Ever been to London? (part one)

Have you ever been to London? It seems like an odd question to ask someone from Sheffield. It's only a couple of hours away. If you get up early in the morning, walk or drive to the station, make your way to the remote reaches of Platform 8, where the dark walls of Victorian stone loom down on you, you'll find a train straight to London. Yet, lots of people have never seemed to bother. Admittedly it's not a journey without some perils; groups of friends nearby conforming to the usual pattern of friends behaving in public; the one loud one talking to - or maybe at? - his (or her) two quieter friends. Or maybe a family quietly chuckling and smirking at another group of passengers. in fairness to the family the other group of passengers are a fairly preposterous bunch of teenagers with an interesting sartorial quirk that I will refrain from mentioning here lest they one day grow up to become very important people. They too also conform the the pattern - one is talking in a weird pseudo-American-inflected accent (it sounds familiar, perhaps its the voice of the dubbing on Japanese anime shows - something about their appearance leads me to think they may be fans of the genre), about the abilities of his latest phone. And in fairness to the family they are playing cards - what is this, a family actually playing a game? I remember doing that many years ago. and me with all my supposed learning can't remember how to play any card games. Not long ago I was in the company of some very drunk friends of my girlfriend and they could follow the rules of "Chase the ace" better than I could while stone cold sober. Poker is one of those things - like ice skating and knitting - that I have clear memories of being able to do (at lunch times in about year 10) but I have now completely forgotten.

When you travel and arrive in London the sights are still familiar from the past - the gasometer outside St Pancras, the multi storey car park at St Albans, the power station (I still don't know how they make concrete cooling towers). the train doesn't actually arrive in St Pancras any more. it arrives next to St Pancras, in a new bit. the main shed is full of Eurostars and is now bright sky blue instead of gunky orange. I'm struck by how old the Eurostars look already. A weird thought to have while standing in a Victorian train station I know, but still you can only deal with your own reference points in time. Like how the trains used to stop right under the wall at the end, and the tube was down set of stairs and through a dingy industrial feeling tunnel. That corridor and ticket hall felt a bit eerie to a small kid circa 1991, as if the ghosts of the fire that had destroyed it a few years earlier were still there. See, I am getting old now, I even remember the wooden escalators and those dull grey unpainted Northern Line trains they used to have. But for all my nostalgic twangs from the many times I've been to London, and the many times I used to get the Network Southeast Cambridge students smarty-pants express down from Hatfield and then the Thameslink from St Albans a decade ago, this is the first time I've ever stayed in a hotel in London. That time me and my brother crashed in the flat of some guy he house-shared with in Hove counts as staying in London, but we didn't pay for the privilege. Or maybe we did, that was a long time ago too and the details have also faded away. The hotel is the Kings Cross Inn, bang across the street from the building site in front of Kings Cross station. Progress is coming but only after a lot of fences and 'pavement closed' signs.

Dump bags in the store room, it's only 11 am, can't check in yet -- it's only 11, even more proof that Sheffield is not far from London, at least not in terms of miles. Maybe its a long way to listen to Oscar Wilde over there chatting to his mates. Becky tells me its my pick to decide what we do this afternoon. its quite hard to decide as there aren't too many places in central London I haven't seen, at least in passing. Further afield is a different matter, but we're keeping ourselves in the central zones on the tube. But this time I get to take somebody else with me. Back when i used to come here on a Saturday afternoon it was almost always on my own. After a week packed into a small art studio with thirty other people, and then more evenings packed into a communal kitchen with eleven more it was nice to have some freedom to wander about. But now its nice to wander about with somebody else's input. In this case it's Greenwich. She's got a good line in imagination, and will stand on the deck of the magnificent Cutty Sark - restored, with gleaming copper hull propped up in its dry dock like a model ship on a display stand - imagining the crew scuttling about on the deck, or the officers sitting down for dinner. The light drizzle helps to enhance the effect for less whimsical people like me. We look around the ship. Its funny, I can't recall ever seeing anybody else outside of my family taking pictures of the captions in museums and she's also doing it. perhaps I haven't been looking closely enough at other people - well, I do think that glasses restrict one's field of vision. Something similar happened the other week, CTRL ALT DEL got pressed on her laptop when ebay wasn't responding after a few seconds. I do that. All the time. It;s meant to be those little things that matter though isn't it? in those movies that Sandra Bullock is always in they're always more romantic and silly - "that's *MY* favorite movie!!!" "no waaaaay, you like the Red Sox too??? Get out, I've got a season ticket too!" and so forth. but these are technological times and habits with shortcut keys are just as valid as any other endearing gesture if you ask me.

She does look a knockout when we go out in the evening though. all long dark hair blending in with the black at the top of her dress, above the riotous colours of the print. It's not subtle but I like it - it's a dress that seems to say 'yeah? so what?!' with a smile on it's face. That's her to a 'T' - she's a bit wobbly on large escalators (its a bit of a surprise, she dragged me onto that blasted Oblivion contraption on Alton Towers and giggled at my, to quote, "Girly scream") but other than that walks with a stride that seems to say "yeah, I've seen Rotherham after dark, this place ain't dangerous". I feel a bit conspicuous standing outside the hotel next to all the construction works, the McDonalds, the customers for the newsagent, and the passing traffic. it's the shoes; nobody else here is wearing "Shoes". This little section of the Euston Road is like a very brief gauntlet to run for anybody clearly goin' to see Les Mis' in town. Clearly the station engineers understood the desire in tourists to be plunged into the welcoming mixing pot of the Underground concourse as soon as possible, which is why they built an exit right next to the hotel. That exit is boarded off at the moment while construction business goes on below so we have to walk along past the newsagents to the next exit. These little narrow corridors of human activity used to have at least one person begging in them somewhere but these days they're all hanging round next to ATM machines.

Shaftesbury Avenue is great. I suppose in an ideal world the hoardings advertising the plays and musicals wouldn't be quite so big - it would be nice to see the building underneath. We both make the same observation that Piccadilly Circus's famous advertisements look like any other bill board these days. But the mix of people is great - a proper melting pot of a huge cast of characters. Every single person one could possibly imagine is on Shaftesbury Avenue at seven o'clock on Friday night; pensioners, toffs, teenagers, rastafarians, men holding hands, women holding holding hands, impossibly tall heels, hipster beards, parading Indian families, those eternal flocks of camera wielding far-eastern tourists, television newsreaders. It was actually the day after when the television newsreader walked past with his wife. Recognition of the face was immediate but placing it took a few minutes. Its funny really, millions of us flock to the west end to watch the musicals yet the only face I recognized in passing in London that day was a newsreader. The actual cast of Les Miserables were all unknown to me, and I suspect, most of the rest of the audience in the Queen's Theatre. The program listed the names and faces, most had hoity-toity sounding qualifications, with the exception of one of the leads-  he'd been to school in Guildford. They were always listed as being "thrilled/delighted" to be making their West End debut, or return. But I bet the kid from Guildford was probably more thrilled than the poshos.

Stuttgart, Mercedes, Porsche and some Solitude

(From 2011)

If all goes well then it takes a few hours to drive from Munich to Stuttgart on the autobahn. If there is an enormous traffic jam on the autobahn then it might take a little bit longer. Stuttgart would be our final big city stop before returning to Strasbourg to complete the trip. The hold up on the motorway had cost quite a bit of the afternoon and it was getting on for three pm by the time we got to the hotel. The hotel was near the airport, quite a distance from the centre, but the local railway station was a few minutes away by foot. As it turned out the train wasn't quite the effortlessly fast magic carpet to the centre that we had imagined. It was quiet, clean and not-crowded but there were many stops between the airport and the stop at the city's zoo - the destination we had chosen because it was a sunny afternoon and we could take or leave how much of the zoo we could look around before it closed. The clock was pushing past four-fifteen when we reached the entrance gates to 'Wilhelma' - the curious semi-official nickname for Stuttgart's zoo. 'Wilhelma' is named after a elephant that was once kept there, but might as well be named after the thousands of other individuals called Wilhelma since it's a normal human name too.

The zoo's website had said that although the ticket windows closed at three, tickets could still be bought at machines until five. All that was missing was to mention that the ticket machines were by the car park and not the ticket windows. So the staff at the gate taking tickets were spending all their time pointing the way to the ticket machines to just about everybody who showed up. If only somebody could invent the written language so signs saying '<--- Buy Tickets at Machines This Way' could be created. One day.

This being Germany one might expect the gates to slam shut promptly as the clock strikes the hour. This wasn't quite what happened. We were still walking around at six, and most of the buildings didn't close until six-thirty. None of the building's occupants looked bothered by the lateness of the hour. We walked around the handsome glasshouse, up the terrace past large bird cages, through a grove of giant sequoia trees - familiar from California but a strange sight in urban Germany - past the bears (polar and black), up to the very top of the hill where there was a small farm setup. The zoo was part of a larger park and at this end the only separation between the two was a modest wire fence. There were still plenty of people around, in fact there were more in the zoo than in the park.

