow, was not all we did here today (we also visited the Guggenheim Museum, which is next door to Central Park, and the Museum of Modern Art – MoMA – which is down on 53rd Street, a few blocks beyond the southern edge of Central Park) and so a slow, two-hour wander through Central park in between the first dose of art and the next, really was the highlight of our day, although I must say Frank Lloyd Wright does design a nice building.

New York Stories (7) – Districts

2011-11-02T09:29:00.021+11:00

"Hi, Gulliver here, just letting you know that I have mastered the Subway system here in New York. It's a snap to get around underground. All you need is a map and an Australian accent. What you do is stand at the entrance to a Subway, poke your finger at the map and talk with your partner in an Aussie accent. In no time at all a helpful New Yorker, keen to show off their PhD in Subway Know-how, stops and helps you choose which line to take. "Oh, you'll need to walk two blocks up to Lafayette, get on the Subway there, take the F train and that will get you to your destination with the least walking. Have a nice day." Works a treat, this method. Anyway, Pam and Jamie have been giving their Subway weekly passes a hammering in the last couple of days, getting around to see several of the main districts of New York that lie beyond Manhattan, so here's how they went."

It's probably illegal to take pictures on the Subway (security and all that stuff) but we managed to take a snap of Gulliver at an undisclosed Subway station when the security staff weren't looking.

Let's just say that undisclosed location for the Subway photo was in Brooklyn, where we wandered about in search of the arty end of this city, on Bedford Avenue. We didn't know there are two Subway stations called 'Bedford Avenue' and of course we got off at the wrong one, then walked a mile or more to find what we were after. That walk was interesting in itself, as we passed through many streets where the Hasidic Jewish community live. Finally, when we saw this bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, we were close to the Bedford Avenue we were after.

Bedford Avenue itself is rather like those old inner-city areas of many cities where the arts crowd has moved in en masse. Lots of nice cafes, people on pushbikes and quirky shops.

This corner store on Bedford was both colourful and popular – no sign of any shopping malls around here!

I'm not sure why I like Orthodox churches with their onion domes so much, but I do.

After Bedford Avenue we jumped on the Subway to High Street (and did it without any help from the locals!) and made our way down to the Hudson River shoreline to see the Brooklyn Bridge. On the way we passed by several streets of really charming houses.

The Brooklyn Bridge itself is a wonderful span; even today it's impressive enough but what a marvel it must have seemed to all on both sides of the river when it was built in the second half of the 19th century. No-one had ever built a suspension bridge this big or wide before.

The view from the Brooklyn side of the river is impressive by day; I can only imagine what it would look like when lit up every night.

Another part of town Jamie visited one morning was the Bronx (to the north of Manhattan Island). He was there to see Yankee Stadium (the baseball ground) but while there he also wandered around a few streets on the morning after the snowstorm, and it was eerily quiet here with just a few people out and about amid the piles of snow, but the area looked a bit run-down and in need of some civic love.

The next day we went for a walk to 'The Highline' an innovative urban 'hi-rise' garden on the West Side of Manhattan that makes use of a disused above-ground railway line. On the way we passed this 'hi-rise' parking lot, called 'Unparalleled Parking' where the cars are cleverly stacked on hoists. We passed several of these later in the day.

We climbed the stairs at 20th West street on 10th Avenue to join the above-ground Highline walk. As it's mid-autumn, and there was a snowstorm last weekend, the plantings here weren't exactly at their peak, but it still looked good.

Ornamental grasses play a big role in the planting choices up here in this difficult, exposed spot, but they have also included hardy blue daisies (in sunny spots) and hydrangeas (in shady spots) in between the various grasses.

Here and there, for decorative effect, they have left sections of the old railway lines in place to tell the story of the garden's origins. It's no small garden either, and they're planning to expand it soon. As you walk the length of the Highline you traverse several streets on the West Side.

Along its length there is some interesting architecture (pictured above and below) to take in as you walk the Highline.

Hydrangeas are a great choice here, as they still look good even when all their summer colours have faded. By the time we made it to the southern end of the Highline, it was a short Subway ride down to South Ferry, where we caught the Staten Island Ferry to Staten Island.

There are several great things about the Staten Island Ferry. The first is that it's free. The second is that there is one every 20 minutes. And the third, fourth, fifth to umpteenth great things are the views, such as this one as the ferry pulled away from Manhattan.

Down at the very southern tip of Manhattan apartments, not offices, line the shore.

A good two-thirds of all the people on the Staten Island Ferry were tourists, most of whom were there to see this grand lady.

Pammy's camera has a really good zoom function that captured the magnificence of this statue on a sunny day. As well as being a superb statue, its placement in the harbour was a stroke of genius by the old New Yorkers. Once we returned to Manhattan from the untidy, uninspiring shores of Staten Island, we soon made our way up to the Soho district of Manhattan.

Our first surprise down this end of town was the extent of the cobblestoned streets. These aren't cutesy new cobblestones installed to make a touristy area look and feel older: these are the irregular, worn old real-deal.

Down at street level, Soho is all about ultra-expensive designer retail shops that we couldn't afford, but looking up around us the architecture is free to behold, such as this very narrow, tall (12-15 storey high) ornately decorated building complete with fire escapes.

If you keep on walking through Soho, before you know it, you're in Little Italy, where several streets are lined with Italian cafes, restaurants and Italian flags. Around one corner, we came across a deli with this impressive array of whole cheeses in the window (each is much larger that a basketball). Other windows were decorated with equally gargantuan parma hams and salamis. Inside, the aroma was divine.

Little Italy is little. Within just a couple of streets it abruptly ends, and Chinatown begins. That's one of the features of neighbourhoods in this city: they literally end at one side of a street, and across the road a completely different neighbourhood begins.

The other major discovery down this end of Manhattan, which is not far at all from the Financial District and Wall Street, is that all the buildings here are fairly low, with very few above 10 stories. Look up and you see sky, not skyscrapers. These are the older parts of New York which are probably over 100 years old now, maybe a lot more, and so they are being preserved and indeed are being revived, restored and appreciated.

After seven days here (just one day to go!) we have barely scratched the surface of seeing New York, but by visiting Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, the West Side, Soho, Greenwich Village, Little Italy and Chinatown we've realised that this extraordinarily large city is also a lot more complex, varied and delightful that we'd ever imagined.

New York Stories (6) – Times Square

2011-11-01T23:57:00.010+11:00

Take that, Las Vegas! If you want to see razzle dazzle with some class, head for Times Square in New York. We both liked the experience of walking up 7th Avenue through to Times Square and Broadway on Sunday night (to see some music) so much that we decided to do it again last night, Halloween night, and this time we took our cameras.

As our last posting was all about the wonderful Halloween decorations on houses, this post is really all about 7th Avenue and Times Square. The cute thing about all the Halloween revellers, though, is that the spooky and scary theme is only a small part of it all. In this part of town at least, it was a giant fancy dress ball, with 'anything goes' as the dress rule. Wandering past the throngs on the streets we spotted Superman, Ninjas, Roman Centurions, Zorro, Batman, Hanky Panky Nurses, Strumpets (!), a guy in Lederhosen – you name the costume, they were all out there having fun.

And unlike Las Vegas, which the whole scene reminded me of but surpassed, the atmosphere on both Sunday and Monday nights was of a good-natured party. There were little kids in the crowd with their parents, lots of tourists like us of course, and standing on the edges of it all I must admit, a fairly solid police presence. As well as the action on the main streets, the side streets were alive with light and colour, too.

Anyway, enough blather from me. On with the show: 25 photos taken last night, without any captions, as it was all about the imagery and not the words.

New York Stories (5) – spooky!

2011-10-31T23:18:00.007+11:00

The good news for the little tackers going out Trick or Treating for Halloween tonight in New York is that in many areas the snow will have melted and they won't all be slipping over, spilling their stashes of candy everywhere. Wouldn't that be terrible! I'm not sure whether we'll get a knock at the door up here on the 12th floor in our Manhattan Hotel, but you never know your bad luck, do you?

As we've driven across the country and walked around the streets of many towns, the Halloween decorations on houses and shops have been such a delightful thing to see. Some involve elaborate ghoulish figures, others are as simple and charming as a set of hand-cut pumpkins on the front steps. And so here's a few photos of the Halloween decorations we have seen all across the country, starting here with some we spotted in New York City in yesterday's walkies.

"I now pronounce you ghoul and wife" a macabre wedding ceremony on the steps of a Greenwich Village house.

I've been told these pumpkins are a special type grown each year for Halloween. They're supposedly much easier to hollow out and carve but aren't that good for eating (can my American gardener/readers confirm this?). We've seen them for sale in parking lots and local parks in some towns, with huge areas turned into a sea of orange as thousands of pumpkins are arrayed for customers to choose a few to take home.

This graveside awakening is enough to give you nightmares. Love their work (again in New York City).

Charleston, South Carolina, did itself proud with its Halloween decorations. We love these balcony folk.

This Charleston witch looks fab at the moment, but where do they keep her the rest of the year? Maybe it's in a cupboard to give burglars and snoops a fright?

Same deal with this Charleston front garden guy who greets passers-by with a cheery "boo!". Surely he lives in the attic in the off-season. Must terrify the electricians doing repairs up there...

Passing through many country towns we spotted simple harvest displays of haybales and pumpkins that are a simultaneous feature of this October Harvest/Halloween season. This one was in the town square of Swainsboro, Georgia. There were several of these in the square, including one with a scarecrow. Hundreds and hundreds of shops everywhere had mini displays of haybales/pumpkins/scarecrows in their front windows, even teeny little plastic ones on the store counter as well. The whole nation is into it!

If you think you've seen this photo of a front step harvest display before, you have. It's from Galveston, Texas.

Hand-carving your own pumpkins is a real skill. You can buy videos on how to do it, there are demos on TV on how to do it, and as these pumpkins in New Orleans show, when well done it's great folk art. At night, with candles inside the pumpkins, the effect is superb.

New Orleans cheerfully embraces graveside humour all year-round, and so Halloween just brings out the best in them. Virtually every balcony had something ghoulish hanging from it.

At any other time of year this front door in the Garden District of New Orleans would be a worry. Right now, it's just great.

Around the corner from that spooky front door, in the side garden, ghosts fluttered from the trees.

And in the French Quarter, the staff are here to help you find the graveyard of your choice.

The major Halloween Street Parade tonight in New York City is between 6th and 16th Streets in Greenwich Village, and we're not sure if we'll be there or not to join the crush, but it's no problem if we aren't there, as they televise it live on local TV, much as they do with the Mardi Gras Parade back in Sydney each year. Meanwhile, we await a knock at the door this evening, and hope it is merely a sugar-loving child dressed as a demon or witch, and not the real thing.

New York Stories (4) – walkies

2011-10-31T09:07:00.009+11:00

While buying yet another T-shirt from a shop-owner in Savannah, she told me that she loved visiting Sydney: she saw the Opera House, shopped in The Rocks, caught the Manly Ferry, went to Bondi, then flew to Ayers Rock. It occurred to me that we tourists often stick to that sort of agenda in the cities we visit, just sticking to the famous attractions. And so everywhere we have been so far, as well as seeing the famous attractions, Pammy and I have been keen on going for walkies through nowhere in particular in each city or town, in the hope of seeing a bit more of the real, ordinary life of people who don't want to sell you T-shirts or take you on a tour.

And so that's part of our plan here in New York. The trouble is that as soon as we leave a famous building or street behind, before you know it, just a couple of blocks further away, there's another world-famous district or building getting in the way. Them's the breaks, so here's what we saw on our lovely cold-but-sunny Sunday afternoon's walkies today.

We started with lunch, in a Greek-run diner on Seventh Avenue. I had a burger and fries, Pam had a toasted sandwich. The great news about New York is that we've made it back to the land of decent coffee.

Also on Seventh Avenue, which is known as the fashion street, is this charming statue of an old Jewish tailor at his sewing machine, and in the background is a dramatic sewing needle and button sculpture, whose button was still filled with yesterday's snow.

