To the land of cheese and clam chowdah

Boston - the capital of a Commonwealth and of course the site of the famous tea party. For our first full day in this bustling city we were blessed with sunny warm weather, perfect for strolling along the red brick road (the Freedom Trail). We downloaded an audio guide from the internet and set off at our own pace. We got to visit old cemeteries where important historical figures such as Samuel Adams were buried, and the Old South Meeting House, which had a very impressive small museum. The Trail highlights Boston's role in the American Revolution, and provided a great introduction to the city. Unfortunately we did not get to finish the entire walk, as the temptation to try some local clam chowder got the better of us and we checked out what is allegedly America's oldest restaurant, the Union Oyster House. Clam chowder is actually quite nice, and is a much more delicate flavour than I imagined.

The next morning I got up early to hang out with three great local birders in Mt Auburn Cemetery, which is more like a huge city park in the middle of Boston. The primary aim of the morning was to chase down some migrating warblers. I was informed that the spring had come early this year for the trees, and so the leaves were out earlier than usual, making it much harder to find these tiny birds amongst the foliage. Despite the threatening rain, we saw some great little warblers, including chestnut-sided, magnolia, and black-and-white warbler. We also got to see scarlet tanager and Baltimore oriole. To finish off a lovely morning, we went to a great local diner for breakfast. The afternoon was spent relaxing at Ken and Meredith's house where we stayed in Boston, trying to identify the birds, butterflies and frog we encountered in their yard.

The next day it was off to New England on a mini driving trip for me and Shelly. We first drove to Portland in Maine, north along the coast from Boston. We stopped via Salem to check out the House of Seven Gables, where the author Nathaniel Hawthorne used to visit, and to have a quick wander around the town. We stayed at a tiny B and B within walking distance of downtown Portland, and had a wonderful evening at the Street and Co restaurant. Shelly had soft-shelled crab while I tackled lobster. I was surprised at how small Portland was, and also at how vibrant the nightlife was - lots of pubs and restaurants and lots of people walking around the cobble-stoned streets combined for a friendly and festive atmosphere. In the morning we checked out the Portland Museum of Art, which turned out to be a lovely little gallery. I was impressed to see they had some local art, including a sculpture of a ram with seashells and other beach debris adorning his fleece. We also saw some lovely glassware, and some Homer, Wyeth, and of course the reason Shelly insists on visiting galleries in the US, Singer Sargent. They also had McLellan House from 1801, which had plenty of wallpaper to keep Shelly happy.

From Portland we drove north along the Maine coastline for a bit until we reached Booth Bay via some osprey and scenic views, but we weren't overly impressed and decided to press on to our next destination, Franconia in the White Mountains, New Hampshire. We arrived in the dark and so got a nice surprise in the morning when we saw where we were! Beautiful countryside, lots of little babbling brooks, and many of the fruit trees were still in early blossom. We went to Polly's Pancake Parlour for a delicious breakfast of organic banana pancakes, smoked maple bacon, French vanilla coffee, blueberry pancakes and locally produced maple syrup. Best of all we got a great view across to the mountains and were able to watch the birds and butterflies hanging out around the verandah. After pausing at an incongruous old iron smelting furnace, we checked out Franconia Notch State Park for the rest of the day. Our first excitement was to see a black bear cub gambolling across a pasture, with no mother bear in sight. Next up we did an amazing bushwalk to the Flume, which reminded me very much of Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings with many wooden bridges over waterfalls and lakes and wonderful foliage hanging down. There was a microcosm around the waterfalls consisting of mosses, lichens, violets, ferns, and many other plants I didn't recognise. We got to see and walk over some covered bridges, and saw a few different forest types. I was highly impressed with the signs on this walk, which were meaty enough to be worth reading but also accessible enough to keep people interested, and included notes on geology, flora, fauna, history and climate. As with everywhere else in New England, there were hardly any people, as apparently spring is the off season - I found this strange because the weather was perfect, everywhere was open but cheap due to off-peak rates, and the ubiquitous and deliciously fragrant lilac was in full bloom!