The donkeys, camels, cows and bison in the 'farm' area lived a more al-fresco lifestyle than the rest of the zoo, (at least at the later hour). The giraffes, elephants and the leopard were all inside eating, either by choice or because the keepers needed to clean the enclosures. Despite the signs asking visitors not to use flashes on cameras there was at least one person enthusiastically talking flash pictures of the giraffes. The largest one promptly lumbered as far away as possible and turned it's back, in much the same way that cats beat an escape from shrieking four-year olds. People like this fascinate me sometimes. How can one possibly be that oblivious to the prominently posted signs? Language barriers aren't an excuse as the signs are all pictographs  The most satisfying explanation is that these same people are responsible for all the other little inconsiderate actions; not indicating in cars; proferring hugely large bank notes for tiny purchases; talking in cinema; standing stock still at the top of escalators. It would be nice to know that everyone else is a thoroughly decent person who isn't the bane of the poor zoo giraffes day.

As usual the most fascinating yet inert animals at the zoo were the big cats. The sole visible tiger was laying on it's back on a wooden platform in an uncomfortable position. Inside the cat house things were a bit more lively - the leopard was eating from it's bowl, looking like a giant house cat. There was a Serval, the African desert cat, sitting calmly watching anybody who walked past. In the front of it's cage was a large rock. Peering into it's cage at it's eye level I walked from side to side behind the large rock and every time the serval's gaze would be waiting for me. It moved it's head but I never saw it's head move. A ninja cat in other words. It was nearing seven pm and the zoo still wasn't closed. We walked through the still-open aquarium and reptile house to the front gate. Not bad considering there had been no reason not to believe the place would only be open for forty five minutes when we paid at four twenty. We took the tram back to the central Hauptbahnhof , and walked up the main pedestrian street into town, the process passing by the Steingenberger Graf Zeppelin hotel opposite the station where three of us had stayed for a few nights in 1999. The hotel restaurant where we had enjoyed some of the slowest service in Germany was still there on the ground floor on a side street.

We found our way through the surprisingly large crowds of late-evening shoppers to a Turkish bistro that was one of the better restaurants we found on the trip. For such a deceptively large establishment (there was a large outdoor terrace on the other side of the building) the service was relatively speedy by European standards. They provided separate German and English menus that didn't quite match each other but still allowed the satisfaction of being able to order in German from a German menu with full knowledge of precisely what one was asking for.

Both Porsche and Mercedes Benz are based in Stuttgart and extraordinary fact when thought about. Firstly in a world with only a few premium large volume car companies here are two in the same city. Secondly Stuttgart isn't a really big city, the population is 600,000, about the same as Glasgow, and way fewer than Munich's 1,300,000. Thirdly they have somehow never trodden on each others toes too much; Porsche makes sports cars, Mercedes makes everything including sports cars but the giant has never put the minnow out of business. Coming from a country where all the car companies are now merely 'brands' in a foreign ownership, and all the car factories are now empty spaces in the suburbs of Birmingham and Coventry  I might also add that it is also extraordinary that Porsche and Mercedes are still in their original locations, more or less. The original Daimler Motorwagen works began in Bad Cannstatt, Unterturkheim in 1890 and is still there today. This was our last full day on the road before returning to our respective homes and we made the most of it by seeing both museums. As we had done in 1999 in fact, but those had been the old museums, and both had been replaced by shiny new ones.

Both museums were huge improvements, but the contrast was greater at Porsche. The Porsche museum used to be a small dingy showroom by the main gates. Now it was an intergalactic building across the road from the factory gates. A big silver geometric lump sat over a glass atrium and supported by the pillars containing the escalators. Looked up a directly from above the reflective lower surface sent back distance reflections of us peering up at it, taking photos. At Mercedes the big improvement was moving the museum out of the factory grounds. Before we'd got on a bus and been driven down a back road behind large industrial-looking sheds to the museum, hidden amongst the sea of walls and windows. Now the whole shebang had been moved to a building that looked something like a giant submarine conning tower, clad in satin-finish silver panels with 'Mercedes-Benz' emblazoned on the top level. Once again this was a museum that began at the top level; only Mercedes had topped everyone else with a vertiginous atrium with pod-like lifts climbing up the inner walls like something out of a Star Trek set.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the Porsche Platz, containing many of the holy relics. After riding up the entrance escalator we entered the main space. It was clinical white and immaculately kept, but far from being sterile and cold. This is because everything was organised together well; here the oldest cars in chronological order, there the earliest production road cars, here the many Le Mans cars, there the concept cars. Most pleasingly nothing seemed to take priority over anything else. The only special plinth belonged to the first streamlined Porsche prototype - only an empty shell, but setting the design direction for nearly everything that followed. Many of the cars had small computer monitors next to them with information, pictures and videos. They were mounted on swiveling posts and worked by pushing the side of the monitor in the direction you wanted to navigate; an interesting idea in theory but a handful in practice. What would happen would be that to move along to the next picture I would push the monitor right, at which the screen would roll over three pictures. So I pushed it back left but slightly up too, at which the pictures rolled left and up a level. So I gave up and looked at this picture instead. Designers sometimes forget that some things (in this case monitors with touch screens) are so very good at what they do that there is no need to do anything differently. And museum designers seem to be especially prone to this. The museum cafe provided another example of needless rethinking; absolutely everybody who came in had to have the system of picking up a small swipe card which then was placed on little slot machine at the counter to order and carried to the cashier on exit. In theory it had advantages; the counter staff didn't need to listen for orders in broken German from hundreds of foreign visitors, and cashier only had to take payments once when people left. In practice the counter staff and cashier had to spent their entire time explaining the system to people so completely used the usual cafeteria system that it is probably burned into their motor-cortex somewhere next to the brushing of teeth and using bank machines.

Porsche is relative small-fry compared to the enormousness of Mercedes but that gave their museum the feel of an small art gallery or cathedral, rather than the grand "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" approach of their neighbour across the city. That feeling that everything contained within must be in some way important and storied. Most of Porsche Le Mans winners were inside, as was their sole Formula One winner, their Dakar rally winner, and other road-car prototypes and notable cars, including the one millionth Porsche 911 that was given to the German police as a patrol car. Not that these cars were too holy to touch; there was a well-mannered young guide showing round a bunch of Australians, stopping at many cars and deftly opening the engine covers and doors, thus attracting the attention of more camera-toting gawkers such as myself. It was clear from the big service bay on the ground floor and the general condition of the working parts that most of these cars were kept in working order and could be wheeled out tomorrow and driven at the Goodwood Festival in a moments notice.

At Mercedes-Benz things were on a slightly bigger scale; whole floors were given over to specific decades. It took a whole gallery just to reach the formation of the modern company, from the separate Benz and Daimler companies and incorporating the Mercedes moniker from one of Daimler's sporty models - named in turn after the daughter of one of Daimler's best customers. As well as the chronological display of cars were large side rooms given over to buses, trucks, earth movers and everything else with a three-pointed star on the nose. It was an eclectic selection; an Edwardian London bus, a sinister looking 1930s German ambulance, the Formula One medical car, the 1974 German World Cup team bus (or a replica since the original is missing presumed lost), Princess Diana's 300SL (she had to swap it for a Jaguar after government pressure to be more patriotic), and Hirohito's Daimler (he didn't have to swap because Japan didn't have Lexus at the time). Down in the ground floor was yet another display of racing cars in starting-grid formation along the edge of the room, so the display could only be seen from one side. It is clearly either the fashion or convenient way of keeping visitors grubby fingers a safe distance from the most precious metal. For that reason I think my favourite car in the place was the 1955 'Uhlenhaut Coupe' (named after the chief engineer). It was racing car in disguise; meant to be used in 1956 but when Mercedes withdrew from racing after the Le Mans disaster it got turned into the chief designers personal runabout which he used to commute between Munich and Stuttgart regularly at speeds over 150mph. In 1956. Since it was technically a 'road car' it wasn;t in the racing hall grid but perched on a plinth a few floors above, where I paced around it taking pictures of its rather wonderful profile and exquisite details.

It was getting on for four pm when we finished in the Mercedes museum and time to proceed back to Strasbourg. On the outskirts of Stuttgart I took us on a brief detour round an old road racing circuit called Solitude-ring. It was only in the Porsche museum that I had learnt that the track that was once a prominent non-Championship Formula One venue in the 1950s and 1960s was even in Stuttgart. And it was only while leaving Mercedes that I spotted where it was on the map. It was so obvious I had looked right past it several times - a red triangle of roads right next to the motorway. This had demanded a unilateral decision; I wasn't driving right past a famous old racetrack eight hundred miles from home without taking a lap. So we did, and miraculously didn't get lost and were back on the way to Strasbourg within a quarter of an hour. This made me quietly very pleased with my tour-guide instincts.