No matter where you go, the giant buildings, like the Empire State, are there looking at you.

Pammy wanted to take a photo of the water tower on the building on the right, but even 10 streets away the Empire State loomed large.

Guess which building made it into the reflection here?

We were heading downtown for the first time in our visit, and as we walked through the Greenwich Village neighbourhood the array of fire escapes on the buildings looked like a dozen steel Zs lashed onto their sides.

We stumbled across Washington Square at the south end of Greenwich Village, and the sunshine seemed to have lured out every resident in the district.

These elegant houses catching the afternoon sun were around the northern edge of Washington Square.

Overlooking the square is this magnificent tiered wedding cake of an apartment block.

Inside the park, the residents here include hundreds of squirrels, all very busy indeed with collection acorns. Yesterday's surprise snowfall must have spurred them into action. Crikey! Is it winter already?

Looks that way. In all the shadier parts of the garden yesterday's snow had turned to ice that wasn't willing to go away.

The shopping in this area is all about small specialist stores. I bought a great T-shirt from a store specialising in all kinds of stuff from the Coen Brothers' movie, 'The Big Lebowski'. And next door was a chess store, with chess sets in all known permutations, including this baseball-themed set.

As the sun started to get low in the sky and the chills set in, we headed for home up La Guardia Place. In the middle of this street I spotted this wonderful statue of the former Mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia. It's such a vibrant, energetic and non-pompous statue of a major civic figure. I love it.

At one intersection I spotted this remarkable looking building, but it's really just a giant trompe l'oeil. It's a great paint job on the side of a flat brick building.

OK. Guess the name of this street? If you answered 'Broadway' go to the top of the class. The remarkable thing about Broadway is that in most sections it's not very broad at all. On Sundays it's closed off to make a long, long series of street markets stretching across several streets.

As well as all the fashions, crafts and other offerings in the stalls, there are lots of food stalls here laden with a dozen different types of meats slowly grilling, plus deep piles of peppers and onions to be piled on top of whatever combo you want.

Marking the end of the Broadway markets, which are in the Flat Iron District, is the incredible building which gives its name to that district. The Flat Iron Building was one of the original skyscrapers of New York, and it was one of my 'must-see' buildings in this town. I have the same attitude to buildings as I have with sculpture: you have to see them in flesh to truly appreciate them.

The walkies haven't finished for the day either, as we're planning to walk from our hotel in 31st street up to the Iridium Jazz Club on 51st street to see some live music (Marshall Crenshaw with the Les Gibson Trio) tonight. Walkies might be a slow way to get around but it is by far the best and most interesting way to get to know a city. We plan to do a lot more of it, and the weather forecast for the next couple of days looks like walkies weather to us, at least most of the time.

New York Stories (3) – snow!

2011-10-30T07:38:00.007+11:00

When planning this holiday, we always knew that our late-October/early-November stay in New York would be the chilliest part of the holiday, and we were right! But we didn't expect snow. We're thrilled to see it happen (I'm not so sure that all the homeless people here would share our excitement at the prospect, though). We spent quite a bit of time trying to take a still photo that captured the snow as it started to fall, and Pam's photo below captures the first flurries seen out of our hotel room window really well.

Then it occurred to me that one of my dodgy pan shots might work. It did. You'll have to forgive one error in the commentary: the local newspaper I looked at early in the day said it was the first decent fall of snow in October since 1925, but since then it seems that there were light smatterings of snow back in both 2002 and 1952. So October snow is a rarity here in New York, that's for sure.

Soon after we did this pan shot, we hit the streets with coats, brollies, boots and every other protection we could muster against the elements. Same old bustling street life. A bit of snow wasn't going to slow down the taxis, dull the horn honking or keep pedestrians off the sidewalks.

It was amazing how quickly the cars here accumulated a layer of snow as they got around.

Though it doesn't look like it, this dull, dark photo was taken at midday.

Even the ever-moving cabs, whose engines would surely provide a bit of snow-melting warmth up-front, were all covered in more than a dusting of snow. After lunch Pam and I split up: she sensibly went for the warmth and temptations offered by Macy's and other big stores in a humungous shopping area. I wandered around the streets for less than 20 minutes more, just looking, and by then my shoes were soaked, so too my coat and bag, and so I headed back to the hotel.

On the way, just a block or two from our hotel, I decided to try one last street-level pan shot and (keep an eye out for them) at the end of the shot three or four people dressed in full Moon Mission space suits, with helmets, wandered into the shot, all carrying umbrellas.

So who would've thunk it? Snow in New York in October. The weird thing about the weather here is that yesterday was bright and sunny, today it's snowing and blowing, and tomorrow it's meant to be bright and sunny again, although with temperatures barely into the 40s at best.

Now, 40°F is not quite 4.5°C, and that's a miserable max for a sunny day. The Weather Channel promises that it'll warm up a bit for the rest of our stay each day, getting all the way up to 57°F (13.8°C) on Wednesday. After the incredible run with warmth and sunshine all the way from Las Vegas to New Orleans and then on to Atlanta, we're not complaining for a nanosecond. In fact I would like to thank Huey the Weather God for making our New York stay so interesting. Onya Huey!

New York Stories (2) - sculpture

2011-10-30T02:01:00.016+11:00

If you're a regular reader of this blog you might remember this photo below, which concluded our last installment from New York City. Not only were we quite proud of ourselves for actually making it out to the Broadway station in Queens, on the N Subway line, without a hitch; when we stepped off the train and descended the stairs to be greeted by this sight we two movie buffs were giggling to ourselves about how cool it was to actually be under one of those overhead rail lines that we have seen in so many movies. However, we weren't trainspotting or movie-buffing that day. We were looking for art, as a friend had tipped off Pam that the Noguchi Museum and Sculpture Garden was well worth a visit.

Queens itself turned out to be a multicultural area that felt just a bit, only a teensy bit, like our home suburb of Marrickville back in Sydney. You name an ethnic group, both Queens and Marrickville probably have them. Italians, Greeks, Vietnamese, Korean, North African, Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, African, Egyptian, etc etc. After getting off the train it was an easy, shortish 10-block walk down the interesting main street (called Broadway) to the Noguchi.

It was a shame that we'd already had lunch before setting off on the train trip: otherwise our Tummy Time correspondent could have sampled this fine looking diner here in Queens.

However, we were here on a cultural mission to see The Noguchi Museum, which you can read all about here. The short version is that Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese/American artist who worked in many media. Here, the gallery mostly shows his sculptures in stone, steel and timber, but at the Gallery Shop you can also buy his hand-made paper lanterns, for which he is also justly famous in designer homeware stores around the world. The Gallery and Museum itself is set into two very different buildings which seamlessly flow into one another inside, and both in turn can lead you out into a tranquil outdoor sculpture garden. Pictured above is the white-walled, timber-floored building which consists of several large, airy open rooms that display the small- to medium-sized pieces in the collection.

The other building is a less appealing space, built from grey cinder blocks, yet the large, earthy stone sculptures here look as if they belong here and nowhere else.

As I have mentioned several times in this blog, it's the things you've never seen before, didn't imagine ever existed, which so often make the greatest impact as you travel. The Noguchi collection is another case in point. I always seek out sculpture galleries as a traveller, as mere photos in books fall way, way short of doing any sculpture justice. You need to see sculpture in the flesh to fall in love with it.

It's the stone which is always the star in every work here. Noguchi set up his workshop out here in the urban wastelands of Queens in the early 1960s in these very buildings, as they were in the same street as all the specialist stone suppliers who unloaded the ships from the nearby river.

His collection showcases marbles from around the world, plus granites, travertines and other beautiful stones. At times he works them into shapes as if they were children's plasticine.

Several pieces include a 'twist' on the stone, as if it were a licorice stick warped a fraction then plonked on a plinth.

As well as shaping the stones, he explores their inner textures, skilfully combining brilliant polished surfaces with pockmarked roughness in the one piece.

As we walked around the gallery, the garden outside could be seen through every window.

We've been to many superb Japanese gardens where the traditional emphasis has always been on creating a miniature landscape through the careful placement of stones and the clipping of shrubs, as well as the deft layout of sculptures, water, seats and pavilions. Here at the Noguchi, it is a simpler thing, a Japanese sculpture garden, a tranquil place with large, coarse gravel rocks at your feet, and a stimulating mixture of smooth and polished stones in shapes ranging from the geometric to the organic. It's not as precious as the more traditional Japanese garden. I felt more relaxed here, by comparison.

After the Noguchi visit, we stopped off at the Socrates Sculpture Park just down the road on Vernon Boulevard (here's a link to the website for it). Once a derelict riverside headland of weeds, the park is now an open area venue for changing exhibits by local sculptors.

The nearby district isn't flash by any means, but this Park and the Noguchi Museum are in the vanguard of the effort to rejuvenate inner urban lands in every borough of New York City, not just as a venue for art, but more importantly to improve the areas as places for anyone, everyone, to live in.

When we visited, we first came across this artful arrangement of glass doors.

A stainless steel giraffe across the way glowed with good cheer, despite the cloudy afternoon.

A small tree dressed in thousands of bangles looked like a long-necked tribal dancer ready to party.

One fears for the well being of this mortarless wall of bricks on a windy, stormy night, but perhaps the artist has given it inner strength?

And down by the riverside, this member of the Stones is just waiting for his cue to get rolling.

Standing on the edge of the Socrates Sculpture Park, the view here is across towards the many apartments of Uptown Manhattan.

With the first first dark clouds of the cold change forecast for tomorrow looming overhead, and with sunset not so far away, we wandered back up the 10 blocks to the Subway station and headed back for home.

Along the way, not sure at which stop, a young man carrying an accordion, accompanied by his young girlfriend/wife with a one-year-old baby on her hip (plus a baseball cap to collect the tips), asked for the passengers' attention and then started busking a Middle-European tune. It was $2 well spent. Then, when we got off the train at 34th Street, an acapella busker group (five African-American singers with a young white guy on upright acoustic bass) singing a very respectable doo-wop repertoire also loosened another two bucks from our wallet.

As I sit here writing this blog, it's actually snowing in New York around lunchtime Saturday, and it's set to get colder and snowier and windier the more the day drags on. They say it's the first time it has snowed here in October since 1925, so aren't we lucky to be snowed in! Pammy and I are still working on getting a decent photo of it for you (tricky stuff to photograph in the city, falling snow) but right now it's not so much fluttering down, as fluttering sideways in the wind.

While New York is such a marvellous headquarters for so many man-made marvels, it's really wonderful right now to see Mother Nature brushing her cold, snowy hand across the city, just to remind these mere mortals who is boss. Yes, ma'am.

New York Stories (1)

2011-10-29T11:59:00.019+11:00

Where should we begin with telling you the story of our first couple of days in this amazing city? Oh yes, that's right! With one of Jamie's now-infamous pan shots, of course, taken from what is known around town as 'Top of the Rock' – the top observation deck of the main tower in the Rockefeller Centre, which gives you a 360° view of Manhattan.

This is the first part of two pan shots, looking north over Central Park.

And this is from the other side of the tower, looking south, over the Empire State Building.

The whole visit to Top of the Rock is designed to amaze. Once you get past the queues and security, the elevator ride to the 75th top floor was a trip in itself. As soon as the doors closed, the lights went out in the lift. All 12 of us crammed in the lift groaned, and then the light show began, overhead. The lift has a glass roof, and as we took off the elevator shaft lit up with blue lights narrowing all the way to the pinpoint high above us, then whoosh we flew upstairs to the observation deck.

Before all that, however, they ask you if you want to sit for a cheesy tourist photo where you look like you're falling off one of the steel girders on the construction tower, and we weren't too sensible to say no to that!

