Crossover
Monday, 2/9

We arrived home after dark last night.  It's good to be home, but we've not yet had a look around outside.

Had one of our very few rainy days on Wednesday.  Took the subway south to the 9/11 Memorial, which was very moving.  About 25,000 people a day visit.  We'd already found (eg at the Somme) that even when you know about something that happened, being at the actual site adds a powerful extra layer of emotion.  It seems strange that being at the actual place has the power to intensify feelings that were already well established. 

Had a look too at Wall Street and the financial district.  There's a little square (actually a triangle, like so many "squares" we've seen) that was recently renamed to Queen Elizabeth II Square and contains a memorial to the 9/11 victims from all Commonwealth countries.  Here's a bit of the nearby East River...

Thursday was our last full day in NY and we spent almost all day in MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, which we really enjoyed.  We're not normally all that keen on some of the most modern art, but the collection here is wonderful and there's a terrific section on design. And there's a very nice little Thai restaurant just over the road, which provided us with lunch.

We had plenty of time on Friday.  We had a leisurely breakfast, packed and checked out, leaving our big bags at reception.  Then strolled out for coffee and some time in Bryant Park nearby, pictured...

Saved a small fortune by taking the subway and Airtrain to JFK airport.  Then the flights, about six hours to LA, a pause then about fifteen hours to Sydney.  We went through customs quarantine, etc in Sydney, so were domestic passengers for the short hop to Melbourne, which made it possible for Rob's sister and elderly mother to meet us in the gate lounge; what a pleasant surprise.

So now we're home.  It's hard to grasp that it's Spring after being so long in Summer.  We'll have plenty to do in the garden and elsewhere.  It looks like we've taken about 7500 photos between us, which is going to take a lot of sorting out.  And catching up with people will take us a while too.

But we're already thinking about other trips away...

Regards from Judy and Rob.

New York (2)
Tuesday evening, 27/8

Last time we were in New York City in 2000, we didn't do it well; we were unwell, we had messed up our booking and had less time than we thought, then we wasted most of the little time we did have, looking for a hotel room (or B&B, hostel, motel, or anything) and trying to buy a stove part that we found immediately we arrived in London.  So we didn't see or do much.  This time we're making up for that in a big way, and we're loving it!

On Saturday we walked up 42nd Street to Times Square where Levi had 30% off jeans in their Broadway store (and Rob had just gone through the knees of his jeans while on this trip).  We found out about subway tickets and then roamed for hours in Central Park, watching a game of softball, riding on the carousel, walking down the literary avenue, watching the model yachts, seeing the Alice in Wonderland statue, the Belvedere Castle,  the boating lake and Strawberry Fields.

On Sunday we went south, down to Greenwich Village and Soho, then made our way back north via a string of squares; Washington Square, Union Square, Gramercy Square and of course Madison Square Park, before visiting the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum (J.P. Morgan's father) - we had thought that we'd rather like to have a library like the one at Chatsworth House; now we've upped the ante!!

With the weekend over, we thought that the galleries might not be too crowded so we spent yesterday at the Metropolitan and today we went to the Guggenheim and the Frick.  As usual, Judy had a few specific things she wanted to see before we started roaming the rest of the collections (although not at the Guggenheim).

We are totally in awe of the Metropolitan!  It is vast and full of really great stuff. It even lets visitors take photographs (without flash of course)! Jude couldn't believe her luck; a whole room devoted to each of Vermeer and Cezanne, almost a whole room of Rembrandt, and three rooms full of Degas!  There's no way that a whole day is anything like enough to see all we needed to, so it looks like we'll just have to come back to NY some other time.

There were even things we didn't see and didn't notice at the time.  It wasn't until this morning that we thought about how we entered the gallery. We just went to one of the many entrances, where we went straight in.  Contrast that with that long, long queue at the one entrance to the Louvre!