Turin, motor city Italy

(From 2011)

Turin is Italy's motor city. It is where FIAT is based and since FIAT now owns every brand in Italian car making Turin is the epicentre of all the countries car making. Naturally Turin has a motor museum, a museum we had visited in 1992. Back then it was a straightforward gallery of cars lined up in rows in a plain white interior. Now the whole place had been completely reconstructed and the museum rebuilt with more a more thematic approach. As is the fashion in many exhibition spaces these days the suggested visiting route began with an escalator ride to the top floor and continued down the stairs. The first gallery began right at the beginning and had an interesting wall of models; models of the most notable attempts to make an 'autonomous carriage' (for wont of a better phrase) before the invention of the internal combustion engine.

The rest of the floor was given over to a chronological development of (mostly Italian) cars; from the earliest types, through the grand Rolls Royces of the 1920s, to the golden age of the Italian coachbuilders in 1950s and 60s. Not a whole lot different from the Mulhouse collection except that the Italians had not put their cars on plinths or kept them at a slight distance; it makes a world of difference being able to walk right up to the cars and peer inside. Looking at rows of neatly parked cars from the front is like looking at neatly hung paintings from behind a rope. It gets a bit boring and repetitive after a while, and all the details that only appear with a close look are missed.

Not even the Italians were prepared to allow visitors to breathe all over the racing cars though. In the lower level the collection of Ferraris, Maseratis and the others were laid out exactly as they had been at Mulhouse; on a dummy starting grid display. The second floor was dedicated to Turin's part in all this. In the staircase lobby were four of the finest models from FIAT and Alfa Romeo. Then, just to remind the visitor that once up a time there were many others, the next room housed respectively a Temperino, a Storero, a SCAT Ceirano and a FOD. I had never heard of any of these marques before, possibly because they were all consigned to history by the 1940s. FOD only ever made one model. The same room also had a giant aerial photograph of the city set in the floor with labels pointing out all of the car factories and other companies involved in Turin throughout the years. There was barely a district that didn't have something automotive as it's industrial centrepiece.

Down on the ground floor was a gallery of Turin's finest designs. What Turin regarded as it's finest designs anyway, and it was surprisingly up to date with concept cars from this year. This explains why museums have taken to having this upside down arrangement with new and temporary exhibitions on the ground floor and the old things upstairs - it's much easier to swap things around in the evening if they are on the ground floor. Turin wasn't just where the cars were built but where they were styled too - in the workshops and studios of Italdesign, Pininfarina, Bertone, and others. And not just Italian cars either, most of the rest of the world's most stylish and notable cars were fashioned here. The final rooms of the exhibition were given over to a video of the personal musings of car designers and small cases holding their inspirations and other favoured designs. Most of them had picked the 1955 Citroen DS as their all-time number one - perhaps a sign of modesty as none of them had anything to do with it. The very very last room housed a small line up of cars without much comment - I assumed we were to infer that these were the very cream of the crop, or the museum's parting comment to us the visitor - an Alfa Giulietta, an Abarth saloon, a 'Disco volante' Alfa (so called because it looks a bit like a wheeled pancake) a white Cisitalia fastback, a Ferrari GTB. Nothing too showy, but all in their subtle way exceptionally fine designs.

European holiday - Cars and trains in Mulhouse

(From 2011)

Whether it is by coincidence or by intention both France's national motor museum and national car museum happen to be a few miles apart in northern Mulhouse. The rail museum began as a dumping ground for old SNCF bits and pieces but the car museum began as a private collection owned by the Schlumpf brothers, a pair of woollen mill owners, before being unofficially commandeered by the striking factory workers union in 1977 when the business fell into terminal financial problems. The brothers ran off to Switzerland and the workers opened the collection warehouse to the public. Eventually the proper authorities got involved, the government took over the cars to recoup the Schlumpf's debts and the whole caboodle was turned into a national car museum.

The car museum has been renovated in recent years but the exhibits are mostly pre-1970s cars, and of them over half are pre-WW2. In fact on entering the exhibition hall the first row of thirty cars stretching out ahead barely even entered the 20th century. One seriously comprehensive collection in other words; Panhards, Peugeots, Renaults, De Dion Boutons, Benzs, Rolls Royces, and many others of which even I had not heard of. The most represented marque was Bugatti, an obvious choice since they were made in Molsheim, a town not too far away, and the pride of place in the darkened side gallery was given over to one of the museum's two Bugatti Royales. The Royale is a mountain of car, about the same length as a large pickup truck (21 feet), with twelve litre aeroplane engine, 24-inch wheels, and right hand drive (like all Bugattis). Thanks to the Great Depression they only made six of them before giving up the project and returning to slightly more sane cars. Because cars of the time were still coachbuilt none of the cars were quite the same, despite the similar chassis underneath. My favourites were the specially designed 1936 Type 57 coupe without any windscreen pillars, a concept far ahead of it's time; and the two-tone cars painted glossy black with either yellow or red flanks, a neat touch to already very handsome cars.

Only ten minutes drive away across the northern suburbs of Mulhouse was the rainbow painted train shed of the rail museum. After the massed ranks of tidily parked vintage cars in the Schlumpf collection the train museum presented a more eclectic selection of sights and sounds. Most curious was the strident French voices playing from mannequins in some of the coaches. These mannequins were on the shoddy side, looking like something that should be on top of a bonfire, but they did have on authentic period clothings, thus giving a fair idea of what French commuters and day-trippers looked like in 1890 or whenever. The 1890 commuters must've looked a bit grimy since they were sat on the top deck of the train- not so bad one might think but the top deck was open to the elements.

The museum had also come up with the interesting idea of fitting some kind of steam canister in some of their engines so every so often they would literally blow off steam. In fact the place was a font of imaginative thinking; to show what the French resistance got up to during WW2 one engine had been tipped onto it's side as if it had been hit by resistance sabotage (or Improvised Explosive Device as we call bombs these days). This had the side effect of showing what the underside of a steam engine looks like.

The newer part of the museum was in a very dark shed with efficient air conditioning. We only noticed how efficient the air con was when we opened the door to the older shed and felt the heat. The older part was an interesting wooded-roofed shed (resembling Manchester Oxford Road and possibly of a similar vintage) and contained most of the museum's collection. Coming from the perspective of the British; who are only ever told about the Stephenson's Rocket, The Flying Scotsman and Mallard and grow up assuming that these represent the three pinnacles of train development, it is easy to overlook how much the French have to boast about. True, they weren't first with the train (and the earliest locomotives in the museum are all British-made) but they seemed to become pre-eminent in the field about the time we seemed to give up in the 1950s.

To illustrate the point no fewer than two electric engines were mounted with a plaque claiming they had set 'Record Du Monde Vitesse' of 331 KPH in 1953. Obviously being English I had been taught all about Mallard's record run in 1938 and then never received a mention of anything that happened after so I was ignorant of the precise details. Perhaps, I thought, the two engines had been coupled together on their record run. Turns out that SNCF deliberately ran both on consecutive days just to show off. They still hold the record now, as a little booth showed a film of a TGV flying to 500kph. My favourite trains were the Bugatti Railcar, which like the firm's car was heroically fast and glamourous at the time, but disappeared without a trace after the war; and the two TEE's (Trans Europe Expresses). Not only did they look impossibly chic in their silver livery and aura of seventies retro-cool, but their sleeping cars looked like genuinely nice places to be (if a bit old fashioned these days). I stood for a minute and more peering into the windows trying to work out exactly how the compartments were arranged. It looked like they had been ingeniously designed to split the compartment in half with the top bunk being a separate room from the bottom bunk. It looked better than the modern day aeroplane seat anyway.

2009 in America

Originally written in August 2009

June & July 2009

This trip came about because Nicholas needed to move his stuff from Urbana, Illinois, to Victoria British Columbia. The rest of us flew out there to help with moving and to have a road trip. Some of the days are necessarily more interesting than others. I’ve focused more on the ‘holiday’ bits since there only so much that can be written about packing boxes, loading trailers, paperwork, and shopping for sofas.

Monday 15th (Spent flying to Chicago)

After eight hours sat down on a plane you would think that being forced to stand in a queue for over an hour wouldn't be as difficult as it might be in normal circumstances. Unfortunately when the thing that takes over an hour is US immigration at Chicago airport my patience starts to fray. I have no problem joining a long queue as long as there is no possible way the queue could be made to move more quickly, Roller coasters and tall buildings being good examples. The problem at Chicago was that the entire immigration system seemed to be overloaded by more than one airplanes worth of people. The queue would've easily lasted more than two hours if the US Citizens lanes hadn't been opened to everyone. Presumably this is standard procedure or they risk a mutiny from the workers processing hundreds of foreigners while their colleagues sit idle waiting for the thirty Americans on the next flight. The only upside to this ridiculous wait is that when our turn came the officer was in hurry up mode and didn't bother with all the usual suspicious questions about your intentions and the retina photographs.

