exciting announcement - i just checked my blog account and apparently i have earned 1 pound and 9 pence so far this month from my adverts on my blog. mum, watch out for a cheque arriving at some point - it won’t quite clear my overdraft but every penny helps. i think that means i’m officially a professional writer now, that’s what bert said anyway.exciting announcement part 2 - i have changed the blog a bit so that when someone leaves a comment it appears right there below the blog on the same page, not in a separate window. i hope this makes more people leave comments, i think it’s better that way.
exciting announcement part 3 - the film we watched the other night which i didn’t know the name of at the time, was the man from snowy river - it’s actually an australian western film about horses and things. i fell asleep during it which was a shame because i was enjoying it, but fell into a very deep sleep - this annoyed bert as it‘s one of his favourite films, but he is currently asleep so that evens it out. previous to this i had been trying to watch the film with my bad eye in an attempt to make it see properly, so that i don’t have to wear glasses anymore, as i find wearing glasses so very annoying. you non glasses wearers don’t know how good you’ve got it. i wear my contact lens sometimes but my eye doesn’t like that either and sometimes they break in half in your eye which is scary because then you think they have got lost into your brain (if you are me). anyway perhaps it was the effort of using my bad eye that put me in such a deep slumber.
exciting announcement part 4 - as pointed out by mamma mia, yes apparently i did spell weasel wrong on a previous blog and so i have 5 words for my spelling list now.
today (it was today when i wrote this, but isn't anymore - well it is today, but a different today) (tuesday 13th october) there is a dust storm blowing around so we decided to not do any driving as it can be dangerous in monty to drive in high winds. we have done lots of research of nurseries and farms around the area, and made some appointments to see other customers tomorrow and thursday and i have updated my lists of things. i have many lists of things, it’s a genetic disorder i inherited from mum. all i need now is a stationery store so i can get a folder for all our bits of paper and i will feel like a well organised worker again.
october 2nd to 5th, salida, colorado - jim and amy’s place
so whilst staying with im and amy in salida, colorado, i sewed 3 buttons back onto items of clothing - i am aware i have mentioned this fact more than twice already, but that is because it was such an achievement for me. however, my sense of achievement was short-lived when i realised later i had actually sewn one button right through the lining and into a pocket so the pocket is now half the size it was. i vowed to never do any sewing again. soon after vowing that i found the hem of one of our sheets was coming off so i took it to amy’s sewing room to mend it, and she saw me looking all pathetic and like i couldn’t use a sewing machine, which i can’t, and she did it for me which took about 1 second as she knows what she’s doing with sewing. here’s a picture of her dress. she was making this for a wedding but didn’t get it finished in time, but will wear it at her birthday party in november, 2 days before my birthday which is the 25th, hers is the 23rd.
we talked about books, amy recommended three cups of tea, which dad has read too and said was ace, also crazy for the storm, which is an adventure story about a crashed plane, and what is the what which is about child soldiers in liberia. she said we should get audio books to listen to in monty which is a very good idea. monty still only has one working speaker though, until we make some money on our sales out here we can’t upgrade any of monty’s parts.we watched jim’s tree wrap machine in action, which was really fascinating - i can’t believe you can be so clever to design and build a machine that intricate that does that much stuff. in goes the plain cardboard, and out the other end comes a welded printed folded flat packed tree wrap, then a man bundles them up and they go on a pallet and get shrink wrapped when it’s full, then sent off to wherever they’re going. amazing. jim has patented a black stripe that goes inside the top of the tree wrap to stop tree scalding which is when the sun rays get inside and bounce around and fry the outer layers of the tree. he has to reverse the whole print process to get this printed as it’s on the other side, so this was causing a few teething problems and he had to work into the night most days we were there, to get it going properly.
