North America
Archived Posts from this Category
A stroll through London’s quirky East End
Posted by Caitlin on 18 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: Asia, Europe, North America, Photo post, Trends
Vintage clothes, art and stuffed squirrels on Brick Lane and Columbia Road.
Brick Lane, at the eastern edge of the square mile that is the City of London, is one of the most vibrant parts of London. It’s best known for the Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants that line the street and if you go at night you can barely move for the restaurant touts trying to entice you inside with various bribes of free drinks or samosas.
I prefer to get my curry elsewhere - at places such as New Tayyabs, a Pakistani restaurant behind the East London Mosque. And I prefer to visit Brick Lane during the day, especially on a Sunday when the Sunday UpMarket is on in the Old Truman Brewery and Columbia Road Flower Market is on up the road in Bethnal Green.
The Sunday UpMarket has great food - from Japanese to Ethiopian - in one half and secondhand and handmade clothes and other assorted flea market goodies in the other. It’s all under cover, which is perfect when it’s grey and drizzly outside as it so often is in London at this time of year.
As you wander further up the hill, you pass great cafés, famous bagel bakeries from the days when Brick Lane was a Jewish rather than Bangladeshi enclave, cool art galleries and around half a dozen great vintage clothing shops.
As you exit the northern end of Brick Lane and cross Bethnal Green Road, check out the contemporary furniture studio Unto This Last. Their best stuff is made to order as apparently they have had some problems with theft.
From there it’s just a hop, step and a jump to Columbia Road, which hosts a flower market every Sunday. I prefer to go late, around 2pm, when the crowds have died down and the flowers and pot plants are often on sale. This street is also full of funky independent shops. There’s the cupcake bakery Treacle (although cupcakes are not really my thing), a few gardening and homeware shops, and Nelly Duff gallery selling cool limited edition prints to name a few. If you’re still hungry after the Sunday UpMarket, the bagel bakery and cupcake shop, there’s a good Spanish restaurant called Laxeiro and the Royal Oak Pub.
There’s always something new to see in the East End. On my most recent visit, this past weekend, my eye was caught by the window display to a vintage clothing store halfway up Brick Lane, modestly called This Shop Rocks. The window display had two mannequins in dresses, one with a stuffed badger on a lead and one with a stuffed fox. There were also six stuffed squirrels wearing clothing dancing in a circle.
Have I missed something here? Is taxidermy back? Even though I’m sure they’re antique and not freshly stuffed, I actually found it a little disturbing, especially since they were rare, native red squirrels rather than the more common, foreign grey squirrels. They were cute but creepy.
It certainly got my attention but when it came down to it, none of us wanted to go in. Maybe the shop does rock but I might never know.
Guest post: Sleeping around
Posted by Caitlin on 30 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Europe, Guest post, North America, Transport
A guest post on sleep deprivation on the long journey from San Francisco to Rome.
This is a guest post from freelance writer and tour escort Angela K. Nickerson. Her first book, A Journey into Michelangelo’s Rome (Roaring Forties Press, 2008) combines her great passions - travel, art, history, and Italy – in one volume. She can be reached through her website Michelangelo’s Italy or blog Just Go!.
At one point or another every traveller ends up sleeping in a train station. Not long ago it was my turn. I am not even sure when we actually left Sacramento. But sometime on a recent Thursday I zipped my suitcase shut, and we loaded ourselves in the car for the drive to San Francisco. By this point I was completely exhausted. I hadn’t slept much the night before in the last-minute dash to put work to bed, to tidy up the house, and to do laundry so I didn’t have to run around without clothes again.
Having not slept I thought perhaps I would be able to sleep on the plane. Not so much. We flew Virgin Atlantic, and they offer far too much to keep you awake. I am used to having a TV screen in front of me, but the selections… I had my choice of more than a dozen sitcoms, about 35 movies, multiplayer video games, music galore, and text messaging. Who can sleep? First I had to challenge the rest of the plane to a game of Trivial Pursuit. Do you know Lord Byron’s first names? I do. And I won 300 points for that piece of trivia, too. No one else on the plane got it right.
After proving my trivial dominance, I text messaged R in the seat next to me. This is particularly handy for covert operations and spy games. You can text anyone on the plane – including the very hot Brit in 62A. There were a few things I would have liked to text him. Unfortunately, R was sitting right next to me, so I was reduced to texting him. And he wouldn’t reply – spoil sport!