Tuesday 16th (Spent packing and loading)

Down to business. For some curious reason, presumably to do with franchising agreements the U-Haul trailer was in care of an Interstate Batteries store just out of town. Appropriately it was a Canadian trailer, with a New Brunswick logo adorning the side. It was a little rusty in places and the orange stripe on the front was pockmarked with insect impacts, but it fitted to the car fine and its lights all worked. So we headed back to base and loaded up. The trailer came with a trolley to shift boxes and I made myself feel useful by shuttling the bigger things around to the lift and down to the car park.

Wednesday 17th

We were all ready to go on Wednesday morning but the apartment manager wasn’t so we had to hang around for half an hour outside the office until somebody came back in order to give the key back. Combined with another wait at Nicholas’s office to receive a fax it was half past ten before we finally got going on the road. Passing Peoria we managed to drive for fifteen miles up the wrong interstate (the one heading back north east to Chicago) before realizing the mistake and turning around. This is where the mile markers on the roadside are useful, since it was reading these and thinking ‘well that’s not the correct distance’ that clued me up to the fact that we’d evidently been filtered onto the wrong motorway in the roadworks in Peoria. We continued with a certain resolve to pay more attention to navigation.

After an afternoon on the interstate the scenery gradually dribbled into a more built up area and finally into Des Moines, Iowa. With the prior knowledge from passing the same way in 2006 that the interstate runs through the downtown in a cutting and that the city isn’t visible from that route I opted instead to take us round the north suburbs and stop in the Merle Hay Mall. Since it was built in the 1960s it’s practically a historic building by Midwestern USA standards, but only the exterior and the space age entrance sign betray its age; it’s blandly modernised inside. You'd think they might try to push the 'retro' angle a bit more as a ploy to attract curious passers-by, even if all that is done is dress up all the shops with 1960s logos and park a few old cars out front. The day ran out west of Des Moines in the small town of Walnut, on the edge of a thunderstorm that had enlivened the last twenty minutes of driving.

Thursday 18th

Interstate highways in the USA run primarily north-south and east-west so our progress from Iowa to South Dakota involved following one interstate west to the Missouri and another one hundred and eighty miles north via Sioux City, Iowa, to Sioux Falls, where the next interstate runs west across South Dakota. South Dakota is quite a dull place for the most part, except for the south western corner where there are mountains, Mount Rushmore and the craggy expanses of the Badlands. We had lunch in Mitchell, a typical South Dakota town. A large area of gas stations and restaurants to service the interstate and a real town a mile down the road to provide people to work at the gas stations and restaurants. Presumably not all of these people are working towards university or that unspecified American further education establishment called ‘school’. There must be some benefits to living in a small town in the middle of a big flat state. Making friends must be easier and there’s less traffic and more space. It can’t be a coincidence that lots of good rock bands started in dull small towns. On the other hand you have to have friends since you’d never afford the trip to Des Moines or Chicago or somewhere else where interesting things happen on your own. Perhaps it just the state of the economy at the moment, or young Americans are generally more polite than young Britons, but it seemed that a worryingly high proportion of the service staff were young, well turned out, well spoken, and generally seemed capable of more than working at McDonalds.

We arrived at the Badlands National Park in late afternoon. The Badlands comprises several different landscapes; dramatically eroded valleys that resemble a giant disused quarry, a large grass plain, and some meadows. The visitor centre had a rather bland film about the area. It had one of those voiceovers that are slightly too drawn out and seem to take ages to say anything. We drove around the main park road with the lowering sun and fairly clear sky making the place look very photogenic. The road was clearly designed to take in the most number of different environments as possible. It ran over the main ridge like a mini alpine pass, straightened out over a meadow, (the fence posts providing perches for the local birdlife), then wandered around some low hills. One trail was marked on the map as 'fossil trail', which it was, insomuch as there were four or five weatherproofed boxes with dusty fossils inside next to a wooden boardwalk. It was a curiously half baked feature by American National Park standards and a strange mismatch of effort to build a boardwalk, a car park, some restrooms, and then give up on the exhibits. I suspect the fossils might actually have been an afterthought added later, when nobody could find a spare case in the visitor centre.

One place where plenty of effort has been made is the nearby town of Wall. From as far away as Sioux Falls the interstate was decorated with signs advertising Wall Drug, the rather awkward name given to one of the largest shops in the country that isn’t part of a national chain. It’s nice that the area has something famous to boast about but they don’t half boast about it every few miles with ugly billboards. I didn’t see anything worth getting excited about on the tens of billboards we passed.

Friday 19th

After two days of driving across flat farmland and empty plains it looked like being a more interesting day. Partly this is because western South Dakota’s most prominent mountain has four heads carved into it. One of my overriding impressions of Mount Rushmore is how well preserved and tidy it all is despite its age - if the heads were real people they would be pensioners by now, albeit well preserved pensioners. Had it been finished last year it wouldn’t look too different. The mountain is thirty kilometres from and five hundred metres above the interstate at Rapid City. The monument provided some help to make Rapid City a bigger city although it was the Ellsworth Air Force Base that doubled the city population during WWII. Ellsworth is home base for the B1 Bomber and one of them glided over us as we drove into the city on the interstate.

Not only has Mount Rushmore been very well preserved physically but the choice of presidents has stood up well. The Native American population may not have been too impressed by a giant monument of four white men being carved out of a sacred mountain but you’d have to say that Gutzon Borglum did at least choose the four best candidates at the time. Had he been more of a slave to fashion then President’s Taft and Harding could be up there with Washington and Lincoln, like those Channel Four ‘100 Greatest’ programmes where the current flavours of the month slot into 7^th, 3^rd and 2^nd on the countdown. There is still a large space to Lincoln's left where a fifth head could be added. If any tedious cynical person suggests that this will inevitably be filled with some minority person as a token gesture you can point out that back in the thirties they were going to put the suffragette campaigner Susan B. Anthony there until presumably somebody pointed out that this would be a dangerously progressive thing to do. Considering that even today Washington's coat is still only in the 'rough draft' stage and Lincoln's hair is a large chunk of cliff face it's unwise to blame the lack of a fifth figure on conservative thinking when it was actually a lack of money and momentum. I can picture the workers getting to the stage they did and thinking 'that's good enough; I'm getting sick of being up here'.

The same cynical people can look around the Western US landscape and wonder if there are any natural features that aren't 'sacred' to the natives. I'm a little equivocal on this one. The roads and cars make the landscape seem smaller than it would've been in previous centuries. It took us a few minutes to drive up the hill to Mount Rushmore on a big wide highway and a few hours to drive to Wyoming and Devil's Tower in the afternoon. Trekking across the hills on horses I can imagine how on finding a dramatic rock face at the top you would be more inclined to think of it as sacred. On the other hand it is irritating when the only reason to ban people from rock climbing is some immovable idea of sacred importance that seems totally out of proportion to the figures. The native stories may indeed be venerable but the rocks of Devil's Tower predate them by a few hundred million years or so.

Devil's Tower is conveniently close enough to Mount Rushmore to allow both to be visited in a day even with American speed limits. Towing a heavy trailer with a moderately powerful car at least makes the speed limits seem a bit less restrictive. A very tiny bit less restrictive. At least the roads were fairly quiet and free from RVs, as one might hope for when driving to a famously mystical landmark in the manner of a pilgrimage to a cathedral. There are few other places that change so much depending on where they're being seen from. From a distance the rock tower looks like a giant tree stump. One of several, in fact, since there are several other less dramatic looking formations nearby. Up close it takes on its more familiar shape, although I expected its base to be flush with the surrounding ground like Uluru in Australia rather than up on a forested hill - the whole area was generally hillier than I had been anticipated. We had some lunch at a surprisingly slow restaurant near the park entrance. Most of the staff were teenagers and all the American 'HaveANiceDay' service training in Wyoming can't entirely change that fact.

Saturday 20th

If you can make it across Iowa and South Dakota without dying of boredom then you’ll find that the driving gets a little bit more interesting the further west you go. In Montana and Wyoming the interstate highway stops being a giant conveyor belt trundling through endless fields on its way to another petrol station and becomes a road with corners and hills and towns to drive past. The speed limit is still stiflingly conservative but at least it feels like there’s progress being made. In western Wyoming is Yellowstone, the Mecca for RVs, caravans, motorhomes, pickup trucks and SUVs. You wonder why they bother really, given all the miles and miles of fire damaged trees (remnants of an epic forest fire in 1988) Yellowstone isn’t the most lovely place to be, especially, as was the case this day, when there’s thunderstorms about. Perhaps all the RV-ers are practicing dodging lightning for when they retire to play golf in Florida.