We drove to Shelburne Inn next near Lake Champlain, place of tasty chocolate and battleships, knowing little more than they had a farmyard with chickens somewhere on the property. Turns out chooks are a good way to pick accommodation - we stayed in an amazing room in a grand old house formerly owned by a Vanderbilt, and got to sleep and recline and bathe in furniture from the 19th Century onwards! The restaurant was just as incredible as the room, with everything tasting fantastic (well when you add Vermont cheese to the dishes...yum!) and a focus on local organic produce (a very Vermont thing to be into as we kept finding out!). The next day Shelly made a beeline for the free-ranging chooks (Plymouth rocks, Rhode Island reds, silkies, wyandottes) which were very tolerant of being picked up by small children and Shelly and carried around the paddock in rather ungracious poses. We also saw red squirrels, chipmunks, and what I think was a woodchuck. We got to see cheddar being made here too. After this we went to the Shelburne Museum, an open-air collection of old American houses (and weirdly, a boat) which had Shelly drooling. It was kind of like a Disneyland for art and cultural and architectural historians, only everything was real.

To get to our next destination (still in Vermont), we had a very scenic drive via covered bridges and back dirt roads and through wonderful greenery. We arrived at the Applebutter Inn, a delightful B and B in Taftsville. The breakfast here was sensational, and we got to watch ruby-throated hummingbirds a few feet away at the feeder while we ate! It poured with rain, which seemed to fit in nicely with our verdant surrounds and made everything look even more lovely. We checked out a local raptor rehabilitation centre down the road, which was a bit depressing but we we did get to see a snowy owl very close up. We then drove to our art deco hotel in Brattleboro. Brattleboro felt a bit like Asheville, but not quite as vibrant. I was a little disappointed in the hotel, which felt more like a school/public institution than a hotel, and the room (a bit like the town) just felt tired. The hair plastered to the bathroom walls, the hand and face marks on the mirrors and windows, and the dust/random debris on many surfaces didn't help either. The town was friendly however, and there were some interesting buildings to see, and the food we had for dinner was excellent.

Unfortunately we had to return to Boston the next day, so we decided to make one last stop at Concord to get a literary fix. We did a tour of Louisa May Alcott's family home, which was very interesting, and we went to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to see the resting places of Alcott, Emerson and Thoreau/do some quick birding/help Korean tourists with directions/save a turtle from becoming roadkill. As a side note, I still have skunks and racoons on my roadkill list only - I'm beginning to worry I won't get to upgrade them to the live specimens list for the trip :(

Reluctantly we headed back into Boston traffic, met Jon at the Liberty Hotel (former jail, now jazzed up as a fancy hotel, very comfy as you'd expect, but a bit pretentious) and went over to Cambridge for a delicious home-cooked meal at Kristina and Dean's place, where Kristina was very excited to present us with some chocolate mice with ribbons for tails that she had told us about many times when they lived in Canberra. A fantastic way to end our New England part of the trip!

While Shelly checked out the retail delights of Asheville, Jon and I decided to go for a walk in the Great Smokey Mountains, which straddles the Tennessee and North Carolina border and is at the southern part of the Appalachians. After reading about the high diversity of salamanders in the park and having never seen one before, I was determined to find one.












Not only were we successful in finding several different species of salamander, we also found some beautiful snakes, heaps of southern leopard frogs by the river, and lots of butterflies! I was very excited to find orchids too - with much larger flowers than I was expecting. We also found the trees at the top of the ridgeline did not yet have their spring leaves, while the trees in the river valleys were in full leaf.




After the Carolinas we went to Chicago for a two-day intensive and highly enjoyable architecture course, with the tours run by the Chicago Architecture Foundation. First up we checked out the rise of the skyscraper, where we saw buildings from the 1880s through to the 1930s, and learnt about the structural differences which allowed skyscrapers to exist. Once we had the architect-guided tour of downtown Chicago, our next tour indulged in the outstanding art deco buildings. I would highly recommend this walking tour. We got to see some interiors the public was otherwise unable to view, and stared at several fascinating elevators with wonderful golden detail. Unfortunately one of my favourite buildings on the tour (lovely intricate bird carvings on the facade) was one of several buildings at risk of demolition. Our last tour was a boat ride along the river, which while interesting, had too many Modernist buildings for my taste, and the biting cold wind and rain which wasn't too noticeable while maintaining a brisk pace walking downtown became miserable sitting on a boat. For a Canberran, it was thrilling to be in the city where Walter Burley and Marion Mahoney Griffin came from and to see the same buildings they saw before coming to Australia, and it was also interesting to see the city that attracted Miles Franklin in the Edwardian era. I have to say though that this was not my favourite city despite the incredible architecture - it was the first place on our travels which wasn't terribly friendly, negotiating the traffic as a pedestrian was interesting, and even the local accent seemed harsher. Then again, perhaps the continual rain, cold and wind affected my impressions of the city.

