The last few days, plus more of our travelogue...

As you can gather from my post about the Royal wedding, DH and I are well and truly home again! We've been home 5 days now and we're well and truly back into the all the routines. I don't mean that in a negative way either...it's great to be going about all those everyday things. Wednesday was a flurry of unpacking and sorting out all those gifts we bought for family and friends. I've also been working my way through the house giving all those weeks' worth of dust the 'flick'! We've had a steady stream of visitors and best of all...homecooked meals again!
On Thursday I went into work to access a website which I couldn't do from home. My employers, the state government are offering some packages and as I'm still on leave and not officially retired, I 'threw my hat in the ring' and applied. People at my classification will go to the bottom of the list so I may not be successful but DH and I thought it was worth a try. Being at work for an hour or so made me realise how special my work mates are and it also made me realise how glad I'm not there working any more! (it's the pressure and the constant testing of the students that has disillusioned me)
Tonight DH and I went to the Gold Class cinema and saw 'Arthur'. I thoroughly enjoyed it; lots of laughs, but also pathos. My brother gave me a Gold Class Gift card for my birthday nearly 12 months ago. We had to use the card in the next week before it expired. The trouble has been that there are limited choices of film in Gold Class and there hasn't been a film that both of us wanted to see.
Now the travelogue has only gone as far as Washington DC, so let us move on a bit...

On Friday April 15, DH and I drove from Washington DC to New York City. The speeding traffic on the freeways was well and truly ‘freaking out’ DH by this stage and we tried to use some of the smaller roads and we went through some charming communities.

We took 'smaller' roads which went through charming towns and verdant countryside

Nearing Baltimore we found that there wasn’t that much alternative and we navigated some really big, wide and fast moving freeways as we skirted around this huge city on the ‘Baltimore Beltway’. We came off the freeway system and stopped at a big shopping centre at Towson. It was a Westfield! We had a cup of coffee and also did a bit of shopping. There was a Pandora shop there and I went in to inquire the price of the murano glass beads as they had recently gone up in price in Australia. With tax included they were still $7 less than in Australia so my generous DH bought me a new bead as an early birthday present. My watch had stopped the day before so we took the opportunity at Towson to get a new battery for it.

Heading towards the New Jersey Turnpike

The Verrazano Narrows bridge in New York

Another view of the Verrazano bridge showing the 2 tiers of road

The traffic we met as we neared the Coney Island turnoff.

Then we headed back to the freeway to continue the journey to New York. We made very good time getting to the outskirts of NYC and we were excited that perhaps we’d have time to see another Broadway show...wrong! The traffic was unbelieveably ‘bad’! It took us hours to get to our hotel near the JFK airport and when we finally arrived we found we were quite a distance from the subway. So admitting defeat, we went for dinner a little way from the hotel and then settled for the night. One good thing was that the trip to the airport the next morning was very quick. DH dropped the luggage and yours truly at the airport and then returned our car, the Hyundai Tucson, a nice car. The porters at JFK airport were wonderful. I was on my own with a mountain of luggage; 4 suitcases, 1 overnight bag, a backpack, a laptop in a satchel, 2 big coats, a large cloth bag and my handbag. A porter took the check in luggage, plus the print out of our boarding passes and ID and did all that was necessary to get the luggage checked in while I stayed with the carry on things and waited for DH to come back. ( Yes I did remember to tip him and I gave him an extra $5 we saved as we didn’t need to get a trolley as the porters had their own!)

It seemed like DH was gone for ages...he had to take the car about 2 miles away and he then came back to the terminal on the free driverless train. The flight out of NYC started with a very rough take off. The bad weather had been moving south and as we left the city had a few days of stormy weather. At LAX, our luggage was almost the first out on the carousel which is most unusual! Lol Then we caught the shuttle from the car hire company to their office to pick up our third and last car...a small Chevy!!  Then we set off on the freeway to Bruce’s cousin’s place in Huntington Beach. After a few hiccups with being in the wrong lane and not being able to change lanes safely we arrived at Adrienne’s place to a warm welcome and a lovely home-cooked dinner.

Just inside the front doors of our Huntington Beach accomodation! lol

A striking piece of art work in the front garden

The BBQ area with the violinist sculpture in the foreground

Heading south....

On Monday, we left Portland and headed south to Medford. We travelled through beautiful farm country, with rich, thick green pastures, lots of cattle and sheep and traditional red barns and other farm buildings. There were so many calves and lambs, and I noticed a number of ewes with twins! I noticed that there were a lot of daffodils growing beside the road on the verges and they were already flowering unlike in Portland where the bulbs were just starting to push green shoots through. We had a short stop in Halsey , a town which has beautiful old buildings.

During our drive we met a number of timber trucks and a number of towns on our journey had timber mills. We even came to a lane of the highway closed off while loggers went in and were getting logs out. Our lunch time stop was in Eugene where there a couple of timber/lumber mills. I took lots of photos of the streets of Eugene, because some of my friends have ties to the town or have relatives there. We ate at a wonderful restaurant in Eugene. It was called La Perla Pizzeria Napoletana, and the food was really good!  (I can be very ‘picky’ about Italian food...it has to be good!)

The highlight of the day for me had to be just near the turnoff for Grants Pass... a covered bridge! The bridge is the last remaining covered bridge in Josephine County and was built in 1920 as part of the pacific highway project. Ever since I saw pictures of these types of bridges years ago, I’ve been fascinated by them...they are certainly something from an era long gone and as far as I am aware, there are none in Australia. When we drove on the bridge, the play of light and shadows was magical...I loved it! ( years ago my interest in the bridges was re-awakened when I saw a movie about a young couple who bought a their first house together but on the drive to the house, a covered bridge collapsed and the rest of the movie is about the 2 being ghosts and haunting the house!!!)

Today we drove through different country and it was extremely cold and snow was certainly in abundance. We crossed into California once again and stopped at a town called Weed for lunch; it was named after a local senator and timber baron, Abner Weed who died in 1917. The diner we ate in was again how I imagined traditional diners would be. The food was pretty good and the cup of coffee was ‘bottomless’. Overlooking the town of Weed is a mountain called Shasti which at the moment is covered with snow. A smaller mountain about a mile away is known as Shastina. The town had snow on the footpaths and in people’s yards and on roofs and it was very cold walking down the main street. The man in the souvenir shop recognised our accents and said he had a friend who now lives in Sydney. We asked this guy whether it had snowed during the night and he said it was snow from about 4 nights ago!

The snow was still on the trees

mT



The name of this road caught my eye!

 This old truck was for sale in Weed

 The cafe in Weed where we had lunch

Mount Shastina

Mt Shasta

Before we got to Redding, our stop for tonight we came across a motel/small resort which had trains in its yard; both locos and carriages. It was cold wet and muddy though!  We then continued on to redding.

After we booked into our hotel we did a bit of exploring  and in particular we visited the Sundial Bridge which spans the Sacramento River which just happens to be flooding at the moment. The current was just soooo fast! The bridge is very different...it is a footbridge and it has panels of glass that are walked on. In summer these panels can heat up to 150 degrees F! And there are warnings to wear shoes and if walking dogs be aware it can get hot! We couldn’t see the actual shadow part as it was flooded! The bridge cost $24 million dollars and is 720 ft long and 23 feet wide. It is lit by 219 lights (most in the deck under the glass) and has 2245 glass panels in the deck, each 10 square feet.

 The decking of the bridge with the glass panels with lights underneath

 The part that throws the shadow and also where the cables are stretched from

The flooding of the path beside the river

The part of the sundial where the shadow would normally form is under water at the moment