With no one to text back, I set up my personal playlist – all the movies and TV shows I wanted to watch. I decided to go with a British theme, so I chose two episodes of “Super Nanny” – both featuring children with decidedly filthy mouths. I watched a British show called “Peep Show” which wasn’t nearly as interesting as it sounded. I picked several movies carefully avoiding anything too action-packed or which required reading subtitles.
We had dinner – a beef stew that was surprisingly good. Then I settled back to sleep. But I couldn’t. I ended up watching my entire play list instead as my eyes simply refused to close. I was exhausted, but nothing helped.
Finally, just as they were getting ready to serve breakfast and land, I fell asleep.
But that just got us to London. Our connecting flight was delayed because of weather, so R and I had time to buy and write a few postcards. Finally, looking and feeling like death-warmed-over, we crawled onto our next flight to Milan. Both of us were asleep before we even left the ground. Of course, the flight was very short – only two hours. And when we landed in Milan that cat nap didn’t exactly leave us refreshed.
Our plan was to take a train from Milan to Rome, and there were many from which to choose. But… by the time we got to the train station, we had missed them all. Our only choice: an overnight train that left at 11.20pm – giving us another 4.5 hour wait. I stood at the ticket counter and cried. In my exhaustion I’d been looking forward to that train trip as a chance to sleep. And now we had to wait. All I wanted was to sleep. I was exhausted. My head hurt. I couldn’t stay awake any longer.
So, we found a bench. It was stone. It was filthy. But it was flat. We perched our luggage as foot rests, and I lay down with my head in R’s lap. For nearly five hours we took turns sleeping. Given my experience with luggage and train stations, we didn’t dare sleep at the same time. But there, in the train shed in Milan, I had what may have been the best nap of my entire life. The droning hum of the trains drowned out the conversations nearby. R’s lap made for a fantastic pillow, and I simply slept.
By the time our train arrived and we boarded for the night, I felt more human. I smelled, however, like a zoo. Our little berth had two bunk beds and a tiny sink. No room to truly get clean, but we both sponged down. At this point we had been traveling for 27 hours, and we had eight more to go. But we had a place to lay down at long last.
As we pulled out of Milan for Rome, I fell asleep, rocked by the train as it slowly crept through the dark Italian night.
Thanks, Angela. I’m a veteran of long-haul flights - London to Sydney being a popular route for me. Please see this post for practical strategies on long-haul flights. - Caitlin.
Driving to the end of the earth: Alaska Part 4
Posted by Caitlin on 12 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Guest post, North America, Transport
This is the final day of guest blogger Roger Norum’s four-part series on driving Alaska’s Haul Road with his father.
To my surprise, GPS is a real advantage on a trip that follows a single, solitary road. For one, knowing the distance to the nearest petrol station is essential – especially if it’s hundreds of miles away and you’re only getting 12 miles to the gallon. But you also get unexpected navigational gems, too, such as when the little gizmo announces “Turn left. Continue straight on unpaved road for two hundred and thirty two miles. Then turn right.”
This is the longest stretch of road without service stations in North America – though quite frankly these days I’m happy not to be reminded of the painfully high cost of North American gas (as much as $7.40 in one remote village). An irony of globalisation: Alaska holds and produces 20% of America’s crude oil, yet petrol prices here are consistently among the highest in the country.
During the 1980s, in the early years of the pipeline, the oil companies were consistently pumping 2 million barrels of oil a day out of Prudhoe Bay. Today, this number has shrunk to 400,000. Some argue that this is due to the pipeline rusting away at various points (the pipe was designed with a 30 year planned obsolescence – 31 years ago). Depletion theorists, meanwhile, assert that the reduced flow is due to the fact that the fields are rapidly drying up, and they regularly make calls for the US government to prioritise locating alternative means of energy production.
“Here, let’s give you a chance to stretch your legs,” Norm beams, before pulling over to the bank of the Sagavanirktok River – “The Sag” to locals. At the edge of the river, Norm runs his fingers over a beige rock and fondles it gently. “This is so neat!” he whispers excitedly. He strokes the figure of a plant etched in the stone, explaining that it is fossilised coral – sedentary rock that existed as marine life eons ago and, after being tectonically uplifted into to the mountains, is now slowly eroding its way back into the ocean. Again, a cycle of regeneration – though one which takes millions of years to complete. Norm confides in me that we haven’t stopped so that we can stretch our legs, but so that he can forage for a few pet rocks to add to his collection.