we watched becoming jane, a film about jane austen - she never married, despite being rather in love with someone who seemed to love her too, but the circumstances weren’t right (he seemed like a bit of a wally in the film). i guess that’s why her books have such neat little happy endings, imagine if she had married they might all be serial killer books instead.on sunday we went on a flight in jim’s cessna320 which scared the sh*t out of me, but which jim and bert enjoyed immensely - i have to admit i actually nearly vomitted and passed out all at the same time. (am smiling on this photo below, this was before it got really bumpy).
somehow i kept it together but i had lost my appetite for lunch, which is quite unheard of for me. it was pretty bumpy conditions, cloudy, and remember we’re fairly high altitude there as it’s in the rocky mountains. we flew over the arkansas river, and bert pointed out the headwaters of the colorado river, which flows through the grand canyon, to lake havasu and then through california to the ocean - it also disappears underground for a while in southern california. we took some video of the flight, here’s a link to one i put on you tube - this is us flying low over jim’s ranch then zooming upwards again, you might hear me screaming:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4cF8SJ_V9Q
it’s not that i didn’t trust jim as a pilot, but it was pretty windy and bumpy and we did some pretty sharp turns. bert drove it for a while and did a whole 360 turn (not upside down though).
we mended the wobbly headset on my falcon bike. the next stage of its upgrade will be new bar tape, and a good old clean. it could do with a new saddle too and a basket for going to the shops with, or putting a cat in.
we got a solar panel for monty from jim, and bert glued it to the roof. this is very cool as it means if you are parked for days with no hookup but with lots of sunshine - like on the beach in mexico for example - the solar panel will create all the power you need.i read my spanish dictionary for a while, then boiled some eggs, and ate some green pepper, while bert was gluing the solar panel on the roof. peppers are very expensive out here - is it the same in England? - like one red pepper is around $1.50. the greens ones are about 78 cents usually but that’s because nobody wants them as they are a bit boring. everyone wants the yellow or red ones. when we went shopping last at walmart the lady at the checkout had prices of all the other big stores and was doing a price match for us, so all the vegetables we bought she gave us them at the price of the cheapest on offer anywhere else, which i thought was amazing - so our red pepper became 46 cents, and the courgettes and yellow squashes were about a third of the price too. this really made our day.
on monday 5th we left jim and amy’s, armed with our information about tree wraps and some sample tree wraps for our selling trip to california. we drove into a headwind which slowed us right down from our usual speed of 55mph to 45mph. good job we weren’t really in a hurry. the scenery was fairly unspectacular too so i ate my way through the contents of the fridge. we were headed to albuquerque in new mexico, to see timothy, bert’s son - he’s at college there. new mexico certainly is very mexican - suddenly there were little adobe houses, like in mexico, and lots of mexican restaurants and all the towns are mexican names. i don’t know much about american history, but i think this state was spanish and then mexican for a while then there was a mexico-america war and america won all that land from mexico. anyway i liked seeing all the spanish influence and cactuses and funny desert with little blobby trees. we drove through tres piedras - three stones, and ojo caliente - hot eye, and other such strangely named towns. i saw a café called el taquito, a colourful mexican style graveyard at the side of the road, a tumbleweed blew across the road in front of monty which startled him, i noticed petrol is much cheaper down here - i have become a connoisseur of petrol prices on our big road trip - they average $2.60ish for premium unleaded just so you know.
we saw lots of casinos too, and bert told me there is a law that allows the indians to own the casinos here tax free as a way of making it up to them that they stole all their land and pushed them into reservations. also you see lots of indian shops at the side of the road, with big signs up entreating you to come and buy their beautiful rugs and stone carvings and the like. i don’t know how the indians feel about this and maybe they love it, but it made me a bit sad that they should be consumed in the all encompassing mass consumerism machine, when what they actually represent is not that at all, but a natural and free way of life like in dances with wolves. perhaps that just doesn’t exist anywhere anymore, everything is too over modernised that there is no escape for anyone anymore.
