(Update from March 23, 2011)
Howdy from the land of opportunity, cowboy hats and greasy hamburgers – also known as the USA! Marco, Brett and I have been in North America for about 2 months now, and after spending so much time in the developing countries of the Caribbean and Sth America, I was blown away by how clean and well organised everything is. I still gasp in amazement when I see drivers actually paying attention to traffic lights and following basic road rules. It’s also a big relief to be back in an English speaking country after so long struggling by with our shaky Spanish!
As my last group email was sent from Puerto Rico (which now feels like an eternity ago) I figured it was just about time for another update, so here it is! To start at the beginning of our time in America, we flew into Florida and began our US adventure in Miami – city of slutty dressers, noisy nightclubs and swanky cars. I don’t say this very often about places, but to be perfectly honest I didn’t really enjoy Miami. Looking back on it now that we’ve experienced quite a few other places in the States, I like it even less. It had (in my opinion) none of the charm or architectural beauty that so many other American cities have, and the people were superficial to the extreme. To be fair, it did have a spectacular beach, and other travellers we met said much of the appeal is in the huge ‘super-clubs’ that Miami is speckled with. However, as most of these clubs have astronomical cover charges and ask $15 for a beer, Marco and I chose not to visit any of them!
Miami was a world apart from the rest of Florida. We took a bus north to spend some time in the city of Orlando which boasts, among other things, the biggest McDonalds in America (it had a bowling alley in it!). Marco has some relations living in Orlando who were not only kind enough to let us stay with them, but were also able to get us cheap tickets to DISNEYWORLD!!!! So for one glorious day the 6-year-old little girl who still lives somewhere inside me was released to revel in princess dresses and magical castles. We made it to 3 of the 4 ‘sub-worlds’ within Disneyworld: Magic Kingdom, Universal Studios and EPCOT. Magic Kingdom was the beautiful, kiddy-friendly world where you can get your photo taken with Mickey Mouse and Princess Jasmine; Universal Studios is the hair-raising, spine tingling world of thrilling rides and movie-related attractions; and EPCOT (or Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow) is the world devoted to international cultures and new technologies that Walt Disney designed as his interpretation of a perfect, utopian universe. They were all great fun and we squeezed every single minute out of the day – they had to chase us out when the gates were closing at 9pm. You can bet we slept well that night!
Another major attraction in Florida – and actually one of my favourite days in America to date – was our visit to the Kennedy Space Centre. We spent the day gazing, open mouthed, up at huge space shuttles and having our minds thoroughly boggled by the countless incredible NASA technologies, satellites and space stations. We didn’t get to see an actual shuttle launch, unfortunately (we missed it by a couple of days), but still got to explore shuttles that were used on past missions, and saw plenty of groovy outer-space stuff like the space suit Neil Armstrong wore when he walked on the moon, a lunar rover and bits of meteorite.
From Orlando, we headed still further north in Florida to the groovy little student town of Gainesville to catch up with our friend Alex, a lovely guy we met in Colombia. We hired a car to get there, and though the car we selected on the online booking page of the website was the cheapest little economy vehicle we could find, when we arrived to pick it up we discovered we’d been upgraded to a Mustang Convertible for no extra cost! Were we the coolest people on the road? Oh yeah!
I have to say Gainesville was a really beautiful place, and we had a lot of fun there. It’s populated almost entirely by students of the University of Florida. The friends we were staying with there were kind enough to give us a tour of the campus, and it really was like being in a US college film. We saw fraternity houses, complete with big white sheets hanging from the windows painted with letters of the Greek alphabet, and the enormous college football field, emblazoned everywhere with the logo of their college team – the Florida Gators. Staying in a house with students we really got a taste of the US student lifestyle... we attended multiple college parties, played frisbee on the frisbee-golf course (!!) and went paddle boating on the college lake. The town itself was lovely; quaint streets lined with enormous old trees covered in Spanish moss which hung down everywhere. Very, very pretty, though I imagine it could also be quite creepy on a dark, foggy night!