As I leave Norm, his shoes now soaked as he putters about the water cuddling a palm full of rocks, a family of mosquitoes is buzzing about impatiently at the van, waiting to call shotgun. Suddenly, a golden plover lands in front of the van and cocks his head to look at me quizzically. The plover has arrived here at Alaska’s North Slope for breeding after enduring an amazing 2-day, 2,200-mile transoceanic migratory flight from western Hawaii. Feigning injury, the bird begins a quick limp towards the highway, hoping to lure me away from its nest, which it presumes I am preying on. It hops briskly towards the road, scampering across the highway before ducking into the thick, dried brush. Norm returns from the river, catching sight of the plover, who is now fluttering eagerly about the tussock waiting for us to depart. Norm lets out a sigh and smiles over at me, very occupied with swatting away the mosquitoes and spraying myself with OFF! [mosquito repellent]. He pauses for a moment, clutching one of his fossils. “Life is pretty good right now,” he asserts, deadpan and candid, before hopping into the van and speeding us off south for the few hundred remaining miles before America begins, leaving a spoor of camel-coloured dust and the tiny, rugged plover in our wake.
This completes the end of Roger Norum’s guest series on Alaska. Read part 1 , part 2 or part 3 of Roger’s journey here.
A very warm thank you to Roger Norum for his contribution. Roger has previously written about Oxford for Roaming Tales and you can read more about him here
Driving to the end of the earth: Alaska Part 3
Posted by Caitlin on 11 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Guest post, North America, Transport
This is the third part of guest blogger Roger Norum’s four-part series on driving Alaska’s Dalton Highway, or Haul Road, with his father.
The Dalton is the gateway to the most remote regions of the interior and northern parts of Alaska and offers a rare glimpse of America’s Arctic – an opportunity to imagine what gold prospectors first saw when they flooded into the Klondike and Brooks Range over a century ago in search of golden riches.
Invariably, a disproportionate amount of the state’s population has arrived from somewhere else. The average Alaskan tends to be very, very outdoorsy. Jillian Simpson, for example, is a tall, striking ex-Bostonian who arrived in Alaska 11 years ago for a vacation and never left. The day I meet Jillian, who is now head of overseas marketing for the Alaska State Tourist Board, she is happening on her way out of the office for a weekend hike with friends to camp on the banks of the Arctic Ocean.
But it’s not that the average Alaskan happens to be interested in the outdoors; it’s that you have to be outdoorsy to get around.
Even for outdoorsy types, though, walking around on Alaskan tundra for any period of time can be extremely exhausting. The land in much of Northern Alaska is riddled with tussocks, fibrous stems and leaves of cotton grass and sedges that wobble and crack as you step on them, making twisted ankles and wet socks commonplace.
Not that driving here is any cakewalk. Vehicles kick up thick clouds of dust and mud, rocks occasionally flash into windshields and potholes that could easily take out an axle mandate a lot of deft manoeuvring at the wheel. Visibility is rarely more than a pipe dream. Many of the more rugged parts of The Dalton are groomed on a daily basis by maintenance crews, who wet the road down into a slurry, mow and shave it with Caterpillars and then add calcium chloride to enable the road to retain moisture and keep it from disintegrating into dust.
Nor is life made any more sustainable by the masses of bugs that can descend on northern Alaska at any time of the day, commando-strength no-see-ums that despite their magnitude deterred few of the thousands of soldiers and common folk who came here to build the state’s major roads in the last century. Before these civilians signed on, their employment contracts required the admonition, “Mosquitoes, flies and gnats will not only be annoying but will cause bodily harm.”
Still, bodily harm notwithstanding, there can be no better time to explore Alaska than summer. Come mid-August, the brown, greys and rich greens of willows, birch and bearberries turn a brilliant crimson and goldenrod, as the coats of ptarmigan and snowshoe hare morph from brown to white; only the evergreen spruce maintains its colour.