You can’t really win with lightning. You can’t stand under trees, and you can’t stand out in the open. Obviously the chances of being struck are miniscule but there are places, like the boardwalk at the Yellowstone geyser basin, that feel comically exposed. This is a way of explaining why, when wandering round the aforementioned boardwalk in the rain, I instinctively dropped my umbrella when a big spark of static jumped into my wrist from the umbrella. Since nobody nearby came running over to tell me that I’d been hit by lightning, and since my ears hadn’t exploded, the rational part of my brain assumed that it was just a bit of lively atmospherics. The irrational part took a minute or two to stop gibbering.

Yellowstone seemed busier than I remembered it from when two of us went there in 2003. That was in September, which may explain that, although over time my mind has probably been retroactively removing hundreds of people and cars from places to make them seem less busy than they really were. Most of the people were doing exactly what we were doing; driving to see the Old Faithful geyser and have some lunch in the excellent lodge, one of the best of the national parks. It’s almost worth going to without all the surrounding geysers. Most of the geysers in the park erupt at all kinds of odd hours or go for months without doing anything. The visitor centre had expected eruption times posted on boards, and, as the name suggests, Old Faithful was by far the more reliable. It even had the good grace to wait until the rain had stopped. After lunch the rain returned so we decided to drive on west as far as possible. ‘As far as possible’ turned out to be Butte, Montana.

Sunday 21st

Its six hundred miles from Butte to Seattle and we successfully managed it all in one day. It wasn’t a day for much sightseeing on foot, but there’s a few mountains to cross in Idaho and Washington states so the roads are quite scenic. The mountain passes in Idaho are quite dramatic and probably quite exciting for the truck drivers crawling up the hills and then rolling down again. At the bottom on one of the valleys we stopped mid-morning at nice little town called Wallace. Its whole main street was designated a historic district. It was fairly quiet with the odd pickup truck driving past and occasional tourists like us wandering around at the far end of the town. Some of the shops were open, including the big old fashioned bric a brac store that was next to the pizza takeout place – that was closed until noon. Unfortunately for them we were gone before that, back on the interstate. There wasn’t much open in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho at lunchtime at Sunday, except McDonalds and the gas stations. Those anti-globalization people might have to suspend their principles when it comes to driving big distances on the American interstate on a Sunday. Either that or go without lunch.

Having spent a few hours driving across the flat middle bit of Washington the truck drivers faced an even tougher hill to climb to get to Seattle. The flat plain ends with a long bridge across a lake and then a six hundred metre climb up into the mountains. Generally speaking the more dramatic a motorway is the further apart the two carriageways will be and on this bit the traffic going the other way was a long way off to the left. Towing the trailer you could get a feel for the kind of torque big trucks need to get over the hills. Or the kind of suspension they need to get over the curiously corrugated surface of the bit of interstate we drove over down in the next valley. Eventually, having driven over a few thousand juddering bumps in half an hour, car, trailer and cargo made it to Seattle in the early evening. It was grey and raining, unsurprisingly.

Monday 22nd

So we’d made it to Seattle without losing the trailer, or crashing the trailer, or having the trailer stolen, or having the trailer set on fire. And without crashing the car, having the car stolen, having the car break down, being pulled over by the police, or getting caught in any traffic jams. And without losing any wallets, or having money stolen, or being shot by men called Billy Bob and Cletus LeRoy, or being blackmailed by women called Jenna and Misty, or being abducted by aliens. No serious problems in other words (although the blackmail thing would make this worth a bit more to the tabloids). Not that the tabloids in the far western corner of Washington State would be interested. They would only be interested if there were some kind of connection to ‘Twilight’ (it’s like Harry Potter only with more vampires and its set in the area). Given the number of British people playing vampires at the moment I could perhaps get away with pretending to be one.

The car ferry to Victoria sails from Port Angeles, a smallish Hull-like port town north of Olympic national park, rather than Seattle. Towing a trailer meant we couldn’t drive up some of the mountains in the park. We wouldn’t have been able to see anything because of the low clouds. So we went and had a look at a lake (very nice) and trundled around the local roads in a big circle past several dusty looking road work crews. Back in Port Angeles we had a look around the waterfront, passing en route a few tens of shops selling Twilight merchandise, a café called ‘Bella’s Place’ (that’s one the characters) and some BMX riding teenagers making good use of the waterfront boarding ramps. Right at the end of harbour front was a small viewing tower, about two stories tall and enthusiastically autographed by the local youth population. There were a few places to eat but it was the kind of town where anywhere decent was full, so we went back to same place we’d been to for lunch – an ok kind of place where most of the local OAPs appeared to come for lunch and the walls were covered in twee paintings of wildlife.

Tuesday 23rd

The nice thing about car ferries compared to aeroplanes is that you can sit in your own car while you wait for everyone to decide that they’re ready. There’s something nice and relaxing about waiting for a ferry in a car. There’s all the benefits of driving; privacy, quiet, snugness, without the hassle of actually having to drive the next forty miles. Also, the universal sense of paranoia that has settled over airports in the last decade hasn’t quite managed to infiltrate ferry terminals. It took a fair amount of time to get into Canada but it was all pretty civilized with none of the militaristic overtones of US airports. One of the immigration officials even stood around for a chat. Even the person in the car next to ours who’d driven north from Mexico and was having his cars crevices searched wasn’t being frisked for weapons or anything.

Having unloaded the trailer I could have done with a bit of a sit down on a sofa. Unfortunately Nicholas’s new apartment wasn’t furnished and it was a bit late to be setting out on a furniture buying expedition. So we went to a restaurant instead. It was quite a nice place that served an unspecific menu of slightly overpriced food for out of shape middle aged people. There was a bar but the wine list seemed like the more popular choice since it didn’t involve standing up and embarking on a long trek across a room. The only person who was sat there was one of the staff on a break. She briefly created the illusion that the place was a hangout for thirtysomething single professional types. Maybe it was a deliberate ploy to attract more single businessmen who will eventually come back when they are married and drink lots of wine.

Wednesday 24th (first day in Victoria)

Errand time. As I mentioned earlier we didn’t have any furniture so we kept hold of the trailer for another day to go and get some. On the north side of Victoria is as very large Salvation Army warehouse that had a few cheap sofas and mattresses and so forth. The rain did its best to get everything wet but we didn’t have far to walk to load things into the trailer. Next up was a supermarket, and then a second hand furniture shop for a table, then finally the trailer could be given back to U-Haul. A week is a long time to be hauling a trailer around and we’d all had enough with lumbering around, grounding the tow bar on bumps and generally having to be slower than normal. We drove the newly liberated car round to a mall so we could have a drink and to let the car enjoy the feeling of only taking up one space in the car park. Victoria has several hills dotted around its north side and we went to drive up one and have a look at the view.

Thursday 25th

This day never quite got going to be honest. Firstly I wanted to do some laundry, which took an hour. Then Nicholas needed to go to the bank, which took an hour. Then another hour went by as we had some lunch in town at the Royal BC Museum café. Then another diversion for furniture at another Salvation Army shop, this time in the town centre. Then we drove to the cable TV place, which might’ve taken an hour. All I recall is that it was about three PM and the useable day was rapidly running out and at that time of day everything seemed to be taking twice as long as it needed to.

Like the day before we drove up a hill to take in a view. This hill however was the hill with the observatory and Nicholas’s new office on it. The observatory was built in 1918 and had visitor centre next door rather grandly (or sarcastically) called The Centre of The Universe. There were a few models of telescopes, bits of cameras and other equipment on display, as well as a very old drinks vending machine. The staff showed Nicholas and me how to open it without paying any money.

Friday 26th

In an ideal world a UK citizen could move to Canada from the USA with no potential problems. Just present a few bits of paper to show you have a legitimate job and a passport to show you are who you say you are. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. The USAs ‘visa waiver’ program has apparently been designed on the assumption that any European going across the border to Canada for a few days is either on holiday or on a business trip from Europe. Moving to Canada and then wanting to come back into the USA is an absolute classic bureaucratic grey area. And being refused entry to the USA is not something you want to happen if you ever want to go back there for the rest of your life. In fact they’d probably refuse to bury your coffin on American soil if you’d been refused entry once upon a time. It probably wouldn’t have mattered. There probably wouldn’t have been any problem. We decided to stay in Canada. Call us silly yellow chicken wusses but I say that fear of US immigration is not an irrational fear.