However, let's rewind for just a moment, all the way back to ground level. Getting used to New York is the first challenge to face here. For one thing it's noisy. Every taxi driver blasts his horn about every 10 seconds or so. The ambulances, cop cars and fire engines have even louder horns, and they love to use the ones which sound like ocean liners, or semi-automatic machine guns, to get their 'let me through' message across. Then there are the tall buildings. Lots of them, everywhere, stretching for miles in every direction. There are so many you can never see the sun and you have no idea which way is north, south, east or west. And every sidewalk is crowded. People walk fast here, most with their heads down as if on a mission.

We of course walk slowly and frequently consult our map. We're not alone, though. There are lots of lost tourists here, speaking every known language on the planet. No-one, not no-one, asks where you're from (unlike the South, where it happened virtually everywhere we went). When we do bother to lift our heads from the map, we see famous buildings, like the beautiful Art Deco Chrysler Tower.

If we turn right three short blocks from our hotel room, then look up, there's the Empire State Building. If you think these blue skies are typical here, don't be fooled. It rained all day yesterday, today was cool (max of 50°F) and tomorrow snow is forecast, as well as temps in the low 40s, maybe even the 30s. When I saw those forecasts, I knew today (Friday here in New York) was the perfect day to head for the Rockefeller Centre and that wonderful view across the city.

And so it proved. I simply cannot put into words the sensation of being so high up in the sky, looking out on such a massive city. The only thing I can say is that the moment I saw all of Manhattan and New York in one hit, it ceased to be the mystery to me that it was when all I could see of it was from down on the ground. I'm ready to really enjoy the place now (but I think Pammy has been enjoying it from the moment we arrived).

This south-eastern view from 30 Rock overlooks the taller Empire State Building, and off to the right, in the harbour, you can just make out the Statue of Liberty.

Pam's ultra-zoom brought it a bit closer, but the lady is still shrouded in mystery for me. Must get up closer with a ride on the Staten Island Ferry in the next few days.

There's actually a series of observation decks at 30 Rock, and one of them was being used to express some high hopes for this bride and groom.

Standing back down at ground level, the 30 Rock Building itself is actually a series of buildings which stretch between 5th and 6th Avenues, also spanning the breadth of three streets.

At the base of the building the skating rink was filled with lunchtime ballet stars.

It's a lively place filled with people, and that's a feature of virtually every street and avenue here: a press of people, everywhere. Can you spot the blogger in the crowd?

One lovely little detail in the plaza next to the ice rink was the cabbage art plantings here.

Rows upon rows of ornamental kales in reds and greens, all perfectly grown.

Yesterday was our first day out and about, and to cut a long story short the first thing we learned was how to get around on the Subway. It's pretty easy, really (just get a Metrocard: ours is the one-week unlimited for $29, which lets you ride the Subway and local buses an unlimited number of times). This is the Natural History Museum, which has its own Subway stop – and I mean its own stop. You get off the Subway train, walk to the exit, go through the doors and join the queue to enter the Museum. The Museum itself was a bit of a dud, with a lot of exhibits closed for repairs, plus huge crowds jamming all corridors and exhibits. It was a very dated old museum that seemed like how museums were about 25-30 years ago.

Much better, infinitely better, was the JP Morgan Library which we visited in the afternoon. Forgive this photo, which is actually a photo of the postcard I bought there, as cameras are strictly banned inside there. JP Morgan was one of the original American financial tycoons of the late 19th century, and his library has the most extraordinary collection of books I have ever seen. It has the Gutenberg Bible (the first book ever printed using movable type): it has Jane Austen's draft of one of her novels in her own handwriting (a tidy hand it is too); it has a handwritten letter by Thomas Jefferson (another nice hand); a 9th-Century Bible whose cover was encrusted with gold leaf and countless rubies, emeralds, diamonds and other gems. I could go on and on listing all the treasures here, but there are too many. And then there is this magnificent room with its illustrated ceilings in which the whole collection is contained and guarded by the over-zealous officials which seem to be common to all the galleries we have visited over here.

But I really should tear myself away from great libraries to tell you how excited I was to see steam coming out from this manhole cover. Ever since I saw Francis Ford Coppola's film 'Rumblefish' back in the 70s I've wanted to see steam coming out from manhole covers, and now I have. Almost as good as seeing the Gutenberg Bible, it is.

And this afternoon Pammy and I stood in wonderment beneath the railway line running through Queens. All it lacked was a car chase to be perfect.

However, at this stage I really ought to hit the pause button. The reason for us being under this railway line in Queens is that we were off to see a sublime sculpture garden, and that's what we'll show you next time here in New York Stories.

PS: what about Tummy Time New York? The short answer is that our taste buds are already back in Sydney, with any and every ethnic food you can imagine on offer, all cooked to a very high standard. Never fear, we're accumulating a dossier (burp!) and will report in.

Training for New York

2011-10-27T06:54:00.014+11:00

Most of the basic details of our trip were planned months ago, including our train trip which started last night in Atlanta Georgia and has now deposited us quite happily in our New York Hotel, here on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. But let me tell you, this part of our whole across-America odyssey was the bit that had me worried the most.

Pam innocently didn't help things along when she gave me Australian speechwriter Don Watson's travel book, 'American Journeys', as a gift. I took it with me to the local cafe for lunch, looking forward to a good read, opened it at a random chapter and the gloomy sod spent the whole chapter carping on about how terrible the Amtrak Atlanta Station was. As I had already booked the train tickets and paid for them, all I could think was "we're doomed!"

My first view of the station almost had me humming Peggy Lee's old hit "Is that all there is?". For the main Amtrak station in a city of 5 million, this lonely single platform wouldn't have looked out of place in a dusty Australian country town. Undeterred by Watson's spoilsport mutterings, however, we entered the Amtrak offices there and encountered some sweet, helpful people who eased a lot of our worries. Sure we could check our bags in early that day. No, you don't have to get there as early as the signs say. Half an hour beforehand should be fine, honey.

After checking out of our hotel we returned the Avis rent-a-car which had been our loyal, trouble-free friend for the last 38 days, had a nice lunch in town, killed a few hours doing nothing much in Atlanta, then we headed for the waiting room at the Amtrak. There's a different crowd which travels by Amtrak. Not so affluent but just as polite and friendly as all the other Americans we have encountered here, there and everywhere.

Arriving on time from New Orleans, ready for its 8.04pm departure from Atlanta, the big Crescent City Line train looked even bigger next to the low platform. For the trainspotters out there reading the blog, the locomotive pictured here is a big diesel, but when they get to Philadelphia they substitute it with an electric loco for the rest of the trip to New York.

As the train trip was my idea, I booked us into the nicest sleeper cabin they have. We've travelled by sleeper train together just once, back in 1994, from Sydney across to Perth, and Pam was looking forward to doing it again (or at least I hope she was). These cabins are miracles of space efficiency, and inside this space the lower two bench seats convert into Pam's bed, while my upstairs bunk pulls down from above. There's a folding third seat (which you can't see) and around the corner is our own self-contained toilet and shower cubicle. A veritable Tardis, it was.

However, as soon as we plonked our cabin bags down in our Tardis, a friendly face announced that dinner was served (it came free, as part of the sleeper-room package) in the dining room. A comfy enough place, we had a table to ourselves and enjoyed a thoroughly ordinary meal indeed. I took photos, but who wants to see the dry, stringy roast chicken I had or the soggy bland fish with overcooked boiled vegies which Pammy ate half of?

The highlight of the meal was dessert, which they were unable to overcook.

After polishing off the ice-cream, we retired to our room, and an hour or so later the attendant came in and in a flash converted our room to sleeping quarters for us. Now, sleeping on trains isn't easy, but we both decided by next morning that Amtrak is definitely quieter and more comfortable than the Indian Pacific train to Perth was back in Australia, and so we did sleep fairly well this time round. However, the first thing to get used to with Amtrak trains is their driver's love of blasting the horns. The train lines run through the countryside and cross roads incessantly, and so the long, repeated blasting of the horns to warn of the train's approach to each level crossing went on virtually all night. It wasn't that loud, and along with the clickety clacks and occasional stops here and there to pick up passengers through the night, the whole thing worked out to be a bit of a hoot. We'll probably do it again another 15 to 20 years from now, once we've forgotten all the worst bits.

The next morning we were in Virginia, and a green and pleasant land of pastures it proved to be.

All along the way the Fall season colours in the trees were a highlight, but whizzing along in the train at 50 or so miles per hour made them hard to catch on camera. The further north we travelled, the stronger the foliage colours were. We're looking forward to seeing Central Park's Fall foliage this week as there was a thing on the Weather Channel the other morning about how nice Central Park is looking at the moment.

However, train trips always take you into cities via their back doors and untidy backyards, too, and our Amtrak train also hurtled past countless abandoned factories.

From Baltimore onwards we noticed lots and lots of streets of terraced houses, some in good condition and well-loved, and others looking decidedly run-down and shifty. At times you could swear you were in an English train somewhere in the Midlands.

We also crossed many ugly bridges, polluted streams, and vast factories of complex pipeworks and towers belching steam producing goodness knows what essential ingredient for modern living

And then, as we left Newark, New Jersey, we spotted some very tall towers in the hazy distance. Not long after that first glimpse we then whooshed into a tunnel that took us under the Hudson River. Before we knew it the train had stopped at Penn Station, we stumbled off the train, waited half an hour for our baggage to appear, then caught a cab to our hotel.

New York! We're here in the Big Apple and haven't done a thing yet. We just slumped into our room, unpacked, looked at each other and said "New York". And so exploring New York is another day, and another blog posting from us. But I'm really relieved – grumpy old Don Watson was wrong – hooray!

Tummy time USA (9)

2011-10-25T22:59:00.010+11:00

Regular Tummy Time readers might be surprised to know that Pam and I have stopped off at the McDonald's chain of restaurants at least a dozen times on this road trip. They have great restrooms. At Maccas, no-one bothers you if you walk in, visit the restroom, then walk out. Fab places, with lots of locations. Recommended for swollen bladders everywhere. We haven't got a clue what the food is like there, as we haven't bought any. But I do think they deserve a generous plug for their excellent facilities and we can recommend Maccas to all road travellers searching for a comfort stop.

However, when it comes to buying roadside meals at lunchtime our strict policy has been to look for the little places, and they haven't let us down yet. Last Sunday, in the middle of our long 300-mile drive from Charleston up to Atlanta, we were feeling quite hungry by the time we arrived in sleepy Bamberg in South Carolina. Now, you'd be forgiven for not knowing where Bamberg is, but it has some famous neighbours. About 20 miles up the road there is Denmark, and north of Denmark there is Sweden. A bit further north is Norway, and not far to the east of all these is Finland. Got your bearings now?

This photo of Rusty and Paula's was taken as we were leaving (and we were some of the last to go) but when we arrived there were cars everywhere, and that's the road sign that says "eat here".

Though you probably can't read the lettering on the door, it says Rusty & Paula's is open from 5am to 2.30pm each day. Catering for the workers, they are. On Sunday it's open 11am to 2.30pm, and when we walked in the joint was full of well-dressed people in their Sunday-best, fresh from Church, including the local church official in her fine black, gold and red robes.

Inside, Rusty and Paula's was all red check plastic tablecloths. We didn't know it was a buffet ($9.95, all you can eat, including desserts) and so the friendly waitress just said "help yourself, folks". And so we did.

One feature of the buffet was the number of vegetables on offer. Right front is black-eyed peas; left front is string beans; next row is corn (right) and a dwindling pile of spinach (left); at the back is another green bean (right) and collard greens (left).

Pam chose the sliced turkey and loaded the plate with vegies plus rice. Those little round green beans on the plate look a bit like the innermost bean from a peeled broad bean and were just as delicious, but they're not broad beans. Turkey? Yum.