We're glad to have gone to the Guggenheim and it's an amazing building, but we feel a bit bemused by it too.  Perhaps we visited it at the wrong time, but most of the exhibition spaces were empty and there was an exhibition that we were disappointed with.  At one point we queued for half an hour to go into a darkened room to see a rectangle on the wall with a concave depression in it.  Yes it was interesting to see how hard it was to discern the shape of the depression, but was it art?  I think that the Emperor sometimes really does have no clothes.  Certainly we would not have queued for so long if we'd known what was in there!

The Frick Collection, on the other hand, was fantastically wonderful, a suberb collection still in the collector's Fifth Avenue beautiful house. No photos allowed here, or at the Guggenheim. 

After visiting a number of Rembrandt self-portraits (at ages 34 and 63) in London and seeing another one that we didn't know about at the Met (when he was 54), we were really looking forward to seeing the one (at 52) that we knew was part of the Frick collection and it was, in our opinion, the very best of all.  An afternoon really well spent!

So we now have Wednesday and Thursday ahead of us as full days in NYC before we fly out of JFK airport at 17:55 local time on Friday.

Here's a couple of pictures...

Regards from Judy and Rob

Manhattan Island, NYC
Friday evening, 23/8

We have arrived at our "apartment" on West 41st Street and done a brief recon of our immediate neighbourhood  (the Theatre District) to the north and east.  The apartment is more like a motel room with two hotplates, a rangehood and a sink.  There is not even a table and chairs!  The whole space would fit about three times into our classy hotel room in Boston last night, but it will be fine (and will encourage us to eat out!).

Our last postcard was from when we had just arrived in Quebec City.  What a great place that was! Although we had only three nights there, we made good use of the first evening and two full days for sightseeing in the city, the old quarter (Vieux Quebec) and the historic battlefields areas known as the Plains of Abraham.  Then on Monday morning we drove out to look at Quebec's waterfalls (99 feet higher than Niagara) and then headed south, crossing back into the USA and making for Rochester, Vermont, where Judy's cousin (another Rob) runs a berry farm with his partner Patricia.

Rochester lies on highway 100, which runs north-south along the White River and is surrounded by forested mountains, (which are soon to turn golden and red as autumn advances).  According to folks we spoke to in a nearby town, this means that Rochester misses out a bit on sunshine in winter, but Rob and Patricia's farm is in Sunshine Valley, just north of the town and in an ideal sunny spot for growing raspberries, blueberries and blackberries.

 We stayed three nights with Rob and Patricia; a great pleasure to be in a real home again.  There was a lovely mix of helping with farm work, sightseeing in that beautiful area, and good conversation and laughter (well lubricated with red wine) late into the night.  A special treat was a slideshow of some of Rob's family history archives, which ranged from letters home from Rob and Judy's grandfather to his wife during WW1, right up to family photos from their childhoods in Sandringham (and on  holidays all over).

We are very fond of Vermont, and were almost tempted by the "Keep Vermont Weird" tee-shirts.

We had a final breakfast together on Thursday (Judy's birthday) then drove the three or so hours back to Boston. There we returned the hire-car, found our hotel and selected a very swish restaurant for a candle-lit birthday dinner.

And today, the Amtrak train from Boston to New York, the reverse of our last Amtrak trip in the year 2000.  Very scenic as we came down the coast, often beside little yacht harbours and beaches crowded with swimmers and sun-bathers.

So here we are in the Big Apple, where the traffic noise couldn't be more different from Vermont's calm.  We're wondering if it's possible that the horn could be the first thing to just wear out on cars here.

Tomorrow we plan to go to the Visitors Centre in nearby Times Square, learn about subway tickets and what's playing on Broadway and start our NY visit in earnest.

Regards to all from Judy and Rob

Quebec City
Friday, 16/8

We've just arrived in Quebec City and just walked in to our hotel.  So we haven't seen anything here yet, nor know our way around, etc.