After happy few weeks in Florida, we decided to head to Georgia. Alex generously offered to drive us, and on the way we visited our very last town in Florida – St Augustine. It’s actually the oldest continually inhabited city in America, and was founded in 1565. As such, it has a lot of great historical sites, including a lovely cathedral and a very rustic, ‘Little Women-ish’ one room wooden log school house, and the small but prestigious Flagler college – easily the most impressive college I’ve ever seen. We were there on a day with glorious weather, and it was a great little place to explore.
Once we hit Georgia, we spent the majority of our time in the city of Savannah. What can I say? I was blown away by its beauty. The city has beautiful wide streets and is smattered with lovely, green little parks. The houses – mansions, really – were spectacular. They looked like something out of ‘Gone With the Wind.’ Deep verandas held up by broad pillars, sweeping driveways and flowering magnolia trees on every corner. It’s the city where Tom Hanks sat on a park bench and talked about life being like a box of chocolates in the film Forrest Gump, and we sat in that very same park. It’s one of the most peaceful, graceful cities I’ve ever encountered, and I could easily live there.
It was also in Savannah that we got our first taste of true Southern style cooking, and my waistline has been paying the price ever since! It’s very heavy but totally delicious – lots of chowder, gumbo and jambalaya, and heaps of seafood. I’m in culinary heaven!
From Georgia, we took the train into Sth Carolina and spent some time in the town of Charleston. The architecture in Charleston was, if possible, even more impressive than in Savannah. The houses were certainly bigger, but there weren’t as many parks and gardens scattered around the place. Charleston was also the city where the first shots of the civil war were fired so we visited a couple of very interesting museums and learnt a lot about American history. We also wandered through an absolutely wonderful city market that sold everything from fresh fruits and veggies to antique weapons to immaculate diamante dog collars.
After Sth Carolina we began to head West, and made our way to Tennessee. A quick note here about Greyhound buses and the people who travel on them. We’ve spent a lot of time on Greyhounds while in the States, and you sure do meet an interesting demographic! Plenty of tattoos, missing teeth and handlebar moustaches, and when the bus stops for a short break it takes about 15 seconds for a dense cloud of cigarette smoke to completely engulf the parking lot. Once the cigarettes have been puffed dry, the passengers stampede for the nearest McDonalds and climb back onto the bus loaded with burgers, nuggets, fries and gallons of soda. Well, OK – I am exaggerating... but only slightly! We met some really funny characters on the greyhound buses and I’d love to go into detail here but if I do I’ll never finish this email!
Anyway – please forgive my digression! In Tennessee we mostly spent time in Memphis, and after the beauty and grace of Savannah and Charleston it was a bit of a rude shock. It’s a pretty dingy, run down kind of city and there is obviously a lot of poverty. However, there were three things of note. We got our first glimpse of the mighty Mississippi River, which was a good landmark to tick off the list. Secondly, we saw the motel where Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated while standing on the balcony, which as I’m sure you can imagine was a very solemn site. Finally, and most excitingly, was Graceland: the home of the one and only Elvis Presley. We forked out the hefty entrance fee and toured not only Elvis’s home, but also his enormous collection of cars (including the famous pink Cadillac) and his two private jets (because one isn’t enough). The house was great – think lots of animal print, shag carpeting and mirrors on the ceiling. Truly a tribute to the 70s. It also included displays of his bejewelled jumpsuits and flashy jewellery. By the end of the day I felt I’d been almost blinded by the bling!
From Tennessee, we headed down to the true heart of Southern America, and spent almost 3 weeks in Louisiana, basing ourselves in New Orleans. There was one major reason we spent so much time in New Orleans, and that reason was: MARDI GRAS! For those of you who don’t know (as I didn’t before we got to the US), Mardi Gras is a gargantuan, lavish, carnival-style festival that is held in New Orleans every year and lasts for about 2 weeks. Each day of the festival has themed processions parading through the streets for hours. Every parade has loads of enormous, colourful, intricately designed floats, with riders in magnificent masked costumes standing atop them throwing colourful strings of beads and presents out to the crowds. The parades get more and more extravagant with each day that passes, and the very final day – Fat Tuesday – has the most flamboyant, ostentations ones of all. So each morning we would head out to the streets with empty backpacks and a full esky, and come home with an empty esky and full backpacks due to the beads, toys and gifts flung out into the crowds by the float riders.