Of course I went for the Southern Fried Chicken, and I loaded my plate up with vegies plus a dollop of potato salad. Such a guts! For a moment I got excited at the little offally looking ring-things with my black-eyed peas. I asked the waitress: "Are these Chitlins?" and she smiled at the foolish boy and said: "No, honey, that's fatback. We do sometimes have Chitlins here, but not today." (For the uninitiated, Chitlins are also called Chitterlings, and they are cooked pig's intestines. So it looks like I've missed out on trying Chitlins this trip. Not sure to be disappointed or to feel lucky, though). Oh, what's fatback? It's a piece of pork rind added as a flavour-booster for the Black-Eyed Peas. Same goes with the Collard Greens: these have bacon in them. They are chopped-up leafy greens a bit like silverbeet leaves which need to be cooked long and slow, and at Rusty and Paula's they were very delicious indeed. The fried chicken was up to the usual high finger-lickin' standard, of course.

Finally, as a farewell to Southern food, this old menu on a wall is not from Rusty and Paula's restaurant. It's a decoration in a pub in Savannah, Georgia, at the Crystal Beer Parlor. These days it's a lively, trendy pub selling designer beers (plus some nice wines) but the original building has long been part of the hospitality industry, and this wall menu is from the old days. While the reflections from the lights blank out one or two choices, we were fascinated to see menu items such as "Liver and Gizzard Country Barbecue". Menus were simpler back then, but the southern love of eating the whole animal has been alive and thriving ever since man looked at his livestock and said "hello, breakfast".

So that concludes the Southern Editions of Tummy Time, folks. We're heading for the Big Apple now, and we're sure there'll be something of interest up there,. However, the Weather Channel says the forecast temperatures for New York are down in the 50s and 40s (°F) for the next few days, and rain is falling, so it seems our love affair with American sunshine might come to an end when we step off that train in Penn Station in Manhattan. But I'm sure the love affair with American food won't skip a beat.

Stumbling across Charleston

2011-10-25T02:11:00.016+11:00

"Hey look, a Maserati dealership," said Pam, as we motored into Charleston. That sign of affluence was a portent of more to come, and to tell the truth we didn't have a clue what to expect on our little visit to Charleston. This one-day detour came about because we have set such a good pace driving across the country, thanks mostly to the great weather, that we had a day up our sleeve as we planned our visit to Savannah.

"We could just stay an extra day in Savannah," I offered to Pam, but she poked her finger at Charleston on the map and said "what about there – that's in South Carolina, so that'll make another state we'll visit." So, an overnight stay in Charleston it was. We expected it to be a bit like Savannah, without the fancy layout of streets and squares. It turned out to be something very different indeed, an up-market surprise in fact.

Charleston feels like a town with plenty of money. As you drive in, the rivermouth harbour is filled with very fancy, large motor cruisers and yachts, and as we pottered around the streets heading for the lunchtime restaurant zone, grand homes lined the way.

Cruise ships stop here (this one had the not very classy name of 'Carnival Fantasy') and the stylish new bridge across the river fits in with the image as well.

When booking ahead for hotels I should have realised what was in store at Charleston. Most of the downtown hotels were asking anywhere between $300 and $500 for a room on Saturday night. Gulp! So we didn't stay downtown for once, instead staying out on the edge of downtown, the paupers' patch, for a much more modest fee. Meanwhile, back at the $500 fancy place that's harbourside, even their streetside window boxes were upmarket deluxe.

After a pleasant lunch at a local cafe, we went wandering to check out the shopping, and we soon found this place. Now, this photo is not one of ours (I pinched it off Google Images, but it'll do, except that it lacks the throngs of shoppers present when we visited). We were told these were the 'French markets' but they are in fact the old Slave Markets of Charleston. In this photo you can see the front of one low, wide pavilion about 80 yards long. It leads to a second, identical building, then a third one. Each was crammed with stallholders selling their wares, but the goods for sale weren't just the usual T-shirts and caps for tourists: artisans sold their hand-made crafts and well-to-do shoppers already decked out in designer clothes shopped for expensive 'bargains'.

Most notable here were the many local Gullah people making and selling their sweetgrass baskets. Instead of spending ages explaining the craft here in detail, here's a link to one article I found on Google. The short story is that Gullah people arrived here late in the 16th century as slaves and brought with them their basket-making skills from Africa, which they adapted to local plants, notably sweetgrass, or Cabbage Palm, now South Carolina's state plant emblem. Many skilled artisans make these baskets, and any of these pictured would probably cost between $100 and $200 each, or more. It takes time to make these very sturdy, long-lasting baskets, and the prices barely cover the long hours of labour. I can't remember how many basket-making artisans there were at the markets, but there were dozens, and their prices were identical. We just couldn't afford the ones we liked.

After an hour or two of shopping we went wandering, then later on driving, as it soon became apparent that Charleston's elegant older-style residential area is far too big to walk around. The trees here don't have much of the Spanish moss seen in Savannah, but the houses are, if anything, grander and speak of more affluence. Most are weatherboard (clapboard), two storeys and well-kept. Here's a few more shots of them...

We arrived late-ish for lunch so decided to make lunch our main meal of the day, and it was very nice. As we then lazed around in our hotel room, tired as can be from all the walking, looking for a cable movie to watch on TV, we picked up a very nicely produced 'Charleston Living' magazine and discovered that we were not eating out in one of the most famous towns for food on the East Coast. Well, we had never intended to come here, and we of course had done no research whatsoever about the place, and so we missed out on trying one of the many interesting and innovative restaurants featured within the pages of 'Charleston Living'. We comforted ourselves with thoughts about how pricey they would have been, anyway. All I can say is that if you take our tips about visiting Savannah seriously and do plan a trip there, add Charleston to the itinerary, it's only 100 miles north of Savannah, but save up for it, too.

Having left Charleston the next morning for the 300-mile drive to Atlanta, we did the first part of that trip by our favourite means: touring the backroads through all the little towns and villages. Gosh there are some cute houses along the way!

Deeper inland we even came across a house where almost everything was covered in Spanish moss. Maybe they're originally from Savannah.

The rest of the trip up to Atlanta had its moments. In the small town of Bamberg, South Carolina, there was only one restaurant open for lunch that Sunday, Rusty and Paula's, and it proved to be a real find, a buffet of home-cooked southern-style soul food, and in Tummy Time 9 we'll show you what we had for lunch there, and say farewell to the delicious home-cooked food of the south at the same time.

Atlantic shores

2011-10-25T00:54:00.011+11:00

We're moving so fast that our blog is about 400 miles behind us! We've made it to Atlanta, Georgia now, the end of the car-driving part of this memorable journey (what lies ahead is a train trip to New York). And yet this blog posting comes from Tybee Island, about 18 miles east of Savannah, Georgia, right on the Atlantic Ocean coast. Gulliver wanted to celebrate the occasion, so here he is, preparing to get his feet wet.

"Hi everyone, Gulliver here: we've made it to the East Coast and the Atlantic Ocean. Woohoo! I know my mate Benno back in Sydney would like a surf report, and Benno, it's as flat as a tack here. Not a patch on Cronulla's break."

Thanks for that, Gulliver. As well as Gulliver contributing to this blog posting, all three of us will be writing something this time. Pammy takes a lot of the photos you see with each posting, but she also wants to say a few words later on down the page about a special spot we chanced upon here on Tybee. But before then, even driving over to Tybee Island was interesting. The whole coastal area from Savannah up to Charleston in South Carolina is flat, swampy and full of low islands, sinuous waterways and reed banks stretching away in the distance. To get to their boats, home owners on slightly higher ground have built long, long jetties out over the reed banks to little covered landings where their boats are suspended over the more open waterways.

Once you get to Tybee the low, coastal scrub continues all the way to the beach, but the plentiful walkways here protect the dunes and make it easy to get down to the shore.

There's an historic lighthouse out on the point, the third to be built here (the earlier two versions were both blown down by hurricanes until this sturdy, handsome one was built in the late 18th century).

Tybee Island itself is now one of those long beach resorts with houses and apartments stretching for miles along the straight stretch of beach. It's the tourist off-season now that it's Fall, but the place was lively enough, the many restaurants and bars still had customers, and people sunned themselves on the beach.

As mentioned earlier, though, Tybee does have a problem with Atlantic hurricanes, and the Fall season is the hurricane season around here. (My superb research prior to our trip missed out on that minor detail.) This storm surge pole down by the beach gives you some idea of how high the seas rise when a hurricane blows in. So, while it was a lovely place to be on the warm, sunny, calm day we visited, the island does have its moments.

However, as lovely as peaceful little Tybee was to visit, it was a quirky local restaurant and bar called Huc-a-Poo's (pictured below) that we chanced upon that was the real highlight of our day, and which has inspired Pammy to say a few words here.

Hi everyone, Pam here, as many of you will know I suddenly lost my twin brother Gary in a car accident in August 2011. It's because of that tragic event Jamie and I decided to take this holiday we had talked about for so long, as life is just too short and you need to do these things while you can. Every day we have been travelling there has been something along the way that has reminded me of Gary but when we walked into Huc-a-Poo's it just struck me immediately how much he would have loved the place and would have felt right at home.

To me it was "Gary Horsnell Heaven" and I know that somehow he will find this place as it has everything he would enjoy. It's near the water, the bar was very casual with friendly locals standing around chatting, there was an area where you could smoke, the TV on the wall was continuously tuned to the Sports channel and the food was pretty good too! But it was the ambience of the place and the ramshackle way the bar and restaurant were decorated with all manner of old, rare and interesting paraphernalia that I think he would really love.

As you can see from Jamie's photos, not only were the walls covered in stuff but the ceiling was completely plastered with old record album covers. I can just see Gary standing at the bar, having a drink and smoke with some of the locals, and discussing the music that was once housed inside the many record covers on display. So Gary, I really hope you have found this place too and have settled in for a very long enjoyable stay.

Pammy and I (pictured here on a swing seat at Tybee Beach) have had an incredible run with the weather all through this long drive from Las Vegas to here, with barely a drop of rain until we hit Macon, Georgia (and even then the rain gave our dusty car such a good heavenly overnight car wash that it sparkled like new the next morning).

So far we have notched up over 3000 miles on the road, and while we have already made it to our final stop on the road trip, Atlanta, we simply have to tell you in our next blog posting about the great city we visited as our final coastal stop: Charleston, South Carolina (just 100 miles up the road from Tybee).

Southern Elegance

2011-10-22T22:34:00.007+11:00

There really is no place that compares with Savannah, Georgia. It is elegantly, beautifully on its own as a city, and if you can somehow get here one day, do it. This is such a charming place to walk around, with its many and varied fine old buildings, broad-spreading oak trees draped with cloudy fingers of Spanish moss, and a layout of streets and squares that makes it feel like an urban parkland rather than a city. We took lots of photos and here's a tiny fraction of them, about 20 views of this gorgeous town.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia article on the layout of Savannah's streets, but to summarise, the old town area follows a grid based around 24 park-like squares, like this one. Each square is about 30 metres deep but the squares' widths vary from 30 to 90 metres. At the centre of every square there is a focal point, such as this fountain, but other squares have statues in the middle, or a gazebo, or sculptures, or just a circle of greenery plus benches for citizens and weary visitors to rest on.

Each square is shaded by several enormous Southern Live Oaks draped with Spanish moss. These trees are huge, wide-spreading beauties. I paced out the spread of one typical branch on an average-sized tree and it reached out 15 metres from the thick trunk. So some of these squares, though cool and shady, needs no more than nine or so trees to cover the whole area with cool, dappled shade.

The locals use these squares: to sit and chat, others perch laptops or books on their lap and pass the hours, some just sleep. And it also seems that lots of people get married here: we saw two wedding ceremonies in the squares just yesterday – such a romantic place to tie the knot. Close to the main business district close to the Savannah River the squares offer a patch of cool green relief to the workers in offices nearby, but the surrounding buildings down this end of the city are charmless offices and shops. As you move further away from the city the atmosphere changes entirely as the squares are surrounded on all sides by lovely old houses in my favourite higgildy piggeldy style, with very few houses the same as their neighbours.

Let's just look at a few of the houses, such as this pretty little yellow one.

