USA Holiday

Tom and I have returned to Sydney from our trip to the US!

It was a busy trip, but we loved (almost) every minute of it. We visited my family on the East Coast for about 2 weeks, then headed west for a week to California to explore a little bit (and break up the massive flight back to Sydney!).

Highlights included, in chronological order:

- Seeing family and Herdland, where they, the chickens, the dogs, and the cows will shortly be calling home! It's a pretty spunky place, with the original house being a log cabin and subsequent rooms added on in a Miranda Westfield-esque manner. It's really easy to get turned around in that house! The land is gently rolling, the barn is massive, and the roofless silo overlooks it all. Possibly my favourite part is the indestructible chicken coop, which looks more like a prison or bomb shelter than anything else. It'll be a bit of work, but my folks seemed pretty excited about it. The place has rich soils and an even richer history (Presidential overnights? Treasure in a well? Murder on the stoop?!), so it will be neat to hear more of what they discover in the coming months.

- Visiting family in my native Baltimore, we enjoyed tasty food, ridiculous portions of ice cream in Little Italy, playtime with my second cousin (2.5 y.o.), and a tour of the Inner Harbour. Tom got himself a new Orioles t-shirt, which, alas, was not pre-shrunk. He now rocks a muscle shirt, and I love it. I enjoyed seeing massive crabs in the harbour, and little itty-bitty fuzzy ducklings hanging out on the rocks. I hope the two shall never meet.

- Surfing, fishing, and long sunset strolls on the Outer Banks in North Carolina with my family. A week of gentle, lake-like conditions with patchy rain briefly marring an otherwise perfect week of weather. The humidity of the southern US enveloped us like the maw of a giant canine, but thankfully at the beach a bit of a breeze and a dip in the Atlantic fixed us right up. I managed to do a little work while I was there, but the 3-second rides on my surfboard got in the way for hours at a time. The best part? All of the above. The worst? The last 20 miles to the beach that took us 3 hours to drive due to the ridiculous traffic. I wish I was making that up.

Tom and I realised how little we get away to the beach, even though we live only 20 minutes from Cronulla. We have promised ourselves not to be so lame from now on. If anybody has a surfboard that needs a good home, we're willing and able.

- Playing tourist in Virginia! Tom and I ventured to White Oak Canyon, a 10ish mile hike up and down a ravine alongside one of the prettiest creeks I ever did see. The trail tops out at the Skyline Drive, a pretty famous road that winds its way atop a portion of the ridges within Virginia's share of the Appalachian Mountains. We saw a rattlesnake (my very first!), a baby bear (where mama was, we didn't stick around to find out), a chipmunk, and a bright green caterpillar. I also had a close encounter of the fishy kind: while wading in the stream to counteract the aforementioned heat and humidity, I noticed little fish nibbling at my feet, toes, knees and hands with reckless inattention to their own safety. Perhaps I was covered in parasites, or I tasted salty and delicious, or I had a lot of dead skin, or maybe all three, but those fish would practically let me hold them in my hand as long as they could nibble on my goose-bumped and pruny skin. It was weird, and ticklish, but kind of enjoyable. As with most things that are hard to describe as either good or bad, I will simply say that I would do it again.

- We also checked out Harper's Ferry, a pretty important place in the American Civil War history. Basically, the town sits at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers, which when combined with the rail line running through it, makes it a pretty strategic place for transport and military ventures. It changed hands between North and South several times during the war, and has many stories to tell about all the facets of pre- and post-Civil War life in Virginia. Oh, and the scenery around Harper's Ferry is simply stunning. Thomas Jefferson (America's 3rd president, writer of the Declaration of Independence, and founder of the University of Virginia) said something along the lines of, 'It's so impressive it's worth coming across the Atlantic to see it'. Although the Pacific is a bit wider, Tom and I were impressed too.

While at Harper's Ferry, we stopped in the Appalachian Trail (AT) Conference headquarters, which is the "psychological half-way point" of the 2,000+ mile long AT. What a feat for human feet! Maybe someday...