Having been to the Royal BC Museum café on Thursday we had a look round the rest of it today. The first floor is a natural history museum, with the usual dioramas and dimmed lighting. The second floor is an anthropological museum, with the usual cases of artifacts and recreated interiors. Hidden in there somewhere is an IMAX screen but that was only showing National Geographic Films. The first floor was fairly unremarkable. They’d done a good job of recreating the local environments, but it wasn’t especially diverting. If Vancouver didn’t have such an awful lack of museums for grown-ups (more on this below) there wouldn’t be much reason to come to Victoria just for the first floor of the Royal Museum. The second floor was better, not because it had anything remarkable in it, (no Hope Diamond or SR-71 spy plane), but because they hadn’t missed a single subject matter. There was a room full of household items, exhibits on mining, logging, farming, salmon canneries, explorers, shipping companies, railways, and, of course, the First Nations. There was also a street with a hotel, a cinema, a garage and a Chinatown. The hotel wasn’t just a façade; it had an interior with a grand staircase. The cinema worked and the shop fronts were clearly the result of much effort from local historians. It was all fantastic and the city should be proud of it. The exhibits on the natives were peppered with notices informing us of recent treaties over ownership and the contradictory message that many of the artifacts that were “on display” had been “returned to native communities”. Clearly there was some uncertainty about the future of the exhibits; whether natives wanted to set up their own museums or were happy to leave things on loan where they were. It’s a problem without a satisfactory solution since the Indians and other groups had their land confiscated before the world became an almost infinitely more complicated place and it can’t simply be ‘given back’. Most of Canada is probably owned by the Saudi royal family or Russian oil barons anyway.

In the evening we spotted another road to go for a drive on; a causeway in Esquimalt, the town to the west of Victoria. The town is effectively a navy base with houses and McDonalds attached. The map I had didn’t mark that one of the roads had a security post on it and was private, quite a big omission in a map, but since Canada hasn’t got to the British stage of sending police to intercept people for being near to restricted areas we could turn around and scarper without problem. The causeway ran out over a lagoon where some of the local amateur photographers were training lenses on the herons. We drove back to Victoria via the outlying semi-rural neighbourhoods and its very twisty roads. After days rolling along motorways towing a trailer it seemed like the car had earned something more exciting.

Saturday 27th (round trip to Pacific Rim National Park)

By European standards Vancouver lsland is quite a big place. It’s nearly three hundred miles end to end. The distance from Victoria to Nanaimo is roughly the same as Sheffield to Birmingham. The round trip to the Pacific Rim National Park that we drove on this day is equivalent to a round trip to the Lake District from Sheffield. Like the Lake District it will also rain on you in western Vancouver Island, a geographical quirk that the western side is much wetter than the east and the city of Vancouver. There are even rainforests.

It was a little galling to reach the visitor centre and look at the weather forecast for the week; rain, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun. The park takes up a part of the western coast with various different bits of forest, some beaches, a couple of towns at each end (Ucluelet in the south, and Tofino in the north), and a smallish airport incongruously cut out of the forest like something from the Amazon. At the points where the forest was at its most ancient there were wooden boardwalks running out into the trees. We stopped at one and had a wander along the path, taking note of the ‘Beware of Bears’ signs. Unless the bears were Goths or Tim Burton fans there wasn’t much for them; just lots of looming, damp trees with dangling tussles of moss, tangled roots, and an awful lot of quiet. The boardwalk was an impressive bit of wood engineering, and provided the sensation of floating a few feet above the forest floor.

Further up the coast was a long beach, called, with a dash of inspiration, Long Beach. There were a few surfers venturing into the water. Despite the un-photogenic grey sky it was probably ok weather for surfing. There was a bit of a swell and it had stopped raining. A few miles north of the beach was a small road up to an old wartime radar station, now just an open concrete bare patch. The clouds obscured the distant view to the north although even with clear skies the trees were tall and blocked out the near views. The area needed some kind of tower like the one on the waterfront in Port Angeles.

‘Tofino’ sounds like the name of some hip suburb of San Francisco rather than a small, rainy Canadian harbour town. The locals have tried their best to make the town fit the name and the advent of surfing has helped the cause. There are coffee shops and surfing gear shops aplenty. It was late in the afternoon and we’d been without food or drink for a few hours so we stopped in a coffee shop near the middle of town, (or as near to the ‘middle’ as it’s possible to get in a small harbour town). It was quite small and very yellow, and had a good selection of calorie-tastic cakes. The nineteen-eighties came booming out of the speakers in the background, making the whole place seem like one of those John Hughes (RIP) movies that I’ve never watched, obviously. (Actually, I have the seen The Breakfast Club once on TV)

Tofino was the most westerly point of our travels. The rest of the day was spent backtracking along the same roads Victoria. Near Port Alberni (where we’d stopped at midday at a Boston Pizza restaurant whose staff were reluctant to get us the bill) was a large stand of large ancient trees surrounding the road called Cathedral Grove. Like the trees in the National Park they were very tall and almost impossible to photograph without an extremely wide angle lens.

Sunday 28th

Victoria is apparently the most ‘English’ city in North America. Let’s look at the evidence. Appearing for the defense is the large statue of Queen Victoria, the posh hotel, the shop selling Iron Maiden t-shirts, the John West tuna in the supermarket, the word ‘Royal’ in various titles, the waxworks museum and the Butchart Gardens - a large landscaped flower garden that we spent the afternoon visiting. Appearing for the prosecution is the lack of speed cameras, the Orca watching tours, the ‘Save On Foods Arena’, and the girl in the t-shirt shop was cheerful and said ‘hiya’ to me, not a British shop-keeping trait in my experience (with the exception of Katy from my shop, although technically I wasn’t ever a customer there).

As far as landscaped flower gardens go the Butchart Gardens were quite interesting. They could be a victim of their own success actually – it’s so well kept that nothing is out of place and you could take it all for granted. The gardens divide into three main areas; to the left of the main entrance is an area created in the site of an old quarry, with plants and trees growing up the sheer sides. To the right, running down to a sheltered cove, is a Japanese garden. The centerpiece is a rose garden and a large lawn in the English style. In fact the whole place is in the English style, not the cutesy olde-England Jigsaw box style but the believable clone of somewhere in England style. Like the bits of the All England Tennis Club that aren’t tennis courts.

We drove to the ferry to Vancouver, hoping that early on a Sunday evening wasn’t too busy. It wasn’t. The ferry is actually advertised as the ‘Swartz Bay – Tsawwassen’ ferry, two places that are so small they don’t appear on many maps that foreign tourists are likely to have in their possession. The name ‘Vancouver’ doesn’t appear anywhere. Still, the Vancouver ferry is the largest one – the others are more like Marines landing craft than car ferries.

The ferry gave us a good view of some of the houses on Saltspring, North Pender, Galiano and Mayne islands. There are hundreds of islands around Swartz Bay and Vancouver, and most of them seem to be inhabited. One of them had lost an inhabitant somewhere though; the main preoccupation of the newspapers at this time was a 17 year old called Jodi Henrickson who had vanished from one of the islands just west of Vancouver. Unsurprisingly Ms. Henrickson was quite photogenic and ‘sociable’, and her boyfriend was under suspicion. (They still haven’t found her as I write this).

We’d decided to leave Vancouver for later and continue to the Canadian Rockies first. Finding the way around south Vancouver wasn’t easy with a USA map that only included Canada on a large scale that didn’t show all major roads in Vancouver. All the motorways run into the middle, to get from the ferry terminal to the eastern suburbs requires a little juggling of minor dual carriageways and following signs. Amazingly we made it to the suburb of Abbotsford without getting lost or being shuffled off to the middle of nowhere on an interstate

Monday 29th

Now that we were back on the open road without a trailer in tow I could do some driving. I could’ve easily done some driving earlier but it’s not like I’m itching to take over at any opportunity because Nicholas drives too slowly or carelessly or anything. I also wasn’t envious of towing a big lumbering U-Haul trailer full of stuff that didn’t belong to me. I’m also not as well conditioned in the spotting of North American style police cars. On the flat plains of the US Midwest that’s an important skill – police cars parked in the median seem to appear from nowhere. Fortunately for me the British Columbia landscape was hillier than Iowa and the undulations gave more visibility of potential police cars. There wasn’t much traffic on the motorways and they were all going at a reasonable speed. The scenery was nice too.

After two and a bit hours we stopped at a service station at the interestingly named town called Kamloops (less of a name of a town, more that of a car engine part). American service stations are vast, of course, but they don’t have as much variety as British ones. There aren’t as many flavours of crisps (I’ve recently had this independently confirmed by someone from South America), or sandwiches, or drinks, and especially magazines and newspapers. There are more ‘energy drinks’ (although they all taste the same) and caffeinated Starbucks by-products like iced tea. There’s more dried beef jerky, more types of Kelloggs bars and more car polish. In Canada they have more sandwiches, which is nice if its lunchtime, but the magazine situation is still disappointing. The strange thing is that the magazines they do have deal with what seems like a small niche – “Automatic Weapon Collector”, or “Latino Pickup Truck Driver”. Maxim or Esquire are often the only ones that I’ve heard of.

We spent the next few hours driving up the Thompson River valley. North of Kamloops there were lots of burnt trees from a large fire in 2003. All the towns in the area seemed devoted to campsites. To be honest the view was quite repetitive; the occasional small town, trees, hills, campsites - all just a tiny little fraction of Canada. It’s a big place. You wonder how the train drivers stay awake.