White weatherboards with dark grey shutters, a popular colour scheme.

I can't remember any ramshackle houses anywhere here in the downtown. All were beautifully and proudly looked after.

And not all the houses are grand. This little row of simple dwellings dates from the 1790s.

I like the twin staircases leading to the front door.

Flags and flowers are a common decoration out front, along with countless Halloween pumpkins.

Even the pavements were interesting, often very old bricks from these two companies.

Otherwise the pavements were made from a concrete infused with millions of seashells.

This eye-catching garden used a colourful foliage infill between the neatly clipped hedges.

Pleasingly, many planters were full of life and colour.

These colourful mounding blooms were a popular choice all over the city and feature on many front steps.

A cool courtyard glimpsed through an iron gate.

Beautiful, ornate iron staircases like this one decorated many houses.

Even the local birds seem to be very relaxed about all those tourists wandering around admiring the place.

Later in the day, Pam and I went for a drive to have a look around the city beyond the tourist hub of the historic downtown area, and the pleasant surprise was that the huge oaks with their Spanish moss, and the lovely old houses, stretched out for a few more miles, well beyond the downtown area. Driving out on Abercorn Street, one of the main thoroughfares leading out of town, the stretch of such beautiful neighbourhoods lasted all the way out to 62nd street.

Such a humble, simple plant the Spanish moss, and yet it's the star attraction here. When we saw a huge Southern Live Oak NOT draped in Spanish moss, somehow it didn't seem right.

Trying to do justice to such an extraordinarily beautiful city by showing you just 20 photos is never going to tell the whole story, so I think the best idea is for you to put Savannah, Georgia on your 'must visit' list and come here one day. Set aside a few days at least to see it all. We were lucky in that the weather here has been sunny yet cool to mild (65-70°F), making it very easy to walk around, but Savannah is a subtropical city and it can get very hot and humid here at times.

We walked everywhere, but there are countless alternatives for those for whom walking is not an option. There are buses, trolleys, horse-drawn coaches, rental pushbikes and motor scooters, even Segways. But if you choose the slow pace of walking you'll see all the details, at your own pace.

We also went out to the coast, to Tybee Island, so we could officially say we had made it to the Atlantic seaboard, and that's where our next blog will come from.

Tummy time USA (8)

2011-10-21T23:15:00.015+11:00

Woo hoo! We've made it to the East Coast. Savannah, Georgia, one of the most beautiful cities you could hope to walk around, but more of that tomorrow, once we've finished all the walking and been to every neighbourhood. After all the deep-fried southern soul food we've enjoyed over the last few weeks we were actually craving something lighter, fresher and, yes, healthier. Here's how we went.

OK. For starters, one classic Savannah, Georgia photo to set the scene. This really is a town of a thousand delightful neighbourhoods.

In the centre of town, however, the Jepson Art Gallery is an equally wonderful modern space, and it was in the cafe (from which I took this shot) that we enjoyed a much healthier lunch.

Pammy would like you to know that this photogenic Biscuits with Tomatoes, Swiss Cheese, Basil Aoli and Salad was a truly impractical thing to eat. As mentioned several Tummy Times ago, biscuits are a baked thing rather like Aussie scones, but often a bit wider and flatter than scones. When used here as a substitute for a bread roll, they collapsed into half a dozen little bikkies after the first bite. This is a classic of 'it seemed like a good idea at the time'. It passed the taste test (nice) but it didn't exactly shine in the 'pleasure to eat' department.

I had a saintly salad. Well, actually, no I didn't. I had a chicken salad, which featured halved seedless red grapes, sun-dried tomatoes, red onion, cold cooked chicken blended with a herby mayonnaise, Cos (romaine) lettuce and a basil vinaigrette. What a mouthful of a description, but it turned out to be a pleasant mouthful for lunch. All it lacked was crunch...

So I ordered a half-plate of grilled ciabatta bread drizzled with olive oil and scattered with herbs.

After lunch we went exploring the amazing streets of Savannah and along the way we spotted this missed opportunity for Tummy Timers, the 'Shalom Y'all' Festival of Jewish Food, advertised outside the local synagogue. Sounds both fun and yummy.

Last night we dined out at what turned out to be a much more flash restaurant than we expected, but it was a night of interesting food served in a beautifully restored old house. The restaurant is called 'The Olde Pink House' and it's inside an historic mansion fronting Reynolds Square, on Abercorn Street. Somehow I was so keen to get stuck into our entree of a shared plate of a dozen oysters natural that I forgot to photograph them, but you know what oysters look like. The oysters were from just down the coast in Florida (not on the Gulf Coast side) and while, quite honestly, they weren't as good as creamy, superb Sydney Rock Oysters they were still the cleanest, freshest flavour (with a squeeze of lemon) we had enjoyed in weeks. After that fab entree, Pammy ordered the grilled salmon with dill cucumber salad, and they cooked the salmon the way she likes it: rare.

I had a crab-stuffed black grouper, with lightly steamed string beans on the side. Please note, that in Savannah they pronounce the name of this fish 'group-er', and not the Aussie way of 'grope-er'. I did notice the waitress twitch just a fraction when I placed my order. Oh, and it might not be all that photogenic but it was deliciously crabby, with the grouper a mere casing for the crab main, flavour-wise.

As so often happens with goody-two-shoes diners, by the time they have had salad for lunch and fish for dinner the danger period is desserts, and we both succumbed, I am happy to say. I had a key lime pie (not my first this trip) and this one was up there with the best of them, but all of them have been of a high standard.

Pammy lost her head for a moment and blurted out "I'll have the Chocolate Oblivion Torte, please" but she recovered beautifully when this relatively restrained, but deeply chocolatey little slice appeared. She approved on all counts. Got her chocolate fix, didn't overdose.

One cute note to finish on is the dessert menu, or more specifically the dessert drinks menu. We both loved the way they listed all the liqueurs as 'cordials'.

We'll tell you a lot more about this truly beautiful place with a blog posting tomorrow, but Savannah is well known for its food and it's living up to its reputation. On our first night here we were too tired from driving down here to venture far looking for a restaurant, so we went to a local pub, the Crystal Beer Parlor, and even there the crab cakes I had were light and full of fresh, real crabmeat, while Pam's lamb rack was cooked pink, how she likes it. Shame I didn't take the camera, but we didn't think pub grub was going to be all that enthralling. That's a mistake I keep on making on this trip. I forget to take my camera when I dine out and then I wish I had. Just goes to show you that the food here continues to be full of pleasant surprises.

Tummy time USA (7)

2011-10-19T01:00:00.012+11:00

I'm calling this the Soul Food edition of Tummy Time, although Pammy thinks it might be closer to the mark if I called it the Southern Fried edition of Tummy Time. We're going to say a final Tummy style farewell to New Orleans for starters, then get down to some serious eating here with mains and desserts in Montgomery, Alabama.

"You must go to Li'l Dizzys on Esplanade," said the owner of the Upperline Restaurant where we dined out one night early in our stay in New Orleans. And we're sensible enough not to turn down a recommendation like that, especially when it comes from the owner of a restaurant where we had just enjoyed a fine meal. Li'l Dizzys is a cafe that does breakfasts and lunch. Many say it has the best Southern Fried Chicken in New Orleans, but really it's just famous for all its good Soul Food.

Pammy chose the catfish Po' Boy, and like the shrimp Po' Boy I had the other day at Mother's, this had the same great virtues: fresh, light baguette loaf; juicy fresh-cooked fish inside; a light amount of salad on top ("hold the mayo" said Pam, and they did): and that's it. Lightness was its virtue, flavour its soul. Perfect.

The current record for biggest ever glasses of iced tea goes to Li'l Dizzys. These must have been a full quart each. Very nice they were too. Most of the time when you order iced tea, which everyone offers, you get the choice of sweetened or unsweetened. If they have run out of either option, it's always the sweetened stuff they no longer have. And so everywhere we have gone we've enjoyed our preference: unsweetened iced tea. Very refreshing, and if you want it a tiny bit sweeter you can always open a sachet of sugar and add a bit of your own.

Of course I ordered the Southern Fried Chicken. When ordering, you're always asked to specify white (breast meat) or dark (thigh/drumstick), and so the most common order is one of each, although you can order whatever you like, in whatever number you like. These two cost a grand total of $5, and they were large pieces with lots of juicy but not oily flesh. The crispy coating didn't feature a lot of spices or extra flavours; it was quite delightfully plain, apart from the presence of a bit of salt and pepper. Yum.

How do the customers like Li'l Dizzy's food? This tour group came out singing and swinging – they'd had a great time there!

Now, moving on over to Montgomery, Alabama, there's a restaurant here that's famous for its country cooking. So we had to go to Martin's. Its location is as typically American as can be: it's in a strip mall on the side of a main road. (This is why the centres of so many towns are so quiet and deserted – everyone lives out in the suburbs and they shop at local strip malls like this one, which included a supermarket, dentist, hardware store and several other shops supplying the locals' needs. These malls aren't giant multi-storey things; just a big parking lot with a long array of single-storey businesses that you can easily park close to. On main roads in bigger towns each shopping centre can sometimes be less than a mile apart, some are side-by-side, there are thousands of them all over the place.) Anyway, back to the Soul Food/Tummy Time experience at Martin's....

Inside, Martin's is all country-style quaintness. Where are the customers? In the next room. We ended up eating there well after 2pm, and the lunch crowd had gone. Martin's also opens for dinners from 4pm to 7.30pm. They dine early out here in the Montgomery burbs. To check out the full menu and more, visit the website here, at www.martinsrestaurant.org

To start things off we ordered some corn bread, and in a few minutes out came these little muffins in a basket. Now, Martin's is famous for both its corn bread and southern fried chicken, and so my fate was sealed. Corn bread? Tick!

Talk about deeee-licious, these light and fluffy corny things were a great way to get the taste buds going. They were quite moist and pleasant just on their own, but you can slather butter onto the warm buns and let it melt down fast before enjoying some more. I had heard that corn bread is good, and they're right.

Pammy ordered the 'roast turkey with dressing' and what came out was shredded roast turkey meat covered with the stuffing from the turkey. The plates were mess-hall quaint in that they were divided into little compartments ("like a TV dinner" said Pam) in which Pam had a side each of shredded steamed cabbage, steamed string beans and mashed potato. The vegies were well cooked (OK, overcooked) but still very full of flavour, so however they overcook them, they do it well. The mash was buttery, and the turkey itself was extremely delicious, if also very filling.

Of course I ordered the Southern Fried Chicken, and do you know what? It was almost identical to the wonderful chicken at Li'l Dizzys. It was hard to separate the two for quality: juicy, not oily, tender; salt and pepper the only spices on the coating; one each of light and dark meat; big pieces of each, too. Yum, but I won't fit into my jeans if I keep on eating this stuff! On the side I also had the string beans and mash, but I went for the black-eyed peas and they were a very simple, long-cooked, tasty dish as well. This was plain food at its best. But we hadn't finished. The owner of the restaurant had a nice, friendly chat with us, after hearing our Aussie accents ("Y'all visiting?"), and with her smooth southern friendliness made us feel as if we'd be mad to walk out the door without trying her pies, and so in we plunged into dessert world.

This was all my fault. I spotted a sign on the counter saying 'Fried Pies' and underneath it 'Peach or Cherry'. That must have put the wicked idea into Pammy's head, and so later on she ordered the Fried Peach Pie, which came with a creamy buttery sauce. It was very freshly cooked ("the fried pie will be only a minute or two more, Honey" the waitress helpfully told us while we waited) and so it came out warm and sweet. Being deep-fried, the pastry wasn't all that light but wasn't heavy either, and they didn't spare the sugar with the peach filling. Pam's a oncer on these.