In the forested reaches, grizzlies and black bears putter about the rivers and lakes, while on the plains caribou find shade under the pipeline when they’re not fraternising with shag-carpeted musk oxen. An ugly, hefty beast with the face of a cow, the form of a bison and the furry coat of a English sheep dog, the musk ox is taxonomically a goat. It looks horrifically prehistoric – an animatronic fossil of a mammal that should have died out millennia ago along with the woolly mammoth. Though staunchly herbivorous, they can easily take out their predators – grizzlies and wolves – by trampling them to death.
As we trundle along the southern reaches of the highway, Norm calls out through the Ford’s makeshift loudspeaker system, “Does anybody remember what a tree looks like?” He’s right. We are in Alaska, the most forested state in the nation, but I haven’t seen a single conifer since we’ve arrived. South of Coldfoot, if the side of the highway isn’t completely barren, it’s lined with miles of burned stubby, half-naked black spruce trees that look ripe for another lightning fire. One fire four years back decimated 500,000 acres in this area; plains of naked, ashen-coloured stalks of dead spruce that stretch towards the heavens. “Mother Nature puts them out when Mother Nature is ready,” Norm advises. It’s all part of the ecological cycle: fires remove dying spruce, readying the soil for fireweed, then spawn willow, aspen and birch, followed by an undercover of moss and lastly the growth of new, healthy spruce. This whole process, which takes several years, is a natural renewal that is one of nature’s most productive cycle of habitat regeneration and maintenance.
Read part 1 and part 2 of Roger’s journey here, and stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow.
Driving to the end of the earth: Alaska Part 2
Posted by Caitlin on 10 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Guest post, North America, Transport
This is part 2 of Roger Norum’s four-part guest post on his road trip through Alaska with his father.
Driving in Alaska is an experience amplified by the extended summer hours of near-Arctic daylight, an unsettling phenomenon that deceives the senses: driving without headlamps at 10pm; a glowing red sunset at midnight; waking up to a “dawn” chorus of birdsong at 3am.
Behind us sprawls the Brooks Range, an alpine landscape that would look less out of place on the moon: rifted moguls of deep brown crags, pillowy hunks of ice that cling to and blanket the rock and families of Dall sheep and moose that wander glacial hills and trudge along S-shaped rivers. Everywhere are the taciturn landscapes of northern Finland and western Mongolia. In fact when seismic geologists first arrived here in the 1950s, they surveyed the landscape and saw one thing: Iran. They saw strong similarities in the anticline, the syncline and the way the hills delicately roll. Suspicion led to hunch led to a short drilling exploration in 1967 that led to the discovery of bazillions of barrels of petroleum buried beneath the sea: the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay.
The Dalton, you see, was not built for you and me. It was slapped down by private oil companies over five months in 1974 to enable transport vehicles hauling supplies and machinery for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, the US oil industry’s petroleum aqueduct. Costing some $8 billion to build, the pipeline is still the only way to get crude oil from the ocean to the transport tankers waiting in Valdez. Still, Prudhoe Bay oil is very, very crude – saturated with sulphurs – so raw, in fact, that many refineries dread having to process shipments of Alaskan oil, and many won’t even accept it. Yet the oil produced here accounts for a whopping 20% of US oil production.
Aside from the odd caribou, who feed on the lichen that grows here, visitors driving the Dalton are accompanied by a single, lone travelling companion: the pipeline. A massive steel tube that groans its way south along the tundra for over 800 miles and crosses more than as many rivers and streams. About 50 miles south of Deadhorse, the pipeline re-emerges from the permafrost, where it remains mostly above ground for 420 miles until it reaches southern Alaska. The frigid temperatures outside (–90°F [-67°C] in the winter) and scalding temperature of the oil inside (140°F [60°C]) mean that the 48-inch diameter pipe had to be constructed to be able to expand and contract accordion-like without breaking.
There are no towns or villages along the 414-mile stretch of The Dalton and, by God, there’s nothing that ever comes close to a city. The half dozen settlements up here have been established to accommodate the traffic of lorries transporting heavy industrial objects north and a few bewildered tourists – European and American middle-aged couples who want to keep on trucking after driving the much-mythologised Alcan Highway through British Columbia and the Yukon. Service stops up here are little more than oversized gift shops offering excessively large selections of moose-related trinkets, corny bumper stickers and wicked expensive liquor. Along the route, we pass a handful of what I came to call “inconvenience stores” for their criminal prices (A transport koan rhetorically asks: If you, the proprietor of a roadside shop, charge me $23.60 for a six-pack of beer at a roadside shop, and I beat the crap out of you for attempted highway robbery, will anyone hear your pain?).