Despite having most of our days filled with Mardi Gras related activities, we also managed to do lots of exploring in and around New Orleans. It’s a pretty special city, and I’m really glad we got the chance to spend some quality time there. The French Quarter of town has a wonderfully characteristic quaintness about it. Lots of cute little houses painted in bright colours tumbled in amongst huge, ‘Interview with a Vampire’ style mansions, and smoky little bars and restaurants.
The happening centre of New Orleans is definitely the neon-lit, party strip of Bourbon Street. It’s lined with every kind of bar playing every kind of music under the sun, a generous sprinkling of mechanical bulls, and Americans and tourists everywhere really letting their hair down and knocking back the local cocktails at an impressive rate. It’s so laid back that you can buy a drink in one bar, wander out into the street and mosey on into another bar still holding the drink and no one minds at all.
On a much more sombre note, we also visited the American national World War II museum, which was truly an emotionally exhausting experience. The quality of the footage and displays that they had were absolutely heart rending, and many people in the museum were walking around in tears.
Another heart wrenching experience was visiting the area known as the Ninth Ward – formerly the projects of New Orleans that were hit the hardest by Hurricane Katrina, and haven’t yet been rebuilt. The houses are still totally derelict, left just as they were after the hurricane. Many are missing roofs, and/or have been blown off their stilts, and you can still clearly see the dirty water mark that runs along all the houses showing how high the water rose. However, easily the most disturbing part of it all is that nearly every house has a big ‘X’ spray painted on the door with a number beside it indicating how many bodies were found within that house. It was truly haunting.
We did a few trips further afield in Louisiana to see a bit of the state, and easily the most notable journey was to Oak Alley Plantation. Oak Alley is a charming old sugarcane plantation that dates from the 1800s. It has lovely grounds, and easily the most beautiful part is its namesake – the alley of mammoth, 300 year old, moss covered oak trees flank the entrance of the big old house. It was like something out of a storybook. We did a tour of the mansion (led by a woman in period costume, right down to billowing hoop skirts), and then spent a very pleasant couple of hours wandering around the beautiful gardens and grounds, and sitting beneath the huge old oak trees.
Eventually, Marco and I said goodbye to both New Orleans and – at least temporarily – to Brett. While Marco and I boarded a 30 hour greyhound bus ride to visit his parents in Missouri, Brett jumped on a plane to Mexico. We’ll be joining up with him again tomorrow evening, but it’s been strange to have him gone for the past 2 weeks. Marco and I have been enjoying relaxing and spending some quality time with his parents Greg and Vicki in Branson, Missouri. They have plenty of generous friends who have let us indulge our inner redneck by going horse riding and shooting (not at the same time, obviously!). We’ve also been on some great long motorbike rides into Arkansas, and just enjoyed not having to pack and unpack our bags every day.
Tomorrow we’ll bid a sad farewell to Greg and Vicki, and fly back to Miami for 5 days to attend a music festival. From there, we’ll make our way North up the Eastern coast via Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Exciting times!
Howdy from the land of opportunity, cowboy hats and greasy hamburgers – also known as the USA! Marco, Brett and I have been in North America for about 2 months now, and after spending so much time in the developing countries of the Caribbean and Sth America, I was blown away by how clean and well organised everything is. I still gasp in amazement when I see drivers actually paying attention to traffic lights and following basic road rules. It’s also a big relief to be back in an English speaking country after so long struggling by with our shaky Spanish!
As my last group email was sent from Puerto Rico (which now feels like an eternity ago) I figured it was just about time for another update, so here it is! To start at the beginning of our time in America, we flew into Florida and began our US adventure in Miami – city of slutty dressers, noisy nightclubs and swanky cars. I don’t say this very often about places, but to be perfectly honest I didn’t really enjoy Miami. Looking back on it now that we’ve experienced quite a few other places in the States, I like it even less. It had (in my opinion) none of the charm or architectural beauty that so many other American cities have, and the people were superficial to the extreme. To be fair, it did have a spectacular beach, and other travellers we met said much of the appeal is in the huge ‘super-clubs’ that Miami is speckled with. However, as most of these clubs have astronomical cover charges and ask $15 for a beer, Marco and I chose not to visit any of them!