I got lucky! Now, there's no way you will ever believe me when you see this photo of a bulging Lemon Meringue Pie with its own pot belly, but this was the lightest, most beautiful Lemon Meringue Pie I have ever eaten. I have cooked countless Lemon Meringue Pies in my time and this was so much better than mine. Everything was light. The pastry base was thin and light. The lemon curd was oh so light and lemony but not too sugary. Even the meringue was somehow lighter than usual. It's a standard-setter, this one. When I get home I am going to have to work on my Lemon Meringue Pie skills. This was a 10. My best is probably a 6 by comparison. Note to self: must improve pie skills!

Finally, I have to show you the magazine which the owner proudly brought out to show us. Martin's had been featured in the "100 Things You Simply Must East Before You Die" story and it was their corn bread which made it into the mag. Note the mag name: 'Garden and Gun'. It's a magazine for outdoorsey people who like to cook, and who like cooking what they catch or kill. Inside, it's not as bad as you might imagine, in fact it's a nice looking mag with a wide range of stories other than hunting inside (craftspeople, a man who hand-builds kayaks, cooking, etc). It comes out 8 times a year, and a year's subscription costs $17.95. I'd be a subscriber at that price!

After that huge meal at Martin's we ate nothing more that day, and we also went for a long walk as well to work off at least one ounce. But Pammy says enough is enough on this Soul Food caper; she won't be able to fit into her clothes soon.

So Tummy Time is going to go looking for some healthier options from now on. Farewell, Southern Fried Chicken, you were great. Farewell, Lemon Meringue Pie, you were perfect.

Hello salads, hello grills (must do more walkies)!

Sweet Home Alabama

2011-10-18T10:51:00.011+11:00

While studying countless city road maps on our long drive across the US, one road name we have encountered everywhere is 'Martin Luther King'. The Great Man's name is on boulevards, highways and major thoroughfares in virtually every city and major town we have passed through. It's hard to think of an exception. And here we are now in his home town, Montgomery Alabama, the city where he was senior pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (whose name has since been changed to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church).

So today we set out to learn more about Montgomery, the city of 200,000 people living here now, as well as the place where momentous events in the Civil Rights Movement took place in our recent past.

Well, for one thing Montgomery is a very green and pleasant place, so let's start there. It might be the Fall season now, but it still reached 90°F here today, but a cool change is due to finally arrive in a few days, say the weather people.

The city is set on the Alabama River, and there's a pleasant riverside walk down there where Pammy took these photos (as well as most of the others in this posting).

The river was alive with fish, and a local fisher person was patiently waiting to catch her dinner.

Wandering around town, the green civic pride is evident everywhere. Montgomery is the capital of Alabama and it feels like a government town, with large public buildings fronted with nicely landscaped gardens. The street trees here caught our eyes: they're maidenhair trees, Ginkgo biloba.

These are deciduous trees which will eventually put on a golden show, but right now they can be forgiven for thinking it's still summer.

Other trees are just showing signs of Fall colour.

This sea of green groundcover was enormous, lush and deep. It looked superb.

The older parts of town are well preserved, but very very quiet on this working Monday. It reminded me of the very quiet, almost deserted old parts of Natchez Mississippi.

We set out to be tourists in the morning, and the first stop was the Hank Williams Museum, a remarkably comprehensive museum that has the car in which Hank died, most of his very flash stage outfits, countless photos and other memorabilia. They even had his kitchen table and chairs! Not far from the Museum is the statue of Hank, photographed here with an Australian roadie getting himself into the shot.

Here and there in the old part of town a few houses stand alone, each exhibiting equal quantities of shabby chic and fading grandeur. However, we were on our way up the hill first to visit the King Memorial Baptist Church, then the Civil Rights Memorial after that. Unfortunately for us, the church was undergoing major renovations and had barriers and warning tape all around it. Openings where doors and windows should be were covered with plywood, a new set of stairs was being built at the entrance, and of course the whole thing was closed to visitors.

One block up the hill we found the very impressive Civil Rights Monument. Made from black granite, the wall behind the memorial contains a quote from one of Dr King's speeches.

A table-like, elegantly sculpted circular black plinth stands before it, with water gently coursing out to the sides.

The surface of the plinth is engraved with the names of people martyred during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s. Behind the monument, the Civil Rights Museum is a powerfully moving place to visit. The first room displays the names, faces and stories of everyone whose name is etched on the memorial out the front. While the majority of people listed here are African Americans, I was surprised to see a number of white faces there, and most of those belonged to Christian Pastors from other parts of America who came to the south to join the struggle, and were killed. Several people listed were not active campaigners in the struggle – they were just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were murdered out on the highways somewhere, including a Lt-Colonel in the army. And finally, it was disturbing to read how often the killers were police deputies. It must have been an anarchic time and place when the police were killing the citizens, almost with impunity.

On the way back down the hill, we passed by this plaque, commemorating yet another major milestone for Montgomery in the Civil Rights Movement: the place where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person. The plaque explains what happened.

Further down the road, we stopped to admire the old Union railway station, which no longer has trains running through it and is now the home of the local tourism bureau.

As a sign of how much things are changing in Montgomery, around the corner from this part of the railway station you can now find a Thai restaurant.

However, lest you imagine that here we have another lovely old historic town, there is another side to Montgomery which is not worth all that many photos, but is worth telling you about in the name of accuracy. Montgomery's streets are broad and very very quiet. As the centre of government here it has lots of 'headquarters' style buildings, each consisting of a monumental building with a very large garden (or lawn) around it. The style they seem to prefer here is what I call 'Greco-Russian'. It's 'Greco' because of their love of those big Greek columns out front, and it's 'Russian' in its love of fearsome KGB-style monumentalism. Maybe Pammy and I are a bit perverse in our tastes, but many of these buildings drew either gasps of astonishment or peals of laughter as we passed by. Here's an example of what caught our fancy.

I honestly cannot remember what this building was about. Probably superannuation, or sewerage, or something similar deserving of such important treatment. What it needs is a statue of Apollo in the foyer.

Though our stay here was brief (two nights, with one whole day to wander around) we really liked Montgomery as a place, and its friendly people who are very likely to say hi to perfect strangers passing by in the street. It's a city which has made a determined effort to put its past behind it by changing utterly the way people live, while recording its history in a dignified, educational, inclusive way that makes sure no-one ever forgets.

Finally, we found a rich source of material for Tummy Time 7 here in Montgomery, and that's what we have in store for you next time. We're heading towards the coast now – Savannah in Georgia, but it may take a day or so to get there.

Farewell Crescent City!

2011-10-17T09:59:00.010+11:00

It struck me that while I have been happy both in New Orleans and Natchez in Mississippi to stand there and admire the broad Mississippi River, I hadn't actually ventured onto the thing, and so before we left New Orleans I got out there on Ol' Man River.

No, I didn't go on one of the two hard-working tourist riverboats for a ride, but this one did swoosh past quietly propelled by its paddle wheels, and it made a nice sight as it did so.

I went for a ride on this thing, the Algiers Ferry. It loyally does the short hop almost directly across the river and back numerous times every day, to Algiers Point. It's a car ferry as well as a passenger ferry, but passengers ride free of charge, while car owners pay a buck or two. Pam took this photo from our hotel room. I did the modern thing and texted her from the ferry "can you see me on the ferry" and so she went to mega-zoom for the shot. No, I can't see me either.

The ferry itself is a rusty, unloved, plain old workhorse, and so it's quite charming. It is very flat-bottomed and the river is very smooth, and apart from the bump at the wharf at either end of the journey you wouldn't know you were on water.

The Mississippi is a busy river port. You see scenes like this often enough, but most of the time the traffic consists of doughty little tugs pushing great strings of a half a dozen or so low, wide barges up and down river.

As well as sampling the water-borne public transport, I went on a few different rides on the local trolley cars, just to see a bit more of the real local community in action. This trolley car, however, is often packed with tourists heading down towards the Garden District, one of New Orleans' major drawcards for visitors.

The Garden District is a flash area of town with several blocks of large 19th-century mansions surrounded by very well-kept gardens. The theme for almost all the gardens here is 'foliage' – lots and lots of lush green foliage. And lots of foliage also means lots of clipping. There's plenty of work with shears and secateurs for gardeners on low wages in the Garden District.

The houses themselves are large and vary greatly in their architectural styles from one place to the next, but ornate lace ironwork is a highlight on many of them.

Another interesting part of the 'foliage' theme is that fewer than one in ten houses here had any lawn. You could walk a block or two at a time before you saw even a patch of lawn. Instead, they go for mass-planted, low-growing groundcovers like this to provide the lush green infill between the clipped green hedges.

Flowers (like this plumbago) are a relative rarity here, and the lack of them did make the district feel a bit too samey and drab for me. Walking around here felt like going to one of those trendy inner-city parties where everyone is wearing chic black. A bit too cool for me. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but as a garden lover I did find the Garden District less than inspiring as we walked around. It felt like a place inhabited by wealthy people who didn't like gardening, but employed gardeners to keep up appearances.

We weren't the only ones leaving the Crescent City, steaming off to our next destination. This is the cruise ship, the Oriana, leaving after a visit of just a few days. Another cruise ship would almost certainly be in port by the evening.

We've done a long haul on the road today, over 320 miles, and we're now in Montgomery, Alabama for a short stay. Montgomery was a centre of the civil rights movement's struggles in the 1950s and 60s, and we plan to find out more about that while here (apparently the Civil Rights Museum is very good). And, being country music fans, it's also the site of the Hank Williams Museum, so I am sure we'll have plenty to do while we're here. And there is all that comfort food on offer, too...

New Orleans was an incredible place to visit, we had a wonderful time there and would recommend a visit to the Crescent City to anyone. We felt safe there, ate well, heard great music everywhere we went, even out on the streets. All I can hope is that you have the same great string of perfect weather that we enjoyed!

Down in the Treme

2011-10-16T10:35:00.009+11:00

I had never heard of the Treme district of New Orleans until that wonderful HBO Television series of the same name appeared earlier this year. If you don't know what I am talking about, ask your video store about it, or read more about it here. Having seen the first series of Treme before leaving on our trip, we were never going to miss out on visiting the area while in New Orleans, and it proved to be a day full of surprises.

This plaque at one end of Esplanade Avenue, near the 1-10 Interstate, summarises the history neatly, but it can't tell the story of how Treme was hit so hard by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and how the district has fought back since then. Watching the HBO TV series is a good way to get a basic feel for the people, the district and their struggle since then, but of course the real story is infinitely more complex.

Our first surprise was seeing the extent to which many buildings have been restored, repainted and revived. Some evidence of Treme's long roots into African-American music remain, such as the front of this (closed at the time) streetside theatre.

The big surprise though was the number of freshly renovated houses. In the streets where we wandered around, only about one in ten houses was boarded up with "no trespassers" signs prominent on the temporary cyclone wire fences. The rest were colourful, revived and looking great.

Treme is a smallish district about half a dozen streets wide by half a dozen streets long, and the houses range from these simple homes on the side streets through to flash looking mansions on the main street, Esplanade Avenue.

We stopped off at local legend breakfast/lunch soul food spot, Li'l Dizzy's on Esplanade, and as soon as the waitress heard my voice she got it right: "Hey, another Australian! Hi there, y'all." I'll save up the very yummy lunch for Tummy Time 7, but Li'l Dizzy's was a thriving, happy place bursting at the seams with (mostly African-American) customers.

When it comes to the choice of house colours around here, anything goes and it's a big part of the area's character.

Maybe repairing and rebuilding has made people extra house-proud, but some background research I did into Treme shows that the area is changing, with the strongly African-American character of the place being lessened by an influx of non-African-American residents attracted to the great location with lots of character, and the cheap, beaten-up houses. It seems that quite a few old Treme residents whose houses were ruined by Katrina simply cannot afford to return and renovate, and some are selling up just in order to survive.

Then, wandering back down to the French Quarter later in the afternoon, we passed a church in Treme with these striking plaques on the front wall. Pictured above is a list of "Murder Victims of 2007" and while it's not possible for you to read the details in this photo, the great majority – well over 90% – were shot. The rest were beaten or stabbed to death. There was a similar size plaque next to it for 2008 with the same grim story.