Read part 1 of Roger’s journey here, and stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow.
Driving to the end of the earth: Alaska Part 1
Posted by Caitlin on 09 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Guest post, North America, Transport
Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has brought Alaska to the headlines - suddenly everyone is talking about ice fishing and helicopter hunting. But what is the 49th state really like?
Travel writer Roger Norum, a native New Yorker based in Oxford, England, has written a four-part account of his road trip along Alaska’s Dalton Highway, or Haul Road, with his dad, especially for Roaming Tales.
“Skeeters!” The ex-marine next to me is flailing about, arms in the air, his choky, smoker’s cry resonating across the campground. “Goddamn skeeters!” His cinnamon neck flushed to a deep scarlet, he is swatting away at a lone, thirsty mosquito – Alaska’s state bird – that has fixed upon him for a noontime snack. Eventually, the man gives up, abandons his food outside on the picnic table, cowers into his motorhome and fastens the door shut.
It’s summer, but the ground outside is a desolate, unforgiving permafrost frozen several feet thick. Just ahead of us, outside the campground, the wily antlers of a caribou steer slowly towards a herd of mangy, stubby musk ox. In the distance, a silver mass of steel tubing snakes its way in and out of the ground, shooting off over the frozen land towards the horizon. This morning I woke up in a town called Deadhorse; tonight I will sleep in one called Coldfoot. It all feels very much like the end of the world. And, geo-politically speaking at least, it is.
I’ve come to Alaska to drive the Dalton Highway, the most isolated road in North America. In a car-smitten continent of service-stop strip malls and turnpike Wal-Marts, the Dalton, or Haul Road, is a curiosity: the quintessential barren-wilderness thoroughfare. From Deadhorse to Fairbanks, the asphalt, gravel and dirt road hurtles, plunges and tears through Arctic mountain ranges, empty tundra and stretches of boreal forest charred to a crisp from fire. Extreme weather conditions and the perennial freezing and thawing of the land cause the road to billow and swell in many places, creating chuckholes, ripples and washboard humps that make for roller-coaster driving. Rental cars are contractually barred from a long list of Alaskan roads, the Dalton being first on the list. But our trusty Ford E350 XLT Super Duty van – powered by a menacing 5.4-liter Triton V-8 – is tackling the rutted mountain roads with a vengeance.
Norm, our jovial guide, speaks with the deadpan tenor of a character out of Northern Exposure. A 55-year-old transplant from Minneapolis, Norm blew into to Alaska 33 years ago to work on planning the highway and now, retired and filled with an infective energy, he leads tours along it. Norm seems like an everyday, run-of-the-mill, middle-class guy – except for quirks such as owning two airplanes (a seaplane and a skiplane) and a massive power boat and regularly coming out with ludicrous lines such as, “…and this one is the only bear I ever shot with a gun other than my handgun” [emphasis mine], when, for example, flipping through photos of a recent to the Alaskan bush.
But then Alaska is just the kind of place where the average Joe is more likely to own an airplane than a car or a bicycle. “You just can’t get to most places,” [emphasis his], Norm explains when wonder aloud why you’d own three vehicles, none of which will ever work on blacktop.
For many, Alaska is an ideal. With its Scandinavian climate, Himalayan landscape and small-town disposition, it is all that’s left of America’s Wild Wild North. Though voted in by Congress as the 49th state of the union 50 years ago, parts of it are so different from the rest of the United States that at times the territory almost exists as a separate nation. When Alaskans travel to other states, they either head “Outside”, to “the lower 48″ or, occasionally, to “America”. When parking in the winter, they plug their cars into power outlets to protect the engines from hypothermia. The day we arrive, the front page of the Anchorage Daily News declares “Dog Wins in Tussle with Bear.” Highway culture is different here, too: truckers are polite and drivers slow down to let others pass but road signs are punched through with bullet holes – souvenirs of wild, shotgun-giddy nights.