Miami was a world apart from the rest of Florida. We took a bus north to spend some time in the city of Orlando which boasts, among other things, the biggest McDonalds in America (it had a bowling alley in it!). Marco has some relations living in Orlando who were not only kind enough to let us stay with them, but were also able to get us cheap tickets to DISNEYWORLD!!!! So for one glorious day the 6-year-old little girl who still lives somewhere inside me was released to revel in princess dresses and magical castles. We made it to 3 of the 4 ‘sub-worlds’ within Disneyworld: Magic Kingdom, Universal Studios and EPCOT. Magic Kingdom was the beautiful, kiddy-friendly world where you can get your photo taken with Mickey Mouse and Princess Jasmine; Universal Studios is the hair-raising, spine tingling world of thrilling rides and movie-related attractions; and EPCOT (or Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow) is the world devoted to international cultures and new technologies that Walt Disney designed as his interpretation of a perfect, utopian universe. They were all great fun and we squeezed every single minute out of the day – they had to chase us out when the gates were closing at 9pm. You can bet we slept well that night!
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| Mr Walt DIsney himself, with his iconic castle in the background |
From Orlando, we headed still further north in Florida to the groovy little student town of Gainesville to catch up with our friend Alex, a lovely guy we met in Colombia. We hired a car to get there, and though the car we selected on the online booking page of the website was the cheapest little economy vehicle we could find, when we arrived to pick it up we discovered we’d been upgraded to a Mustang Convertible for no extra cost! Were we the coolest people on the road? Oh yeah!
I have to say Gainesville was a really beautiful place, and we had a lot of fun there. It’s populated almost entirely by students of the University of Florida. The friends we were staying with there were kind enough to give us a tour of the campus, and it really was like being in a US college film. We saw fraternity houses, complete with big white sheets hanging from the windows painted with letters of the Greek alphabet, and the enormous college football field, emblazoned everywhere with the logo of their college team – the Florida Gators. Staying in a house with students we really got a taste of the US student lifestyle... we attended multiple college parties, played frisbee on the frisbee-golf course (!!) and went paddle boating on the college lake. The town itself was lovely; quaint streets lined with enormous old trees covered in Spanish moss which hung down everywhere. Very, very pretty, though I imagine it could also be quite creepy on a dark, foggy night!
After happy few weeks in Florida, we decided to head to Georgia. Alex generously offered to drive us, and on the way we visited our very last town in Florida – St Augustine. It’s actually the oldest continually inhabited city in America, and was founded in 1565. As such, it has a lot of great historical sites, including a lovely cathedral and a very rustic, ‘Little Women-ish’ one room wooden log school house, and the small but prestigious Flagler college – easily the most impressive college I’ve ever seen. We were there on a day with glorious weather, and it was a great little place to explore.
Once we hit Georgia, we spent the majority of our time in the city of Savannah. What can I say? I was blown away by its beauty. The city has beautiful wide streets and is smattered with lovely, green little parks. The houses – mansions, really – were spectacular. They looked like something out of ‘Gone With the Wind.’ Deep verandas held up by broad pillars, sweeping driveways and flowering magnolia trees on every corner. It’s the city where Tom Hanks sat on a park bench and talked about life being like a box of chocolates in the film Forrest Gump, and we sat in that very same park. It’s one of the most peaceful, graceful cities I’ve ever encountered, and I could easily live there.
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| Savannah Street |
From Georgia, we took the train into Sth Carolina and spent some time in the town of Charleston. The architecture in Charleston was, if possible, even more impressive than in Savannah. The houses were certainly bigger, but there weren’t as many parks and gardens scattered around the place. Charleston was also the city where the first shots of the civil war were fired so we visited a couple of very interesting museums and learnt a lot about American history. We also wandered through an absolutely wonderful city market that sold everything from fresh fruits and veggies to antique weapons to immaculate diamante dog collars.