This hand-written plaque of 2011's murder victims in still being updated, as each new victim falls. There was no-one around to explain whether these were just residents of Treme, but we hope not. Maybe these are people in all of New Orleans. Even then that's frightening. We just don't know, but it's a powerful statement of the violent undercurrents in this society which by day seems pretty normal and ordinary to us. Obviously we don't go to the dangerous areas when the sun goes down, and that's probably when most of the violence occurs.

By the time we made it back down to the other end of the French Quarter, another sign of the foment beneath the surface of this city marched by. I am sure you have all been reading about the "Occupy Wall Street" protests in New York and other major US cities. Well, add New Orleans to the list.

This was a small, peaceful and noisy protest by about 500 people well organised by lead megaphones with chants such as "This is how democracy sounds". The local police stopped traffic, the protestors all marched by, then the tourists resumed shopping.

The protestors are absolutely right, though. The gap in wealth here, or perhaps I should say the extent of poverty in the USA, is something this country does need to deal with if it is to make peaceful progress in the next decade or two.

It's not just the beggars on the streets, it's the number of destitute towns seemingly without jobs or hope we have passed through, the number of utterly ramshackle, almost third-world standard houses on the edges of so many towns. For a wealthy country, there is far too much poverty here in the USA, far more than you'd ever see driving around Australia. It's their problem to deal with, not mine, but from the sidelines I can only cheer on the protestors and wish them success in changing politics here in America so fairness in the distribution of wealth becomes an issue once more. It'd probably save a lot of lives in the long run.

Tummy time USA (6)

2011-10-15T09:51:00.016+11:00

Tummy Time 6 comes to you from New Orleans, one of the crossroads of American cuisine, where the flavours of the deep south blend in with Creole and Cajun influences which are tossed into a storm of extra spices fresh from the Caribbean Sea. Even though we're staying here for several days it's not enough to fully sample what's on offer in this town that's almost as famous for its food as its music, but we had a go.

Long before I set off on this trip I had made a list of American foods I had to try at least once (such as those tamales in New Mexico, and the ribs, and the barbecue, and the grits, and the boudin.... you get the picture). This dish, Jambalaya, was on that list and so I have tried it twice so far, and this was the best example of this classic spicy rice creation. It is its own dish entirely, but it's a second cousin of the popular Spanish paella in that there's rice, shellfish and spicy sausage in there, but the sauce is heavier and the result gluggier than most paellas I have tried back in Sydney. As you can see in the photo above, the vegetables on the side were perfectly cooked, turning it into a truly well-rounded meal. I had this at Pere Antoine in the French Quarter.

Another 'must-eat' on that list was a Po' Boy sandwich. I got the itch to try these from reading James Lee Burke's Cajun detective novels, where his hero Dave Robicheaux and his mate Clete Purcell always seemed to be chomping down on them for lunch. The original Po' Boy (made for poor boys without much money, so goes the legend) consisted of deep-fried oysters in this baguette (or sub) style bun. That was long ago, because Po' Boys can have any filling you like nowadays, and some I have seen are seriously overloaded with too many ingredients. This is a fried shrimp Po' Boy, which consists of light and juicy freshly fried shrimp (prawns) plus a light layer of coleslaw as well. That's it, very simple, very nice. The lemon on the side is not for decoration, it's for squeezing.

I had this Po' Boy at the most famous diner in New Orleans, Mother's on Poydras Street. Its walls are plastered with photos of famous patrons of the establishment, including several of their good ol' buddy George W Bush posing with all the staff. It's a super-popular place and I even had to queue outside before being allowed to join the queue inside to order. Patience is well rewarded here, though.

Also on the list of must-eats was fried green tomatoes. The venue for this nice appetiser was the Upperline Restaurant (from where those lovely people drove us home, which I mentioned in the previous blog posting). This dish is everywhere down here, almost always served this way with a 'shrimp remoulade' sauce on top. The thick green tomato slices were lightly battered then fried, and on their own they're a bit bland, so no wonder they always come with a sauce of some sort.

Here's the interior of the Upperline, and like so many restaurant and bar interiors through all areas we have visited so far in the US, the dominant decorating theme is 'clutter'. If there is a bit of spare wall space, stick something up there! At the Upperline it's original artworks everywhere, by a variety of artists.

Pam's appetiser consisted of spicy, deep-fried oysters (which the Upperline bills on its menu as "One of USA Today's Top New Dishes in the USA for 2007"). Pam's verdict was yum, but she couldn't quite describe the sauce, saying it was really lovely but a bit too complex to nail down what was in it. Tomato-based and nicely spicy is as close as she could get.

It doesn't look too photogenic but it was a treat. We both decided to order the duck, and for a moment, in the interests of wider Tummy Time coverage, one of us was going to try something else, but we both love duck and have barely seen it on the menu anywhere. Pam opted for the Ginger Peach sauce, and I went for the Garlic Port sauce. Neither of us loves sauces all that much, but the garlic sauce was super garlicky, which I don't like, and the peach sauce was very sweet. The duck itself was rubbed with spices, hence the 'blackened' look, the meat was juicy, very tender and not fatty at all (which is what the duck-haters always hate the most). The little pot of mash on the side was deliciously sweet sweet potato blended with chopped pecan nuts, and it was heavenly.

Our side dish was slow-cooked greens, which came to the table accompanied by a bottle of Cajun pickles. The greens were delicious but salty, as I suspect the greens were cooked with ham or bacon bones or something similar, which are high in salt.

Come dessert time and we went for the classics. I had this dish, bread pudding, one of the stand-by desserts offered in virtually all the restaurants and diners we have visited in Louisiana. Oddly enough, no two bread puddings have looked the same, but this one, a Honey Pecan Bread Pudding with Toffee Sauce is top of the list for flavour and light texture.

Pam chose pecan pie and she chose wisely. As bread puddings are ubiquitous on Louisiana menus, so too are pecan pies. We could have eaten 20 of each by now, but we are just so restrained!

Dinner time the next night wasn't all that thrilling, taking place at the Gumbo Shop in the French Quarter. I went for the Creole Combo, so I could try another Jambalaya (the blob in the centre) as well as the traditional Red Beans and Rice (on the right). Making up the numbers on the left was Shrimp Creole. This was blanded down tourist food with very mild spicing and little personality anywhere on the plate. I really should avoid combos at all times, shouldn't I?

Pam's main of blackened catfish suffered from the same disability. No spice, mild flavour, I don't know why they bother serving it this way. The good news was that, as usual, the catfish was juicy and flavoursome. This is probably the most common fish on the menu down this way, and it's a good eating fish.

The dish which saved the evening was Pam's humble side dish of corn cooked the Creole way, with a fair bit of spice, plus chopped capsicums (peppers) and onions.

Before we finish off Tummy Time 6 from New Orleans, let's go back 100 miles to New Iberia, for the Gumbo Festival which we attended just prior to coming to New Orleans. The theme this year was "Peace, Love and Make Gumbo" (I've got the T-shirt), and numerous stands made their own signs for the occasion.

An enormous crowd turned out for the festival, which lasts three whole days. This photo was taken on the morning of the third day, a Sunday, and there were four such 'streets' of stalls like this filled with people from all around the area. Streets around the venue are blocked off by police, and it's as if the whole town is here.

Sunday is devoted purely to a major Gumbo-making competition and while that yummy soup (and the buzz of the carnival) is what everyone is there for, there is so much else to see and enjoy as well, such as the delightful way so many stalls are decorated. This is the Cafe de Poulets, selling chicken gumbo.

They're serious about their hot sauces here, with dozens of different brands available, but the most famous of them all, Tabasco, was a big presence in more ways than one. If you want to buy a half-gallon flagon of hot sauce, sure! But they also were giving away teeny weeny little sampler bottles as well.

I tried all the gumbos on offer. How the system works here and at some other crowded open-air venues is that you go to a ticket stand and buy a sheet of tickets for food, and a sheet of tickets for drinks. This chicken gumbo cost three tickets. A seafood gumbo cost four. Pammy found a smoked turkey and quail gumbo, decorated with a little quail egg on top: that was four tickets. All the gumbos are served in these little polystyrene cups, and it wasn't unusual to see people wandering around balancing three of these cups in their hands as they looked for a spare table to sit down and enjoy the lot.

Two last notes, without photos, to finish off. Hash browns! How could a potato lover like me ignore them? Pam is of the opinion that there is something fundamentally strange about eating potatoes for breakfast. I'm not, and this morning I enjoyed the best hash browns of the trip so far, here at the Marriott in New Orleans. This was an irregularly shaped grated potato cake that was crispy brown on top, crispy brown underneath and softly mashed-potato-like in the centre. This is what I have always imagined hash browns to be, but as we travel this land I've discovered that any kind of breakfast potato dish, no matter how it's cooked, is called hash browns. So I have had them as little baked potatoes or pan-fried potato wedges a few times. However, the standard has been set at the Marriott and it'll be interesting to see if anyone can knock it off its perch as best hash browns ever. By the way, none have been those awful little rectangular, deep-fried bricks dished up in Australia and called hash browns. Perish the thought!

Secondly, a night to remember in the French Quarter. It may sound sacreligious while being here in New Awlins, but when we saw Cafe Giovanni offering Italian food, my brain just went to pasta. I had to have pasta, and anchovies, and olives, and olive oil, and so we dined there. The notice said "light musical entertainment" and so we thought "OK, that's a bonus".

Decorated like an upmarket bordello complete with heavy curtains in the doorway, it had a piano in the corner with a lady tickling the ivories. So far, so good. Just after the appetisers and wine arrived, she started to sing. Opera. She screeched but the crowd applauded enthusiastically.

Then a tenor appeared, walking amongst the diners singing "O Sole Mio". Not long after, to accompany our entrees, another songstress wandered amongst us singing that well-known Italian standard, Bali Hai from South Pacific. Each time the audience loved it. We were the only ones present not there for the singing.

The amusing thing about the Penne Puttanesca I ordered, which lacked in the salty, pungent olives, capers and anchovies I was dreaming of, was that they didn't offer grated parmesan on the side, as is usual in so many Italian restaurants. In this land where there's grated cheese added to virtually everything, including the salads (indeed Cafe Giovanni did have grated cheese on the bruschetta) there was no grated cheese on the side with the pasta, just a few yellow flecks of it discernible on top. Amazing.

To alleviate the threat of four tenors coming out to bellow at our desserts, we skipped the sweets, paid the bill, and left the opera lovers to enjoy their happy cultural evening. We'll never forget Cafe Giovanni!

That's it for Tummy Time 6. Next stop, Montgomery Alabama and all that southern fried chicken!

New Orleans notebook

2011-10-15T01:06:00.008+11:00

Where do you begin with describing New Orleans? I know, just wander around, like we did, and so this posting is a bit of a wander around New Orleans.

Everywhere you go you see beads strung over trees, overhead wires, fences – anything at all it seems. And so we asked the lovely lady in a tourist info shop about the beads, and she said: "Honey, they're leftovers from the Mardi Gras. No-one ever pulls them down and so they kind of accumulate over the years. People just throw their beads in the air and they end up anywhere."

This tree on the trolley-bus line leading down to the Garden District was sagging with beady, Mardi Gras gaiety. You also see dorky tourists walking around town wearing strings of beads, even though it's not Mardi Gras time. I'm almost as bad, as I bought a Mardi Gras T-shirt yesterday with a big "Repent" message on it, but I'll save up wearing that one until I get back to the Southern Hemisphere's Sin City, where the message will no doubt be ignored.

Music is of course what New Orleans is famous for, and it really is everywhere. Down in the tourist district of the French Quarter, the police block off the majority of streets so the visitors can wander down the streets (the sidewalks are narrow), and every blocked-off street seems to have its own busker, or more often, its own busker band. This happy brass band, with a 10-year-old girl on drums, mum on clarinet, was typical. The buckets next to the soloist out front are of course for the tips for which they play.