I can see that our last Postcard was from Albany, NY, so a lot has been seen and done since then.

We stayed a couple of nights in a really nice B&B in Niagara on the Lake (NOTL).  It's a beautiful little town in the midst of a wine growing area, of which we had no idea until we went there.  Saw the Falls, tasted wines, saw a great NOTL tradition in which they close the main street and people, dressed in white, book tables, decorate them and have a picnic in the street, complete with live music and a very festive atmosphere.

Then on to Montreal for three nights.  Our hotel turned out to be an apartment hotel, so we had plenty of rooms (including a kitchen) and space.  Lots to see and do, from Old Montreal, the old port, 'The Village', the Latin Quarter, the Olympic site, botanical gardens, a huge church (called the Oratory), a fabulous lookout atop the 'mountain', a really efficient Metro (which runs on rubber tyres!) and miles of underground shopping arcades etc (to avoid the winter weather).  Here's a corner in the old town...

and here's part of the more modern area...

And today the scenic route along the St Lawrence to Quebec City (with a very pleasant lunch along the way).

Regards to all from Judy and Rob

Albany, NY
Saturday, 10/8

Isn't it amazing how much can happen between Wednesday evening and Saturday evening!

We made a really early start on Thursday and were collected from our Glasgow apartment at 7:15 am; the beginning of a really long day and a really long night.  Of course we were earlier than necessary for our 9:35 flight from Glasgow, but that waiting was insignificant compared to the nearly five hours waiting for our 15:45 flight from Heathrow to Boston.

 But finally the time passed and the flight went smoothly, all in daylight, into Boston about 6 pm.  Then the usual long delays with the entrance formalities, and a cab ride to our hotel, which made it about 1 am Glasgow time.  So a seriously long day. However, it was not late by Boston time and we went to bed at (maybe about) 8 pm local time.  Hence a very long night too!

So Friday we spent in Boston, pretty much adjusted to the different times.  In often heavy rain, we checked whether our hire-car would come with a GPS (like our little Mercedes in Germany) (it didn't), bought a micro-SD card for the TomTom, bought and downloaded maps of USA and Canada, checked out US phone/internet plans (and decided to wait, at least until after Canada).  At Macys we bought a new watch as Rob's died at Heathrow.  And then we decided to buy a road-map covering our bit of the US and Canada...

You know how easy it normally is to buy maps.  You go into a newsagent, or good bookshop and just choose what you want.  You can't do that in downtown Boston.  There appear to be NO newsagents and very few bookstores (and they don't sell maps).  After about seven or eight tries, everyone had told us about an excellent bookstore in a big new shopping complex, but it was miles away.  (Barnes and Noble, by the way, at the Prudential centre.  Well worth a visit if you go to Boston).

From downtown, the Prudential was to be either a thirty minute walk through pouring rain or a ride on the notorious Boston underground.  We took the subway!  And the subway tickets are called 'Charlie Cards' in memory of "poor old Charlie", ("the man who never returned").

Also... The US calls itself the land of the free, but I think the statistics show otherwise if you look at the percentage of the population in jail. A notice on a subway platform helps explain this, indicating that you can go to prison for smoking in an underground station!

One thing the Prudential has is a tower block, with a very smart bar/restaurant up on level 52.  While I sipped Australian (Clare Valley) shiraz and Judy had her Italian prosecco, the skies cleared and we saw the whole city spread out below us.  It was fabulous!

Today we collected our car and have just come the short distance to Albany on our way to Niagara Falls.  What fun!

Regards to all from Judy and Rob

Glasgow (2)
Wednesday evening

Glasgow is great – not what anyone would call a beautiful city, but it is really interesting and energetic!  Some of the architecture is fantastic; some is rather ugly – but inside some of the buildings are fabulous collections of fabulous things.  We spent a full day at Kelvingrove Gallery which was wonderful and we’ve been to the Gallery of Modern Art (one of the very beautiful buildings), the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University (including Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s house), the Riverside Museum (transport and travel) and the ‘Glenlee’ tall ship, the Botanical Gardens and the Willow Tea Rooms (also Mackintosh).  We’ve made full use of the sightseeing tourist hop-on-hop-off bus over two days and also went on a Clyde river cruise which was great.  We walked all around Byres Street in the trendy west end and explored some of the lanes, and had coffee of course.