After Sth Carolina we began to head West, and made our way to Tennessee. A quick note here about Greyhound buses and the people who travel on them. We’ve spent a lot of time on Greyhounds while in the States, and you sure do meet an interesting demographic! Plenty of tattoos, missing teeth and handlebar moustaches, and when the bus stops for a short break it takes about 15 seconds for a dense cloud of cigarette smoke to completely engulf the parking lot. Once the cigarettes have been puffed dry, the passengers stampede for the nearest McDonalds and climb back onto the bus loaded with burgers, nuggets, fries and gallons of soda. Well, OK – I am exaggerating... but only slightly! We met some really funny characters on the greyhound buses and I’d love to go into detail here but if I do I’ll never finish this email!
Anyway – please forgive my digression! In Tennessee we mostly spent time in Memphis, and after the beauty and grace of Savannah and Charleston it was a bit of a rude shock. It’s a pretty dingy, run down kind of city and there is obviously a lot of poverty. However, there were three things of note. We got our first glimpse of the mighty Mississippi River, which was a good landmark to tick off the list. Secondly, we saw the motel where Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated while standing on the balcony, which as I’m sure you can imagine was a very solemn site. Finally, and most excitingly, was Graceland: the home of the one and only Elvis Presley. We forked out the hefty entrance fee and toured not only Elvis’s home, but also his enormous collection of cars (including the famous pink Cadillac) and his two private jets (because one isn’t enough). The house was great – think lots of animal print, shag carpeting and mirrors on the ceiling. Truly a tribute to the 70s. It also included displays of his bejewelled jumpsuits and flashy jewellery. By the end of the day I felt I’d been almost blinded by the bling!
 |
| Some of Elvis's iconic jumpsuits |
Despite having most of our days filled with Mardi Gras related activities, we also managed to do lots of exploring in and around New Orleans. It’s a pretty special city, and I’m really glad we got the chance to spend some quality time there. The French Quarter of town has a wonderfully characteristic quaintness about it. Lots of cute little houses painted in bright colours tumbled in amongst huge, ‘Interview with a Vampire’ style mansions, and smoky little bars and restaurants.
The happening centre of New Orleans is definitely the neon-lit, party strip of Bourbon Street. It’s lined with every kind of bar playing every kind of music under the sun, a generous sprinkling of mechanical bulls, and Americans and tourists everywhere really letting their hair down and knocking back the local cocktails at an impressive rate. It’s so laid back that you can buy a drink in one bar, wander out into the street and mosey on into another bar still holding the drink and no one minds at all.
On a much more sombre note, we also visited the American national World War II museum, which was truly an emotionally exhausting experience. The quality of the footage and displays that they had were absolutely heart rending, and many people in the museum were walking around in tears.
Another heart wrenching experience was visiting the area known as the Ninth Ward – formerly the projects of New Orleans that were hit the hardest by Hurricane Katrina, and haven’t yet been rebuilt. The houses are still totally derelict, left just as they were after the hurricane. Many are missing roofs, and/or have been blown off their stilts, and you can still clearly see the dirty water mark that runs along all the houses showing how high the water rose. However, easily the most disturbing part of it all is that nearly every house has a big ‘X’ spray painted on the door with a number beside it indicating how many bodies were found within that house. It was truly haunting.
We did a few trips further afield in Louisiana to see a bit of the state, and easily the most notable journey was to Oak Alley Plantation. Oak Alley is a charming old sugarcane plantation that dates from the 1800s. It has lovely grounds, and easily the most beautiful part is its namesake – the alley of mammoth, 300 year old, moss covered oak trees flank the entrance of the big old house. It was like something out of a storybook. We did a tour of the mansion (led by a woman in period costume, right down to billowing hoop skirts), and then spent a very pleasant couple of hours wandering around the beautiful gardens and grounds, and sitting beneath the huge old oak trees.
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| The stunning oak trees at Oak Alley Plantation |
Tomorrow we’ll bid a sad farewell to Greg and Vicki, and fly back to Miami for 5 days to attend a music festival. From there, we’ll make our way North up the Eastern coast via Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Exciting times!
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