Last night, thanks to our friends Dennis and Lorna's valuable tips on visiting New Orleans, we headed out to the Rock 'n' Bowl. Like the name says, this unusual but popular spot combines a ten-pin bowling alley with a music/dance venue, all under the one roof.

The bowling alleys are right next to the dance floor on the same level, so you can groove to the music while you watch the pins tumble. The music is so loud it easily drowns out that familiar rumble of the balls and the hollow clunking of falling pins.

Last night it was Horace Trahan and the Ossun Express doing the honours in a rocking Zydeco way, and the big crowd of enthusiastic dancers was there from the first bar of the first song. It's a fantastic venue and the atmosphere here was friendly, with all ages there having fun, from three years old to 93. That's a feature of all the dance places here: it's always all ages and everyone welcome.

Earlier that afternoon Pammy and I discovered that the famous French Quarter is much, much larger than we imagined. It stretches for a dozen blocks to the east and north from our hotel, which is right on its edge. Naturally enough all that walking and shopping took its toll, so we stopped for our first Mint Juleps of the holiday, and the bourbon content in this drink almost did us in! One is plenty...

There's a good police presence in the French Quarter (they even have a police station which sells NOPD T-shirts) but this Segway-mounted cop was the star. He was very happy to pose for a photo, and when I asked him how many officers were in the Segway section he said: "Just two, we're trying them out, but they're pretty cool." Agreed, but not sure where the prisoner goes.

One tourist guide I read suggested we "stay away from the French Quarter" and that's a mad idea. I'd totally agree about staying away from Bourbon Street (more on that in a moment) but the rest of the French Quarter is simply wonderful when it's at its best, and even when it's another tourist trap in the parts devoted to shopping for souvenirs it's still incredibly charming (and big).

As we passed beyond the shops the residential areas with their ornate ironwork and quirky decorations provided almost too many things to photograph and admire, and after a while you put down the cameras and take it all in. I could easily spend a whole day here and still find streets I hadn't been down.

This area is a classic of old-style higgildy piggeldy charm, with any possible combination of dwellings tossed together to form a streetscape.

Down the very far end of Bourbon Street, where it's mostly residential, there were lots of houses which looked like this. They were right on the sidewalk, with three or four steep steps quickly rising to the front door. And all the frontages were shuttered off from passers-by. However, as we walked up Bourbon Street in the afternoon, the appalling stench of vomit assaulted our nostrils (and not just for a few steps, as you often find in many city backstreets). This vomit-smell went on for a couple of blocks, intensifying as the endless bars appeared (already full of patrons at 3pm). It was obvious it wasn't going away, and so we escaped down a side street back into the relatively genteel, sweet-smelling charm of rows of souvenir shops selling the same crap. Bourbon Street was truly disgusting.

A far more salubrious part of town is the Garden District, which I will be doing a separate blog on tomorrow, but down in that leafy and beautiful part of town we spotted this classic example of another of New Orleans' "themes": the coming of Halloween and the locals' love of ghosts, ghouls and all things spooky. Everywhere you go, houses and gardens are being decorated for Halloween.

This door decoration is the only one like it we have seen, so it's probably hand-made, based on a theatre mask.

Skulls and skeletons aplenty, as well as lots of strands of gossamer spider webs over everything.

Turning one corner in the French Quarter and we literally were startled by the sight of these spooky greeters.

A visit to New Orleans wouldn't be complete without checking out their famous above-ground cemeteries. This is the Lafayette Number 1 Cemetery in the Garden District. Above-ground vaults and burial chambers are the norm here, as the water table in the district is very close to the surface, so digging six-feet-under just isn't an option. The Lafayette Cemetery is like its own mini suburb, with rows of vaults lined up like they were houses in a street.

Each vault houses far more than one body. This one, for example, had 27 names on the plaques, covering four generations.

And this poignant one was created as the final resting place of destitute orphan boys, and it was well decorated with fresh flowers and beads, so they are never forgotten.

This really is one of the most fascinating cities I have ever been to, and I have only been here a few days. You'd need to live here for years to even start to understand it, but let me finish with two final snippets.

First up, if you want to hear local New Orleans music played all day, you can listen to 90.7 FM, WWOZ, the radio station we have playing in our hotel room. They only play local musicians, and the content varies from Jazz through to funk and brass bands and anything else they think is cool. It really is a New Orleans soundtrack.

Secondly, we were told about WWOZ by the lovely people who drove us home from the Upperline Restaurant (which will feature in Tummy Time 6, coming to you soon on this blog). After we finished an enjoyable dinner at the Upperline, which is a few miles from our hotel, we asked the waiter to order us a taxi. The people on the table next to us (husband Grant and wife Margot and her elegant, elderly mother) said "cancel that taxi, we'll drive you back to your hotel; mum lives near there and so you're on our way".

And so they drove us home, giving us lots of tips on where to eat, what to see and even what radio station to listen to. And they were funny, and loved to talk, and were very warm and very interested in us and where we came from. Even though they had only driven us a few miles, by the time we said farewell it was as if we were seeing off old friends. They were so proud of New Orleans, and thrived on welcoming us here.

Coming up soon, gorgeous grand gardens of the Garden District, plus spicy creole food and lots more in Tummy Time 6. See you then, with beads on!

On the banks of Lake Ponchartrain

2011-10-13T09:07:00.014+11:00

Woo hoo! We're in New Orleans! If somehow we weren't allowed the luxury of eight whole weeks driving across the USA and were restricted to spending just seven days anywhere Stateside on this holiday, we probably would have spent all seven days here in New Orleans. All our tour plans over the last few years have always been known by the shorthand title of "going to Louisiana", and that always really meant "going to New Orleans". So we're here at last, and the way we drove into town yesterday made the whole event all the more special. We came in by crossing Lake Ponchartrain.

Lake Who? Lake Ponchartrain. We first heard of it through songs, many different songs in fact. Hank Williams wrote a classic about "The Banks Of The Old Ponchartrain", but in other versions people had rowed across it, runaways had met and fallen in love there, and jilted lovers had strangled their sweethearts down by its shores (bluegrass murder ballads are often like that, alas). It was only sometime much later that we discovered that Lake Ponchartrain is no ordinary lake (it's big and shallow), and the bridge across it is even more remarkable. It's the longest continuous bridge over water in the world – over 23 miles long in fact. And so here's to Lake Ponchartrain, the amazing city of New Orleans and being here at last.

Told you the bridge is long. Just disappears into the distance, and you can barely see the shore at times.

On the horizon you can see New Orleans, but on a 23 mile bridge, it takes a long time for the city's towers to grow any bigger.

Several times in the course of the 23 mile journey across the thumpity-thumps of the concrete roadway, there are humps in the road for boats to pass under, and as you crest each hump the roads ahead just join somewhere further along on the horizon. As you can see, the bridge is actually two bridges. Two lanes each way, 65mph speed limit, but it still takes a good while to cross.

Getting into town was a fairly easy job for expert map-reader/navigator Pammy to manage, and as we came down Canal Street we could see our destination, the Marriott Hotel, up ahead.

I let the guy on the reservations desk talk me into the 'special half-price upgrade' which put us in a corner room on the top floor. Pammy will need to sell quite a few paintings in her next exhibition to pay for the upgrade, but it's worth it. I don't think I'll ever forget this amazing view. Here's looking west, across the downtown area, at night.

And this is looking north-east, towards Lake Ponchartrain. In the foreground is the French Quarter, and from up here the roofs of many of the buildings here do look they would be perfectly at home in Paris. However, instead of showing you the view bit by bit, the natural course of action is another of my pan shots with commentary, so here we go again.

With New Orleans, there's plenty to tell you about of course. I already have two other blog topics lined up (not counting Tummy Time 6 either!), and we've only been here a day. Our blessed run with the weather is continuing, with the next five days set to be a bit cloudy, sometimes sunny, always in the low 80s.

Mississippi's Spanish moss

2011-10-12T23:24:00.013+11:00

If you remember from our stay in Galveston how we loved the old houses there, especially the more modest homes of we commoners, well Natchez offers up a more traditional "this is how the rich folks lived" trip back in time. Plus slavery.

Natchez itself is beautifully situated on the Mississippi, and back in the early 19th century it was not only a major centre for plantations and their grand houses. If the commentaries on the tour guides are to be believed, several grand houses in Natchez were the first of their type, each subsequently much copied throughout the South.

Fortunately, they haven't just preserved the rich guys' houses, and throughout the charming, sleepy downtown area of Natchez many old houses are well preserved, lived-in and loved.

A few streets here are filled with lovely old houses offering B&B accommodation. This is the old part of town, and it's almost deserted. Very very quiet indeed. The rest of the people of Natchez live further out in a typical suburbia of modern houses and shopping malls. It's just the tourists and the B&B proprietors and other service providers who mostly inhabit the charming streets of the old downtown.

Walking along one of the main streets close to our hotel we came across this grand pile, named Rosalie, and there are several of these dotted around the town. The extensive lands around them have long been subdivided and turned into housing or shops, so we headed out of town just a few miles to find one of these old plantation homes, Melrose, which still sits on a generous acreage and includes all the traditional outbuildings, including the slaves' quarters.

The driveway into Melrose glides past groves of trees draped with ghostly Spanish moss.

For Pam and I, these trees were the star attraction here. A gentle breeze was wafting through the property on the day of our visit, so the bending fingers of the Spanish moss seemed to beckon us over.

I don't want to oversimplify what was a complex cultural institution, but this is where the baddies lived at Melrose. All other sides of the building are currently covered in very attractive scaffolding, as the crumbling mansion is being refurbished yet again, and from the state of those columns, it needs a lick of paint. Melrose is run by the US National Parks, and when we arrived there the enthusiastic guide asked us if we wanted to do the paid tour of the main house. She was a little crestfallen when we said "no" but then helpfully added that while viewing the rich folks' home carried a fee, looking around the slaves' quarters was free. How times change!

Located about 200 yards away from the back of the main house, the slaves' quarters now look like any two nicely kept old houses. When you go inside the first room there are displays with lots of photos and words that attempt to do justice to the whole institution, from several sides of the story. What was spooky was walking into the second room, where a motion sensor detects you wandering in and triggers off a bit of music and voice telling you all about how the slaves' daily lives passed. Who, what, where, what! Spooky. For a moment there I almost became a Southern statistic.

All of the outbuildings are preserved at Melrose, even the dunnies, and all are freshly painted and quite quaint, such as the stables pictured here.

I'm glad they've preserved a whole property here, and not just the grand mansion, but for us the trees covered in Spanish moss were what really captivated us. I know we're going to see a lot more of this stuff (and indeed we have already seen large amounts of it all through Louisiana), but I thought I'd finish off with one or two more photos of it.

Spanish moss is a bromeliad, the type known as air plants, or to be botanical for a moment, Tillandsia usneoides. It gets all the moisture and nutrients it needs from the air, and it's not a parasite of the trees it infests, and it can be found on all sorts of trees, anywhere it can latch onto, but I've been told that it's most common on the Southern Live Oak.

Up close it's just a tangle of soft grey fibres, and indeed Spanish moss has been used in the past as a stuffing for upholstery and mattresses, even car seats back in the early days of motoring.

Now, this photo is me cheating just a little. This is the Spanish moss I have growing back home in Sydney. In November 2009 while taking photos of it I noticed little flecks of green on the plant. Out with the macro lens and voila! Tillandsia flowers. As it's the fall season here the Spanish moss wasn't blooming, but this plant does flower, ever so discreetly.

As usual, we're a bit behind schedule with our blogging and driving, as it's a warm yet slightly cloudy morning here in New Orleans as I write this. Quiet, old-world Natchez proved to be a good choice to break the spell of deep-fried, toe-tapping Acadiana before heading to the more raucous, jazzy fun of New Orleans, which I hope to tell you a bit more about in the next posting.