Boston on the other hand was immediately friendly, engaging, and even had warmer weather. But more on that in the next post.

Why, Asheville, I do declare!

After the excesses of Disney World and Miami Beach, Asheville, North Carolina, was a very welcome relief. A small and compact town which has banished its chain shops to its fringes (even some locals were asking us where the mall was), Asheville seems to have had a number of lucky breaks in its history to even out the economic decline of the mid-twentieth century that has preserved all its gorgeous old buildings. A Vanderbilt decided it would be a good place to put his faux gothic chateau-esque mansion in the 1890s, and people (first guests and now tourists) have been flocking to this ostentatious building ever since. Young Vanderbilt went to Europe, like what he saw, and wanted it all. He sure got it, but this really isn't a good thing. I preferred the Singer Sargent and Whistler portraits to their architecturally messy settings. They did, however, have very interesting information on the restoration of some of the rooms during the 1980s, including a video of a dude handprinting wallpaper.

As well as the Biltmore Estate, Asheville also has a lively little downtown area filled with art deco buildings, boutiques, chocolate shops, vegetarian restaurants and arts and crafts. This brings us to the next lucky break. Artists of all kinds abound in this place. Some of the Bauhaus staff, including Anni and Josef Albers, relocated to nearby Black Mountain after the Nazis shut down the school in Germany, and the area has a very strong arts community still. There is a lot of local pride in the locally made, with most stores displaying a sign reading "Put your $ where your <3 is. Shop Asheville." Our most exciting discovery in Asheville was that Jon (or perhaps Jocelyn!) has been leading a double life as a restaurateur. Doc Chey's Noodle House serves excellent Asian fusion food and hilarious fermented tea that tastes kind of like sweet carbonated vinegar. We were pleased that the food at a place sharing Jon's uncommon name was so good.

After spending about five days in Asheville, we drove south to Charleston. Suzi and I went on a ghost tour where we saw no ghosts but learned a lot about Charleston's history (gruesome murders, mass deaths from explosions in battle, that kind of thing). Unlike the one we took in Edinburgh where they locked us in a mausoleum, this tour was quite sanitised in where we went. So the tour guide told us about these locations where pirates were hanged, where the inn keepers had a racket to kill people and hide the bodies in the cellar, where a woman haunts the graveyard waiting for her husband who died in Baltimore to return to her, but we didn't go to any of them. It was a nice way to see a lot of the old town and hear about the history nonetheless.

Charleston's wealth was originally gained from rice crops, so we went out to two plantations the next day. The first was Drayton Hall, a lovely Palladian and Georgian 18th century house which has been preserved rather than restored by the National Trust. No furniture, no expensive knick-knacks, no tourists. Excellent. They also had a fascinating talk about the plantation's slave workforce - their origins in Africa, their culture and how it developed in America to form Gullah, a language and culture which is still alive today. The second was next door at Magnolia. Also owned by a branch of the Drayton family, this place has had several homes on the site, but people keep burning them down. After the Civil War had ended, former slaves went through the neighbourhood burning the sites of their oppression, including Magnolia but sparing Drayton Hall, where yellow flags had apparently been put out to indicate the presence of contagious illness. So the current house is the hunting lodge, shipped down the river and put up in place of the burned plantation house. A particular fixation of our guide was the value of objects rather than how the objects tell us about the lives of those who lived there. Apparently, a vase is like a man - much more attractive when you know how much it's worth. We also discovered during the "From Slavery to Freedom" tour that the descendants of slaves still work on the property, not as tour guides but as gardeners. No wonder there aren't a lot of African-American tourists around these parts.

Next stop: Chicago's intensive architecture history lesson.