Tuesday 30th

The long drive had taken up most of Monday. We’d driven across the Rockies to Hinton, Alberta, an anonymous place that didn’t seem worth investigating. We’d had tea in a nice Chinese restaurant next door to the motel (it was more of a restaurant that served Chinese as well as other things). Interestingly enough Hinton is on the same latitude as Sheffield, although its winters are colder. We back tracked along the road from Hinton back to Jasper. If Aspen is the unofficial capitol of the American Rockies then Jasper is the Aspen of Canada. Except that Banff could also make a claim to being the tourist trap epicentre of the area. We had a look at Maligne Canyon, a few miles south east of Jasper. The ‘canyon’ was more like a rock crevasse, with the river churning around at the bottom. A path from the car park ran down the east side of the gorge for a short distance before crossing the gap on a bridge and continuing down the hill. We walked down to bridge, saw looked at the path continuing down to who-knows-where, then turned around and had a walk around the upstream section, where the canyon was shallower but had more energetic churning water.

The road through the mountains runs south east from Jasper to Calgary. It’s called ‘The Icefields Parkway’, a grand name for what is essentially a road. It’s scenic enough, but it doesn’t cross any actual glaciers. We drove south to the Athabasca Falls, essentially a slightly bigger version of the Maligne Canyon. Not as deep and narrow, but with more water rushing through. A few intrepid visitors were venturing out onto the rocks around the waterfall. This wasn’t illegal, the signs merely cautioned against getting too ambitious. Unlike at Yellowstone hot springs the danger was a bit more obvious. There was a big drop into the canyon. Although never underestimate what people are capable of - I have read that once somebody jumped into one of the boiling pools at Yellowstone to rescue a dog. As you do. When he climbed out he said something like ‘That was really stupid wasn’t it?’ and died a few hours later in hospital.

At its highest point the road passes the foot of the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Icefield. Naturally there was a visitor centre and somewhere for lunch. The weather gradually rolled in so by the time we went to look at the glacier it was snowing. Somehow the wind contrived to blow the snow into our faces both climbing up and coming back down again. Along the path were markers showing how far the glacier had receded (1.5 kilometres in the 125 years people have been watching.) Further down the road the snow vanished and summer returned again just in time for a fabulous view down the river valley. Nearly every car that was passing stopped for a look at the viewpoint. A couple of crows were perched on the barrier accepting donations of bread.

After a brief stop to admire the view at Peyto Lake (another long view down a valley), we turned off the Icefields Parkway short of Banff and drove back west towards Vancouver. The road ran through a pass called ‘Kicking Horse Pass’ where the Canadian Pacific railway passes through via the Spiral Tunnels, a figure-8 shaped bit of early 20^th century railway engineering wizardry designed to reduce the gradient up the ‘Big Hill’.

Up an adventurously narrow and twisty side road was yet another waterfall. This one was called Takkakaw Falls and was the result of melting glacier water flowing over a cliff. It’s a seasonal waterfall – in winter the glacier doesn’t melt so the falls are dry. About a sixth of the way from the top the water bounced off the cliff and created a distinctive plume of white water. A bit further down the water hit the cliff again and sprayed out in a haze. Again there were no limits on climbing around on the rocks – you could get as wet as you liked. We managed about half way to the ‘wet zone’ since climbing up the boulders was easier than climbing back down again.

Wednesday 1st

We’d stayed in a quiet town called Golden. The only sign of activity was in the railway depot on the edge of town and the occasional car trundling past on the street. It was quite a nice place. The constant stream of passing tourists must make it cosmopolitan for a small mountain town. At the next table along to ours the previous night had been some Australian tourists talking about the ‘SnowCat’ rides (a bus with caterpillar tracks that drives onto the Columbia icefield).

Two hours down the road from Golden is another railway town called Revelstoke. We drove most of the way along the scenic road up Mount Revelstoke. Near the top the road was closed because of a stubbornly persisting snow bank. There was supposedly a bear prowling around the car park at the top too. There was a small railway museum in the town, and we stopped for as look. There wasn’t much to it, just a steam engine, some carriages and other bits and pieces. It was educational though, with stuff about the railway’s construction and operation, the telegraph system, the Canadian Pacific company’s other businesses (hotels and planes mostly), and those perennially underappreciated people; the Chinese labourers.

It was Canada day. The centre of Revelstoke was closed with a parade marching around. By the time we’d had lunch the parade had finished. The centre of the town was adorned with maple leaf flags and various stalls with the usual carnival fare – food and miniature flags. There were a few vintage cars parked around. The sun was out and it was all rather pleasant.

A few hours later when we’d made it back to Kamloops and stopped for a break there was the other side of the coin; a very drunk native man stumbling across the car park shouting about “Stolen lands” and “Not being Canadian”. Unfortunately I happened to look vaguely in his direction and was immediately accosted with a confrontational “Are you arguing?” Fortunately I had a handy answer without having to think; “I’m not Canadian either mate” which perhaps sounded sincere enough to diffuse his addled brain and he shuffled off to shout at the customers in a nearby Starbucks. Had it been late at night in a big city centre I might have been a bit more on guard to deal with an unruly drunk. 2pm in a car park was more of a surprise, like being caught up in an armed robbery in a toy shop.

We’d booked rooms in the newest Super 8 motel in Vancouver, and it wasn’t on the directory map yet. All I had to navigate with were some directions and the low sun was obscuring all the road signs. We made it despite missing the motorway exit for the simple reason that the directions only gave an exit number and the sign didn’t have an exit number. Fortunately the Frasier River Bridge we went over twice didn’t have a toll.

Thursday 2nd

In 2003 two of us visited Vancouver for a day. That had been at the start of a road trip all the way down the Pacific coast to Los Angeles. This time Vancouver was the finish, nearly, and we’d all be going home soon. Sigh. The trouble with really great journeys is that you end up in a sulk when you can’t repeat them. The second time is never quite the same, although if Vancouver keeps building new towers at the rate they are doing then it could be a new city before long. Vancouver’s also one of those places that’s so cosmopolitan, clean, spacious and full of pretty people that I can’t help but be a bit jealous.

We took the SkyTrain from Surrey into the city centre (and it is centre in Canada). We walked around the waterfront pier and cruise ship terminal before riding up to the top of the Harbour (and it is Harbour in Canada) Centre tower. It looks like a conventional 1970s concrete office block with a large burger bun plonked on the top. The ‘burger’ section is the observation level. When they built it the place towered above central Vancouver but now it’s in danger of being swamped by all the ranks of shiny new offices and groovy apartments with trees on the roof. Vancouver looks a bit like a party for tower blocks. They’re all look the same are clustered together in little crowds.

We walked to Stanley Park, down a high street that could’ve been lifted from London. Most of the tourist maps use perspective to hide how big the park is, ie; very. It’s almost the same size as the city centre and its main attraction is an aquarium. We were aware that the aquarium was aimed squarely at children so we weren’t sure whether to bother. We didn’t. It was expensive, crowded and mostly indoors. We had a drink and got some free wildlife entertainment from an inquisitive seagull.

One thing that’s striking in Vancouver is how Chinese it is. On the SkyTrain, in the shopping centres, on the bus, in the park. Chances are there will be Chinese people or food or adverts. Naturally there’s also a Chinatown. It’s just to the east of the centre and the gentrified low rise Gastown district. Tucked in behind one of those ugly concrete two level shopping ‘plaza’ things was a proper Chinese garden, with water lilies and fish lurking in the ponds. It may have been small but they were more pleasant place to be than the Butchart Gardens, which may have been well kept but were a bit sterile in places.

In 2010 the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver, and most of the area around the end of the city’s central inlet harbour is being turned into the Olympic village. The only building there now is Science World, another one of Vancouver’s attractions that’s aimed at families with children. Perhaps they have a deal with the Royal B.C. Museum not to provide any museums for grown-ups in Vancouver so people make the trip to Victoria. When we got there it was still open but the IMAX screen had finished showing anything interesting for the day. It was late in the afternoon. We caught the SkyTrain back to the park and ride at Surrey, drove to the ferry terminal and went back to Victoria.

Friday 3rd (last day in Victoria)

In the evening three of us rode the Victoria Clipper (a smallish catamaran) to Seattle and took a taxi to Sea-Tac airport. Before that we’d looked round the Maritime Museum, in the old courthouse in the centre of town. The ground floor had exhibits on explorers, traders, pirates and everything else that happened in the area when ships had sails. Up on the second floor were cases of ship builder’s models and an very comprehensive history of BC Ferries. There was also an exhibit on the Vikings with TV playing a forty minute show about the discovery of Greenland and Newfoundland. At the top of the building was a preserved courtroom.