Stay tuned tomorrow and all this week for the next installment in Roger’s Alaskan journey.
The Telectroscope links London and New York
Posted by Caitlin on 28 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: Europe, Events, North America, Trends
A modern art project links the Thames river front near Tower Bridge and the East River embankment under the Brooklyn Bridge via a video link.
Back in May I was walking from London Bridge to Tower Bridge with a group of friends.
We were off to see the the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London - but that’s a story for another day.
We got as far as City Hall, which is this weird, squashed building here.
Then we saw a giant telescope on the public path beside the Thames. A sign identified it as the “Telectroscope“.
It cost £1 for a ticket from a dinky little machine and then we joined the small group gathering round at what would be the wrong end of the telescope were it actually a telescope. People were smiling and waving and writing messages on a small whiteboard - that’s me with the camera reflected in the glass and the girl in green is my friend Jess.
We peered closer and discovered that, as well as our own reflections, we could see another set of people in Brooklyn. We had tremendous fun writing messages to each other across the Atlantic.
I’m not sure how they did this. The Telectroscope website claims that a secret tunnel was dug across the Atlantic, but I suspect video technology was involved somehow.
I must admit I hoped it would become a permanent installation - much like the London Eye was erected for the Millennium but was so popular it stayed. Sadly, it was dismantled on June 15. I never did get a chance to email my friends in Brooklyn and arrange a virtual meetup via the Telectroscope.
It was an exceptionally cool project. What can’t more modern art be like this?
Guest post from Manzanillo, Mexico: Tides of Time
Posted by Caitlin on 09 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: Central America, Guest post, North America
This is a guest post from Stephen from Manzanilloblog. Stephen describes himself and his wife Tiffani as “chronic travellers”, who’ve recently made the leap and left the US to live in beautiful Manzanillo, Mexico. They are loving the experience so far and started the blog to share their discoveries, adventures, and hard earned lessons with the world. In this post he shares some of the bloody history behind the beautiful beaches.
I’m sitting on the beach watching the waves peel and crash; the ocean looks glassy. The sea-scented air feels refreshing, and the sun radiates a warmth that is more than skin deep. Children and their parents are playing in the white wash, giggling as each crashing wave seems to catch them by surprise. Grandparents look on from under umbrellas, shouting warnings, laughing and complaining to one another. “We didn’t have waves in my day… these kids don’t know how good they have it…” It’s peaceful and beautiful; almost paradise.
It’s hard to believe this lovely place has such a bloody past. History in Mexico is a record of one ferocious conquest after another. In the 16th century, not far from where I’m sitting now, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés built a port in Santiago, retired here, cut down all the old growth Manzanillo trees, for which the area was named, and built an armada to bring his greedy conquest to the the Philippines. He and his kind destroyed an ancient culture in search of gold and in the name of God. Cortes and his conquistadors crucified thousands of Indians, watching them slowly roast at the stake after oiling their feet so they would burn better.
Yet the Spanish were not the first to commit horrible crimes here. For hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans, the Aztecs slaughtered thousands every year to appease their gods and ward off catastrophe. In one week they offered 20,000 hearts of murdered slaves to their gods. Entire towns and cities were wiped out. They painted their famous pyramids yearly in the fresh blood of their victims. You don’t hear about that on the tourist tours.
In Cortés’ wake came a regime of cruel dictators who enslaved and oppressed on a mass scale. These dictators created a caste system, rating the worth of the natives; they ground the people down under their well-polished heels. Failed attempts at uprising led to revolution in 1910. Even now there is a brutal war going on against the drug lords of Mexico; decapitations, assassinations, and mass executions are in the news every day.
We are told never to forget the holocaust, so that it may never be repeated. But it seems the holocaust was one instance in a long line of heart-wrenching atrocities that man has committed against each other. Mexico’s story is not unique; nearly every nation in the world has a bloodstained past. It seems to be the human way. What will it take to rouse our collective consciences?
The atrocities of history are dulled and forgotten with time like so many sand castles and footprints in the surf. It’s the crimson sunset that tells humanity’s true history. Can the tides of time wash all of that away?