 

 

 

The Willow Tea Rooms (above) are just around the corner from our apartment in Renfrew Street as is the Glasgow Film Theatre, so last night we went to see a Saudi Arabian film (directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, a woman, and shot entirely within Saudi Arabia) called ‘Wadjda’ which was fantastic.  The GFT is a great cinema; if we lived in Glasgow we’d use it all the time!  The Mackintosh's reconstructed home at the Hunterian was really a highlight of our time in Glasgow.  It is really lovely, ahead of its time in terms of light and space and white painted walls, and beautifully decorated.  It was also quite an intimate experience; we loved it!

 

But our time runs out and we’re off to Boston tomorrow.  We’ve had a wonderful time; all of the Glaswegians we’ve met have been friendly and helpful and their accent is delightful.

 

 Here are two of Glasgow's street scenes.  The statue of Wellington is at the entrance to the Gallery of Modern Art and council workers remove the traffic cone every day, but it always reappears overnight.  Today the horse had one too, but that's less common.

And here's part of the pedestrian zone at the top of Buchanan Street...

So, for those Rod Stewart fans who can still remember, tomorrow we're doing Atlantic Crossing for real.

Judy and Rob

Glasgow
Monday, 5/8

We're now in our little apartment in central Glasgow and settling in, having arrived here on Saturday evening.

Our last postcard was from Troutbeck Head, the evening before our final packup of the van.  We'd been a bit toey about everything that could go wrong with this, relying on washers and dryers in a caravan park.  So on the actual morning we were up really early.  We managed to do all the washing and drying very successfully, using machines in both blocks, and amid pouring rain and strong wind.  Finally, just as we finished, and just as other campers were waking up, the rain stopped, the wind dropped and the sun came out for the rest of the day!  We should have just taken it easy and it would have worked out to be simpler, but who knows that in advance?

On our way from Coniston Water to Julia's place the other day, a little north of Grassmere, we stopped to admire the scenery at a roadside layby.  As we pulled in, a man was launching a radio-controlled quad-copter.  Initially, he stood right in front of the parking bay we wanted to use, so we waited a while in the van before he moved and we parked. He has now uploaded the video of the flight to the internet; you can view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ouyv_QwDbNU 

  If you do, watch out for 'Bessie' at the beginning of the flight and Rob's and the pilot's legs as it lands.

Our little hire-car was a tiny Skoda; perfectly adequate for our purposes, but a bit gutless when overtaking (overtaking is a new experience for us after two months in Bessie!).  We dropped the van in to Brough, where it is garaged in a farm shed and then headed west and north to Bassenthwaite, six miles north of Keswick, where we stayed in a superb hotel.  We regretted that we were there for only one night and would be very happy to return for a longer if circumstances permit in the future.

Then on to Glasgow the long way; over to the coast at Maryport, back almost to Carlisle and then west to Castle Douglas, northish along the Ayr tourist route and finally to Glasgow, all through beautiful country.  And adding to this absolute pleasure, along the way a phone call with Tom (Rob's son), telling us that he'd asked Sian to marry him and that she's said yes!!!!! And he popped the question in our back yard while they were at Crossover for the weekend.

Yesterday, Sunday, we returned our car and spent the rest of the day in the Kelvingrove Museum/Gallery, which you can already see that we loved (or we wouldn't have spent the rest of the day there).  Here's its impressive entrance foyer...

So today... a leisurely start then we'll go out for coffee and find the tourist information centre.  What we find out there will shape the rest of the day.