- We explored the house and gardens of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Irrespective of how much you know or care about American history, going to a place like Monticello is a fantastic thing to do, and here's why. The way the house and grounds have been preserved and restored gives you a really good idea what life was like for landholders back in 1790 or so. It's incredible how much work needed to get done, and it becomes totally obvious why slavery was something required to make and run large houses and the hundreds of acres of land required to support them. No electricity, no refrigeration, no easy access to global trade, no planes, trains nor automobiles! Manpower, indeed. And without going too deeply into war and economics and slavery and the foundations of core American attitudes and beliefs, I think going to Monticello and having a good long think about all the difficulties of TJ's life and times helps one appreciate the complexities of our modern world- except multiplied by every other culture's own tangled pasts, raised to the power of industrial might and environmental degradation. I wonder if the Founding Fathers would step out of a time machine and spin on their heels?

On a lighter note, at Monticello Tom saw what a peanut plant looks like for the first time in his life, and I saw what a cotton plant looks like for the first time in mine. And we both finally saw a sesame plant- did you know that one plant makes about 20-30 pods, and within each pod is only about 6 seeds? Can you imagine how many sesame plants you need to make a sesame seed bun? Or a few milliliters of oil? My mind was blown, and I hope yours is too.

- California! We drove up highway 1 from San Francisco, stopping at Muir Woods, Point Reyes, Bodega Bay, Humboldt Redwood National Park, and Benbow Inn before returning our rental car to San Francisco and dragging our sunburnt selves up and down the steep, foggy hills of that lovely town. I wish we'd had a month to take in the whole of Northern California, or at least week to camp among those glorious redwoods. Briefly, the redwoods blew my mind- I was most impressed by the way they clone themselves under stress, including when they fall over. I also didn't know that they literally intertwine their roots with each other, making their otherwise shallow and weak root systems able to hold their massive heads high. Awesome. The further north we got, the more impressive the redwoods became. I loved the quiet murk of the redwoods, the shades of red and gold and black that the sunlight made as it filtered through the biomass. I loved the sound of the wind in the canopy so very far overhead, the dearth of other tree species, and the ubiquitous clover-like ground cover of redwood sorrell and fern. It was like stepping back to a simpler time, and eerily soothing.

We stayed in a B&B in Olema, and based ourselves there for a big walk through Point Reyes. It seemed like we walked through a different vegetation type and landscape every 10 minutes or so, from heath scrub to towering conifers, boggy creek bed to lichen-festooned snag, sea-cliff to grassland. We went from watching sea anemones and kelp swaying in tide-pools to camphor-scented laurel thickets, eucalypt stands to poppy fields all in 15 miles, with stunning, rocky coastal scenery to boot. Not a bad walk! Upon returning to the town, we had some tasty, locally produced Californian wine and cheeses to revive us and see us through to dinner- but I will  adamantly declare that Dungeness crabs have no hope of competing with Chesapeake blue crabs in the tastiness department!

Further north we stayed in the historic Benbow Inn, a big hotel built in the 1920's and maintaining the feel of that era to this very day. It was another trip back in time, complete with flapper-inspired tunes piping into the lounge room as we played a hearty game of Scrabble (I got my first ever 8 letter word!). It was thorough and tasteful without being cheesy or musty. I would recommend it, and even do it again.

And then there was San Francisco. Part gritty and awful, part soaringly gorgeous and steeped in cash. I wouldn't want to live there, but I sure did enjoy drinking in the views it had to offer. We walked, and walked, and walked some more, until we caught a trolley down the unbelievably steep California Street, and then we walked back to the hostel and caught our ride to the airport. While walking, we took in China Town, Coit's Tower, Japan Town, Fisherman's Wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge, Golden Gate Park (complete with bison, who knew?), Russian and Nob Hills, and the strung-out, beaten-down derelicts around Union Square through to Tenderloin. My favourite part? Definitely the sea lions at Pier 39.

And that about sums up our trip- now it's back to the grindstone, which I'm actually super excited about. I'm demonstrating a course this semester and have an incredible amount of work to do before November, but I'm still super excited and happy to be where I am. I feel so lucky to be doing what I like to do. But on that note, I really have some work to do, so I will check in later.