anyway - we arrived in los lunas, which is where timothy lives. we met him at the walmart car park where we were going to park that night. he had just been told he had swine flu, which was really not very nice as bert couldn’t give him a hug or anything, and we stood a distance away from him with the wind blowing the opposite direction and him and bert wore masks. bert has bad asthma and we figured he really would be at risk if he caught pig flu, though i later read something that suggested you become more immune to it with age, so i’m not sure about that theory either. anyway, tim is fine now, and we are too and we didn’t catch it, but we were worried for him. there had been an outbreak at his college, though i don’t know how serious it became.
wednesday 6th
we left los lunas after briefly seeing tim again. tim works a walmart as well as studying computer animation, he looks quite like bert and has blond hair. actually it’s hard to say how much he looks like him as he was wearing his mask, unfortunately, but he is a very nice boy. we will try to visit him properly after our time in california.
we were headed west now to california, so the next state we came to was arizona. we crossed a river called rio puerco which means pig river, which i thought was quite topical and amusing too. arizona is very deserty as you would imagine, with lots of indian reserves like new mexico. we drove on towards flagstaff, a big town in the middle of Arizona - not the capital though, that is phoenix. we came upon a small national park called petrified tree national park which looked quite inviting so in we went with our free park pass, hooray, and up to the booth. it said it closed at 6pm, and it was 5.45, so we asked if it was ok to drive through it still - they said yes you can but when it gets to be 6pm you can’t stop and take photos anymore, just keep driving please. so we said ok, and set off. we stopped at 5.50 and took some photos. then we saw a little museum place (below) overlooking a viewpoint and stopped for our last 3 minutes of being allowed out of the car.
we ran in the museum and looked at the view and wished we’d got there earlier. then the lady in the museum told us it was only 5pm. hooray! we had gone back in time an hour by crossing into arizona. this was practically the most exciting thing i can remember ever happening to me in recent history. we had a whole hour ahead of us to look at things and take photos.so we looked at the beautiful views, and looked at some petrified trees. here is the explanation of what the petrified trees are, from the leaflet they gave us:
this high, dry grassland was once a vast floodplain crossed by many streams. tall, stately conifers grew along the banks. crocodile-like reptiles, giant amphibians, and small dinosaurs lived among a variety of ferns, cycads and other plans and animals known only as fossils today. the trees, araucarioxylon, woodworthia, schilderia, and others, fell, and swollen streams washed them into adjacent floodplains. a mix of silt, mud, and volcanic ash buried the logs. this sediment cut off oxygen and slowed the logs’ decay. silica-laden groundwater seeped through the logs and replaced the original wood tissues with silica deposits. eventually the silica crystallized into quartz, and the logs were preserved as petrified wood.
cool hey. it was beautiful - big plains, with weird rocky outcrops with stripy and red coloured rock, and then these little blobs which were petrified tree stumps, lying around. we also saw a herd of bikers, and heard them speaking a strange language, i guessed it was czech or russian and on investigating further, i can confirm it was czech, as i just looked up a picture of what their flags were that were flying behind their bikes. i studied czech for a year at university as an elective - most of the class were russian students wanting an easy elective option ha because czech is just like russian but not with the cyrillic alphabet. and then there were a few of us normal people for whom it was basically impossible. there are sounds in it that you just can’t produce, like -strj- and other silly combinations of consonants. anyway i did really enjoy it as it was a language and i like languages.on leaving the park at the south exit, we found a gift shop with a big sign saying free rv camping. how exciting, we turned in there immediately, and i tried to manoeuvre monty into a spot by a hookup (it was free hookup too, i guess in return you are supposed to buy something from their gift shop but we left early in the morning before it had opened). i couldn’t make the corner in monty so we had a small (big) argument and bert took over, then got peeved as we missed the spot we wanted as someone else had got it in the meantime. we still got a spot though so i don’t know what the fuss was about. we had a really nice dinner as i remember, which was baked chicken with lemon pepper sauce, and roasted potato chunks (a la abi, as she had invented them when staying in monty with us), and broccoli and other veggies. i took some photos of the meal before it got eaten.