A change of pace, fun times in the Magic Kingdom

After too much nature, peace and quiet, we decided that a day of indulgence was in order at America's happiest place, also known as the Magic Kingdom; a place where grown men and women walk around with Mickey Mouse ears on their heads and no one makes fun of you for sitting in a mechanical cart promenading past mechanical pirates. To complete the experience we booked in at Coronado Springs Resort, one of Disney's many themed hotels that are within the extensive bounds of the Disney World complex.

We didn't choose but were assigned the faux-Spanish/Mayan theme of the resort we were assigned - I'm guessing that it is perhaps one of the less popular venues, perhaps as it doesn't fulfil a core fantasy for too much of the audience at the park. Not having visited the on-site archaeological dig re-creation/pool and bar, we perhaps can't fully judge how appealing or historically accurate the illusion presented at the resort is, but I do have to say that what we did see was pretty lame. For over $200 a night, I was expecting something more than a slightly beat up hotel room with some pastel paint, a pool that probably contained too much kiddie urine and a complete lack of internet access (that even a $50 a night roadside motel is able to provide anywhere else in the country).

But the hotel isn't the main story at Disney World, it's the park and rides, right? Only having one day, we chose the Magic Kingdom, the most iconic of the four sites within the mega-complex. Initial impressions did not disappoint: the wide avenue through the creepy "Main St USA" set leading to the Fantasia Castle set, obese men hugging and posing for photos with Minnie Mouse, screaming children times a thousand and a general air of determined enjoyment by all despite multi-hour waits for rides and desperate grabs for cash from vendors and sidewalk peddlers of all kinds.

Wearing her glamorous cowboy boots, Suzi attracted attention from a bevy of males again, including the "Mayor", who insisted on posing for a photo with her. On finding out that we were from Australia, we prepared ourselves for the usual "I've always wanted to go there" story, but were pleasantly surprised by an anecdote from his actual trip to down under several years before. It concerned a pair of gold satin shoes that he chose to wear and the word "poofta" - one we didn't expect to hear in the sanitised Disney kingdom.

Having signed up for the Splash Mountain ride, we wandered off clutching our tickets that allowed us to return in an hour and half, a clever idea that saves one from waiting in line for that time. We were surprised to find that there was no such line for the Pirates of Caribbean ride, an old favourite that we were all keen to re-experience. Unfortunately, despite the substitution of Johnny Depp animatronic models for some of the previously anonymous pirates, our combined opinion was that the Florida version of the ride is considerably less cool that the Californian version, perhaps explaining the relative lack of a crowd queueing for it.

Next on our itinerary was the Haunted House, a considerably more interesting ride than Pirates, whose highlights were both the holographic ghosts, particularly the one projected onto Suzi, as well as the person who screamed out "DON'T TOUCH ME" at the top of their lungs when the lights went out. Props are also due to the "cast" who scurried out from their emergency access points to pour chemicals on the pile of vomit at the exit and quickly erect barriers that prevented any of the happy guests from a spew-related intrusion into their enjoyment of the day.

Disney World is a fantasy; the world reduced and sanitised for clean and safe enjoyment. But I found it completely uninspiring compared to the very real and very beautiful Wakulla Springs that we had just visited or the Everglades that we were heading towards. I'm sure it has something very profund to say about the human condition, but I'm quite sure what it is.

Leaving the carefully manicured grounds of the Magic Kingdom, we decided to skip our intended destination of Sanibel Island and make a dash for Miami in order to give ourselves a bit more time for the Keys and Everglades. For the first time, we checked into a hotel on the backpacking circuit complete with the usual complement of Germans and assorted Scandinavians that one finds in these joints. But it was actually a pretty decent place so long as you kept the windows shut to keep out the ravenous Florida mosquitoes.

Suzi and Shellie promenaded around the Art Deco district while I retired to the beach for a swim. I was disappointed in the usual lukewarm and flat Florida water as well as the amount of flab and fake tans on show (I was expecting better from South Beach). But the Mojitos we had at the local Cuban bar were very good and the raw sugar-cane a nice complement.

From Miami, we then raced down the Keys, but only made it as far as Marathon (about half way down) before we decided to turn around and head for our new base in Florida City. They early part of they keys are pretty much what you would expect if you tried to fit a strip mall on a narrow strip of linked islands. But the occasional view over the turquoise waters of the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico do a lot to remedy the succession of chain restaurant signs.