Saturday 4th

The Fourth of July on a Saturday and Seattle was very quiet. We took a bus into town and had a look around. Most of the cars on the streets were taxis, and most of the pedestrians looked like tourists. We had a look at the new central library, which was closed for the holiday, then walked down to the monorail to ride down to Seattle Center (back to the American spelling) and the Space Needle. The monorail only has two stations, one of which sits outside the second floor of the Westlake Shopping Center downtown, and is barely a mile long. It was built as a novelty to get people to the Space Needle during the 1962 World’s Fair and never demolished or extended. Instead of building more monorail Seattle has built a mile and a half of ‘Transit Tunnel’ under the city centre. This was a feature of the city I had never heard of until the bus drove into it.

It was a hot day by Seattle’s normal standards – nudging the 30 degree mark. Up on the Space Needle the view was clear enough to see Mount Rainier in the distance. It was quite crowded at the top the tower. Since it was built in 1962 the Space Needle wasn’t built to be wheelchair accessible so its outside viewing area is reached by stairs and normal sized doors, so a little patience is in order. Since it was Independence Day somebody had asked two of the staff to dress up as Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty. ‘Uncle Sam’ looked a little young to have a grey beard and young Lady Liberty was worryingly sexy swishing around in her green drapes and crown.

Squatting underneath the Space Needle is the purple, silver and blue blob of the Experience Music Project (or ‘EMP’), built as Seattle’s tribute to Jimi Hendrix, the city’s most famous export after the Boeing 747, Microsoft Windows and Starbucks coffee, by the billionaire Paul Allen, aka other person from Microsoft. Frank Gehry, who also did the Guggenheim in Bilbao, did the architecture, and it’s very interesting, looking like a bit like a smashed electric guitar from above with an appropriate ‘Purple Haze’ finishing. Since I’d last been here in 2003 they’d built a new bit called the Science Fiction Museum, making the full acronym of the building ‘EMP/SFM’. The EMP bit hadn’t changed much, with a floor of exhibits, a floor of the usual ‘interactive’ things, and a giant tower built from guitars. One of Michael Jackson’s sparkly jackets was on display in the entrance as a hastily assembled tribute. The ‘SFM’ was new to me and apart from the theoretical ban on taking photos (that many people were flouting) it was very good. There were many first editions of books, and props from TV shows and films. On the ground floor was an exhibition of Jim Henson’s puppetry (Muppets, Ninja Turtles, Sesame Street etc). Not exactly ‘Science Fiction’ but it was a temporary travelling exhibition.

Seattle sells a single $50 ticket that is advertised as being for all their major attractions. This is almost true, except that you have to choose between the EMP and the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. Since we wanted to go to both, that was a little annoying. We walked to the Seattle Aquarium on the waterfront, near where the Victoria Clipper had docked the evening before. It was divided into two parts; the original bit, a 1970s construction, and a newer section, ironically built in a restored older warehouse. Half of the new bit was an open pond contained various starfish and sea urchins that could be touched. I could imagine any Australians present balking at touching anything with colourful tentacles despite the assurances that they were harmless. The older section was built as both an aquarium and a large salmon hatchery. It was made from concrete and was horribly ugly. Since the sun was shining and the place was clean and well kept it was possible to look past the weathered concrete and enjoy it. There were some sea otters and seals pratting about in their usual style, although it wasn’t salmon spawning season so the concrete salmon steps were empty.

The waterfront in Seattle is about forty metres below the rest of the city behind it. Hanging over the edge of the steep hill is the famous Pike Place Market. We walked up there and had a look around. Since it was 5pm the fishmongers were packing up and going home but there were still stalls open and people milling around. After a bit of fruitless wandering around we eventually found a restaurant that was open, a ‘Chinese Bistro’, which meant that some of the menu could be eaten with chopsticks if you wanted. We actually sat in the bar section and had the bar menu since the main restaurant floor was full with a forty minute wait. The bar menu was perfectly acceptable really, and the forty minute wait only seemed worth it if you had children and couldn’t sit in the bar section.

A pleasant day was slightly spoiled by two slightly drunk ‘homeboy’ types on the bus back to the hotel. They weren’t aggressive, just very loud, and sat several rows apart SHOUTING! to each other. One was talking in great detail, in the way drunks do, about what he’d been eating, and got the other started about how his “uncle in Hawaii” cooked, which led to how “my man” Barack Obama is from Hawaii, and eventually how “they killed Michael” (Jackson). Thankfully they didn’t ride all the way to SeaTac and the last twenty minutes were relatively quiet. It was a little sad to see such an unfortunate case of stereotyped racial roles being played out on the bus. The older and whiter people had sat as far forward as possible away from the potentially unruly young black men and their choice been proven to be a prudent one.

Sunday 5th

In the morning we caught another bus to the Museum of Flight, which is halfway between SeaTac and downtown Seattle. The museum is adjacent to Boeing Field, Seattle’s original airport. It was built in 1928 and was the place where Boeing made planes before moving north to the current factory in Everett. The original ‘Red Barn’ workshop is still there as part of the museum and contains an exhibition about the early years of the company, including a mock-up of a 1918 Boeing ‘Model C’ as it would have looked being built (a large wooden frame with wires), and a Second World War design office.

The main building was four floors tall and had the standard arrangement of planes hanging from the roof and arranged on the floor. The museum isn’t only ‘The Boeing Museum’ so they had all sorts of stuff; Ford TriMotor, SR71 Blackbird, MiGs, Cessnas etc. There was a replica of the Blackbird’s cockpit you could climb inside. It was surprisingly easy to get in, and not as small as I’d expected, but it was a bit of a struggle to get out again with any dignity. There were some 1920s air mail planes arranged to look like they were being loaded up. I particularly liked the mail van bearing the promotional message ‘Air Mail Is Socially Correct’. Down on the ground floor was a gallery about Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad, who had donated his memorabilia to the museum. He became an astronaut despite having a penchant for doing things like sticking cartoons and a picture of a nude pinup girl in the Apollo 12 moon walk task list. There was a copy of the task list on display, and funnily enough it didn’t contain all of the original pages…

Up on the third floor was a room with a view of the airport called ‘The Tower’. This was a new exhibition about how air traffic control works. Basically, a different person does each bit. So there’s ground control, ramp control, taxi control, approach control, and area control. Once in the air, the display said, the pilot’s workload decreases ‘dramatically’. A monitor showed all the current movements in the Seattle area and in the whole country and played the current ATC chatter. I quickly understood why controllers work short shifts. The area map didn’t look all that crowded, but the planes were travelling across it quickly. There’s no ‘hang on I’ll be back in two minutes’ in an airport control tower.

A separate gallery had a comprehensive array of WWI and WWII fighter planes, including the first ever fighter plane (an Italian Caproni Ca20 from 1914). There were some slightly unconvincing British accents in the recreated WWI RAF briefing room – they really should put in a TV showing Blackadder Goes Forth instead, it’d be more true-to-life (“I say sir, you mean it’s finally time to give Harry Hun a good old British-style thrashing, six of the best, trousers down? … You mean ‘Are we all going to get killed?’ Yes.” If I were museum curator I don’t think I could resist putting a picture of Biggles Is Extremely Silly (by M. Python, 1970) somewhere in the displays.

Over the, on their shiny new footbridge, is the Air Park, which has quite the selection of big stuff. There’s a Concorde (“The only one on the West Coast!”), an Air Force One 707, a 727, the first 737, and the first 747. The Concorde and Air Force One were open to look inside but only a few people at a time, a contrast to museums in Britain where they don’t care how many people crowd on. So there was a bit of a queue. Fling into Chicago I had seen a big blue 747 in a separate area on the ground, and had suspected it was the Presidents plane (what else would it be?), and the evening news confirmed that the President was ‘back in Chicago’.

In a supreme piece of timing a bus we thought had passed turned up a few minutes late as we were walking back across the bridge. We rode back into the city and, after a bit of consulting timetables and passersby, worked out which bus went to the city zoo. It was due in about ten minutes. This was good since I really needed the toilet and there was no way I was sitting still on a bus for quarter of an hour. The bus stop was next to a big Macy’s department store; I checked the floor directory… men’s restroom is on the… FIFTH floor! Eight minutes! I’ve rarely walked so fast through a department store before.

Seattle’s zoo is a nightmare to navigate around. Its paths loop around and dump you out in a totally different bit. Each junction has a multiplicity of choices. It’s quite easy to do what we did, and be led around most of it without ever getting to one of the corners. Still, most of the wildlife seemed to be making the most of the un-Seattle like warm weather. The orangutan was lolloping around, the lion was prowling around, and the bears were asleep. One of the enclosures was empty because, ironically enough, a wild bald eagle had made a nest in the tree. The Komodo Dragon in the reptile house was busy exciting the nearby children who were managing somehow to say things like ‘I’m like, a foot from, like, a Komodo, like, Dragon’ with absolute sincerity but without actually sounding excited. It was, like, sarcastic without the sarcasm.

That’s about it. We didn’t miss either of our two flights on Tuesday. Nobody had to sit next to a baby. No thunderstorms kept us on the ground for five hours this year. There was even free cake in the departure lounge at Seattle, as somebody on our flight had won a trip to Paris to see the Opera, or something.