wednesday 7th october
we looked at the dinosaurs around the campground (i guess they are there because real ones used to be there - bert petted one of them because he’s brave - see photos in previous blog entry), ate some porridge and drank some coffee and were on our merry way to our next unknown destination en route. turns out we were following the old route 66 for a lot of this journey. i think we did it a bit less crazily than in that film easy rider though, which i haven’t actually fully watched but will try to while on the road. nor have i read on the road by kerouac but should do that too.
we saw a motorhome called a chinook - this is the name of those massive double rotored helicopters, but also the name of this amazing magical wind that appears in western states of america that can suddenly increase the temperature by up to 30 or 40 degrees, thus melting snow and bringing life back to crops and animals. another famous wind that does a similar thing is a sirocco wind. we saw a motorhome turned upside down on the highway, which was not a nice thing to see, but good to be aware of what can happen - bert is a very safe and good driver so this won’t happen to us. we left the highway to buy some sealant as it was starting to rain and we have a hole in the roof by the air conditioner. as it happened we stopped in winslow, arizona, which is very famous due to the song by the eagles called standing on a corner in winslow, arizona. we took photos of us on the corner and had a coffee and a brownie while the sealant dried on the roof. on checking with mammamia pepinillo, she is aware of this song and often plays it on her guitar. the other day she dressed up as a pirate and played her guitar to some people with cerebral palsy, they played sea type songs, thus the pirate outfit.
after this we headed up north a bit to see the grand canyon. firstly we stopped at the IMAX cinema there, to watch their half hour film about the grand canyon - it’s about the history of it, and there is a man in an ultra light in it, who obviously bert knows because bert always knows someone wherever we go, even if it’s not technically a person that’s there, but on a screen. this man was called larry newman. the film is made 25 years ago so his ultralight is kind of dated, so we got in touch with a friend of bert’s who makes 3D films for big screens - they did one together in hawaii that showed in las vegas at the film and video show, and we told him that they should make a new 3D film for the grand canyon, so he is going to approach grand canyon imax about this and see if they can make a new film for them. there are bits in this film where you fly through the canyon and over the river and it makes you feel a bit sick and dizzy, unless you are bert and aren’t scared of anything.
we carried on in to the main bit of the park there, and went to the nearest campsite. they had a 30 foot limit for rvs, so we lied and said we were 30 feet, actually we’re 33 feet. the campsite man said well sir you’re in luck there is one 30 foot site left. oo goody we said. and it’s actually a very long site, so you’ll lots of room. oo goody we said, how fortunate, we like having lots of room. he looked at bert’s senior pass, and said gosh you look too young to have this pass. thank you sir, said bert. and you have a very young wife too i see. yes i said, i don’t have my senior pass quite yet. this was all quite funny to me, the lying and the strange compliments, so i walked off and giggled to myself while bert filled in the forms.
we parked monty and ate some hot dogs for lunch then cycled to the south edge of the canyon, which was only about a mile away. i have to say that this canyon is one of the most stunning things i have ever seen, it’s absolutely massive, and it is so strange and eery that it is so huge. the north edge is higher than the south edge which you can’t tell when you stand there looking over the huge distance, this is because the original land which is now a canyon, is on a hill inclined to the north. it really is awe inspiring. it’s interesting too because they’re not really sure how it got there - apparently the river colorado eroded all the land and made it all stripy and funny shaped rocks, over the ages, and the wind eroded the land too - this makes sense, but isn‘t particularly normal behaviour for a river to just kind of sink into the land like that.
the bottom to the top at the highest place is a mile high. the rocks in the bottom are 2 billion years old which is crazy if you ask me. this was probably the most touristy place we’ve visited on our whole trip - you can hear all types of languages being spoken - i think it is the number one visited tourist spot on the whole planet actually. we saw some cool little blue birds sitting on a rock drinking a bit of water which was sweet. we bought some postcards and wandered along and down into the canyon a little bit - not very far, it’s 7.8miles down and back out again, and people have died as they miscalculated the distance and time and provisions needed. so we just walked about a mile so as not to risk death. by the time we got back to the place we’d left our bikes it was pitch black and we could only just see the numbers on the bike lock. this was a bit foolish. we rode/walked the bikes back to our site, which was no fun - don’t know why we didn’t bring our torch but we hadn’t thought about that in the excitement of getting to the canyon.