Our Florida City motel was another first: this time the first single level classical motel where we pulled our car up in front of our room. The room itself, while perfectly clean and adequately sized suffered from the excessive humidity (currently running at 100%) and smelt a bit like a dog that had been too long between baths. But it was a perfect base for our trip to the Everglades that we made the next day.

Suzi has already spilled the beans on the Everglades. It only remains to say that we stopped at the famous fruit stand on the turn-off to the park for a delicious breakfast of local fruit including mamey sapote (tastes weirdly like pumpkin pie filling), mango and fresh coconut water. And that on the way out, we cooled down with a key lime milkshake.

Next up: Asheville and Charleston.

A tale of three swamps

Honey Island Swamp, Wakulla Springs and the Everglades to be precise. Let's start with one of the wonderful Louisiana bayous: Honey Island Swamp. I was surprised by how much I liked the bayous of Louisiana - think warm, humid, verdant and heaps of wildlife; just perfect! This was where we first started seeing Spanish moss adorning large trees, and where our introduction to American alligators began.


We took a nature tour boat ride here, although at the start of the tour I was a little concerned when our guide mentioned we could see birds such as herons, egrets, and little 'baby birds'. It was obvious that everyone on the tour had come to see an alligator, and the tour operator lured a few gators to the boat with marshmellows and hot dog snags. While it was nice to see the gators a bit closer, it seemed like cheating to lure them to our boat with food. My first impression was that they seemed smaller than I imagined them to be, and did not seem as feisty as salties, an impression which was reinforced in the Everglades (more on this further down). We saw our first wood ducks, including their tree hollow where they nested, yellow-crowned night-herons, various egrets, various herons, osprey, and nesting swallow-tailed kites. We also got to see the Louisiana crawfish. The experience of being in a flooded cypress forest on a boat in the morning light was beautiful. We also saw some floating camps of ramshackle, and not-so-ramshackle houses along the river, most accessible only by boat, with those that survived Katrina bearing high tide watermarks between the door and the roof.

The next swamp was Wakulla Springs in Florida. We stayed at the 1930s lodge in the Wakulla Springs Park, which featured some wonderful architectural features and provided a grand view to the Springs through some of the hotel grounds. This was a very peaceful and beautiful spot to stay in. It is a geologically interesting area with an extensive underground cave system, and judging from the diversity and abundance of wildlife and flora, is also a very important ecological area. We went on the boat trip at the Springs, hoping to see some mastodon bones embedded in the riverbed. Despite the glass-like water conditions, apparently the water was too murky compared to what it was normally like to see this, so we had to content ourselves with the most amazing views of heaps of awesome fish including gar fish, bream, mullet and bowfin. The striped mullet were particularly engaging as they would leap out of the water in a spectacular attention-grabbing fashion.

Most of the birds had young (least bittern, wood ducks, egrets) while others were in the process of producing young (herons, osprey). I could not believe how much we saw on this boat trip, it was hard to know where to look there was so much going on. We also got to see the film locations for Creature of the Black Lagoon and Tarzan, which prompted a passenger on the boat to volunteer her best Tarzan yodel. We also checked out the walking trail through hardwood forests of sassafras, American beech and American basswood, and saw sinkholes with cool white yabbies in them. Jon however was tempted back to the water and jumped in with the friendly gators for an icy swim.






After being blown away by Wakulla Springs, I held out little hope that the Everglades could prove to be half as good, and was worried it would be over-run with tourists in a similar fashion to the Grand Canyon. I was also concerned that Shelly would not last the day, as southern Florida (much to my delight) was very warm and muggy. My concerns about tourist numbers were unfounded as we kept bumping into the same 20 or so people at various walks around the park, including one terrified German boy of about 12 who did not appear to be enjoying his Everglades wildlife experience, particularly when the pigeons and gulls came to relieve him of his food. The main walks were well-designed so as to showcase the different habitats in the park, and there were canoe trails cut through the swamps. One trail was excellent for wildlife - we saw our first snake for the trip here, had close views of waterbirds, saw several species of turtle and heard pig frogs everywhere. We happened upon a smooth-billed ani at very close range, which turned out to be the thousandth bird for my world bird list :). There seemed to be huge densities of gators here, and we saw one lying across the path where people would step around it as it 'slept'. I could not imagine this occurring with salties!