Carnival of Cities: From Carcassonne to Miami
Posted by Caitlin on 30 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: Blogging, Central America, Europe, Events, North America
I’m delighted to be hosting the Carnival of Cities for a second time on Roaming Tales. This is the 30 April edition and we have a bumper crop of great posts. We seem to be confined to North (and Central) America and Europe this week, though we still have a lot of diversity, from Carcassonne to Miami. Happy reading!
Carnival of Cities is a blog carnival - where one blog hosts and other blogs submit posts on a particular theme. The theme for Carnival of Cities is cities and towns. You can see the 23 April edition of Carnival of Cities on Family Travel. I look forward to seeing Carnival of Cities on Leslie Carbone’s blog next week.
Anywhere
Any city: Ecosalon on new guidebooks that highlight a city’s independent businesses.
Europe
Stockholm: EuroPride is one of the biggest events on the gay and lesbian calendar in Europe and this year it’s taking place in Stockholm, Sweden, according to Eyeflare.
Alicante/Valencia: Information on the ferry service (or lack thereof) from Alicante to Valencia in Spain on Costa Blanca Webcast.
Barcelona: Me, My Kid and Life has a post about an open-air market in Barcelona, Spain, including pics of all the yummy food from fish to ostrich eggs.
Edinburgh: A review of the Red Fort Indian restaurant in Edinburgh on the Europe A La Carte blog. A £6 buffet sounds like good value!
Rome: Culture Shock finds accommodation in Rome last minute - and it was surprisingly nice.
Carcassonne: France Tales pays a visit to the medieval French city of Carcassonne. (This has been on my list since reading Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth - not a brilliant book but it did bring the setting magically to life).
Vienna: Mes crazy expériences has written about a visit to Vienna on a rail trip of Europe in 2005.
Salisbury: Traveling Mamas passed through London and stayed in Salisbury as a base for a visit to Stonehenge.
The Americas
San Francisco: CatSynth on a weekend filled with art, music (and cats) in San Francisco.
Washington: Leslie Carbone on the very wonderful Smithsonian museums in Washington DC.
Miami: Photo post of the South Beach in March on the Seabird Chronicles. And a review of South Beach bar Ocean’s Ten on SoloFriendly.
Honululu: Homespun Honululu gets political with a post on the grassroots protest against plans to build a rail network in Honululu.
Cincinnati: If you have a taste for the finer things in life, check out Cincinnati Locavore - this week’s submission has a post on an award-winning distilled vodka only available in the Ohio city.
San Antonio: Intelligent Travel has a post about the River Parade in San Antonio, Texas - lovely pics too.
Granada: And finally, my own post on Granada in Nicaragua - a colonial city on Central America’s biggest lake.
Submit your blog post to the next edition of the Carnival of Cities using our carnival submission form. Please only submit one (non-spammy) post and keep it on the topic of cities and (midsize and bigger) towns. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Stuck in limbo in Houston
Posted by Caitlin on 25 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: North America, Transport
I’ve been awake for nearly 48 hours and I’m about to shower and then collapse gratefully into bed. The plan was to sleep tonight in Managua in Nicaragua but I have only made it as far as Houston, Texas. I flew Sydney to Los Angeles with Qantas to connect with Continental flights from LA to Houston and then Houston to Managua. Unfortunately the Continental flight was delayed by five hours, leaving me stranded. At least they have put me up in the very comfortable Holiday Inn and given me meal vouchers, though I don’t know whether my bag is in Houston or has gone on to Managua without me, or is in fact still in LA where I last dropped it after clearing US Customs.
The best thing I can say about today is that I watched some cool movies (Swedish movie As It Is In Heaven was particularly good), read my book (On Beauty by Zadie Smith), and met some interesting people. There was Welsh Jim on his way to Columbia to do strategic communications for a development and inter-governmental conference. There was Kiwi Jim, a geologist from New Zealand who works on geothermal electricity projects using volcanoes in NZ, Indonesia, Nicaragua (he’ll be on the same flight as me tomorrow). And there was a lady from Houston who had spend 17 years working on a schools programme with ‘at risk’ kids.
Blogging has been sporadic while I’ve been on holidays in Australia, mainly because I couldn’t directly access the internet from this machine. I’m hoping it will be better now but I’ll be busy so I can’t promise. The next week is a coffee story in Nicaragua, then it’s on to Hong Kong, Bangkok and Cambodia, before back to London. Then I think I deserve a rest.