that night the temperature got down to freezing again and our funny heater made those funny banging noises, which basically means it’s not working properly which is no good as then the pipes and things can freeze up, so we set the generator off at 5am, which you’re not allowed to do, but at least our heaters worked then. then we figured we should leave as we had contravened 2 laws of the site, by being too big and having our generator on in the middle of the night. so off we sneaked before daylight and stopped in a nearby carpark and walked to watch the sun rising over the canyon, then ate our breakfast and set off.thursday 8th october
so after our grand canyon sunrise we headed to lake havasu, which is on the border of arizona and california. the river colorado separates the 2 states and lake havasu is made by parker dam. it is much much hotter down here than all the other places we’ve been - i much prefer the non heat, so i didn’t like that aspect of it. it was weird to see palm trees again and not have to have the heater on at night and stuff. bert used to live here with his sons. bert once flew his hang glider under the bridge they have here, which is london bridge - they bought it from london in 1964 or something round that time. i guess the guy that bought it thought he was getting tower bridge as that is the prettier one, but he got it wrong and they got london bridge. they dismantled it all and shipped it over and put it all back together, with all the bricks individually numbered, you can still see the numbers. the man that did all this was mr mculloch, of mculloch chainsaws. mr mculloch dug a channel that goes from one shore of the lake to the other, like a river, and built up a whole little area around the bridge, and that is the london bridge area of lake havasu city. anyway bert once hang glided underneath the bridge for a july 4th special, and he had smoke coming out of the back of his glider, and a radio presenter with him so they were broadcasting live on radio, and tons of people watching from the shores. it is of course totally weird to be standing on london bridge in the really hot heat, with boats whizzing around and clear blue lake water instead of dirty river thames water rushing by. and busy commuters commuting over it to their offices. it’s strange because i used to cycle/walk over london bridge each day on my way to work in moorgate, and here i was standing on it in america a year and a half later.
we had some beers and then went to the nautical inn, which is where bert used to be based for his water gliding operation here. we looked at some nice boats over the water, and then bert decided to be really embarrassing and ask a man for a ride on his boat. despite my embarrassment at this brazen act, the man said yes of course, and off we went - he was called don, and his girlfriend was gail, and we went off round the lake with them, and had drinks and swam, and had a great time. then we carried on drinking at the nautical inn and agreed to meet up the next day and that we would go on their boat up the topoc canyon, up river. how amazingly friendly of them, to take 2 complete strangers on a boat ride 2 days in a row, i was really gobsmacked. they were quite intrigued by our lifestyle and asked us lots of questions. gail had been in miss america once and had won the miss congeniality section, and don had recently been to jersey and stayed with a billionaire man who owned 2 concordes. whilst there he had tried to buy a pepsi in a shop with a us dollar.that night me and bert parked monty out on an outcrop by the lake for free, and cooked pesto pasta, though i don’t know how as i really had had too much to drink. i had been looking forward very much to eating the pesto as i hadn’t been able to find it much in america apart from recently, so it was a bit silly to eat it when not in a fit state to be eating anything.
friday 9th october
we sat by the lake in our chairs and nearly went in the lake but it was a bit too cold. after a really good breakfast of huevos rancheros to soak up our hangovers we went off to meet don and gail for our trip up the canyon. they had brought beer and champagne which quickly got rid of any notions i‘d had of a drink free day, and their boat had tons of cool music on it. i don’t know much about boats, but this one was swanky, nice colours, like a james bond boat (it's the orange one on the right below).
we set off and went under the london bridge and on across the lake, then you come to a shallower bit of a channel. after a while of puttering up slowly through the shallower waters, we ran aground on a sandbank. oops, lots of other boats were having the same issue. so bert and don got out and started walking the boat through the shallow bit. first bert had to go under the water with a knife and chop all the reeds off the propellers that had got stuck round them. we thought this would help but it didn’t solve the shallow problem, but it did make us laugh as he got a load of weeds on his head and looked like a monster. i got out and helped with pushing the boat along for a bit, then we got some deeper water, then some shallower and basically this kept happening for a while. but as we were in no rush we didn’t mind, and just pushed the boat along and drank our beers. finally we got through the shallow bits and went off again at top speed, which always makes me fly back in the seat as though we've gone into warp speed, when really it's only 50mph. we went up the canyon after stopping at a big sandbank that is usually packed with party people in the busier months - lake havasu is a big party town full of rich people and people jet skiing around and boating around and going out and being drunk and crazy. it’s quieter at the moment as the summer is ending, so there were only a few other boats on the sandbank having drinks. the canyon was really beautiful, and at the end of it we were in california, and we stopped at the naked pirate bar and had a pizza and a cocktail.
topoc canyon
don and gail.by the time we realised we ought to be heading back, the sun was already setting. we got through the canyon in the semi darkness (a little bit scary). we got all the way back as far as the shallow channel, which by now was even shallower and we promptly ran aground on a sandbank in the dark. bert and don got out to push the boat around in the dark for a while, while me and gail sat wrapped up in towels to keep warm. there was no danger as we were close to the lake now and could see another boat behind us having the same problem, so it was quite nice to sit and look at the stars on the boat. probably not so nice for bert and don who were getting cold in the water trying to figure out which way to push the boat. after about 45 minutes of this however, they figured we couldn’t get off the sandbank and maybe we’d have to sleep there. shortly afterwards 2 rescue boats came along - not to rescue us, they were responding to some phonecalls they’d had from other boats further down, but we talked them into rescuing us first - it’s more profitable as we weren’t members so they could overcharge us, and did so. they fixed a line to the front of our boat and dragged us out of our sandbank into deeper water where we could drive the boat properly back to shore. what fun this all was, and we went to celebrate our rescue by having a drink by the london bridge.
saturday 10th october
had breakfast with don and gail and looked at don’s house, he has a statue of a gorilla on his lawn which was amusing. we then set off to las vegas, which i wrote about in the last blog. the landscape, other than being filled with luxury boats and rich people and fast cars, is very arid and boring and deserty until you get to vegas - apparently the lights of vegas are the brightest ones you can see from space. how strange that must be going to space and looking down on the earth, kind of makes all our little problems seem very insignificant if you look at it from there. i always think it must be strange being buzz aldrin or neil armstrong and every night there’s the moon and you can look at it and say oh i’ve been there.
how weird to see palm trees again after all the cold and mountains we've been in.anyway vegas was saturday night, sunday we drove to bakersfield in southern california, and the last week monday to friday we’ve been busy meeting farmers and farm supply people and grape growers trying to sell them tree wraps. so far no sales, but lots of positive response. which is nice, but essentially meaningless as it doesn’t pay us any money. we will do this for 3 more weeks, so i would hope we make at least one sale if not more. other things that happened this week: we had some mexican food and watched a bit of mexico v trinidad and tobago football match, and learnt that mexico are in the world cup as are england. but when is it? 2010? and where? we parked in walmart one night in visalia, and got woken up at 130am by a crazed mad man circling around monty with a giant hoover attached to his van. he literally drove around monty 20 times, by which point bert was wielding a club and ready to go and beat him to death. i told him not to incase the man was actually insane and maybe he’d kill him. then we realised this man’s job was to hoover the litter and things from the carpark and that he wasn’t a madman after all - i would say he was a little bit mad though and i’m sure he was purposefully trying to anger us. this was all very strange and slightly scary, as things can be in the middle of the night that wouldn’t otherwise be.
more to come on our weekend with the giant sequoia trees! bye for now earthlings. xx
No comments:
Post a Comment