Rainy days in London

'Ello everyone. We are having a lovely time wandering the streets of London. Leaving MN proved to be the most challenging part of the trip so far. We were delayed about 3 hours, so we missed our connecting flight in Chicago. We only had a 45 minute layover, so that wasn't much of a shock. We left Chicago at about 9:30 and got to London at noon on Saturday. We found our hotel easily, checked in and then headed off. We first went to the area Greg and I stayed in on our honeymoon so many moons ago. It was fun to see all the same sights, streets and pubs. We walked along the Thames and saw lots of boats and crew teams. We went to the William Morris house and museum and saw many of his fabrics and designs. It was very small and interesting and I had no idea it was so near where we had been before. From there, we headed to the nearest theater and enjoyed the final Harry Potter movie in 3D. I was afraid we would fall asleep, but the action kept us wide awake!

On Sunday, we did our walking tour of Harry Potter's London. We saw where they filmed Platform 9 3/4, the specific telephone booth they used as the entrance to the Ministry of Magic (in the Prisoner of Azkaban), and a lot of locations for Diagon Alley. We also climbed 311 steps to the top of The Monument and had lovely views of London. My feet were quite sore by the end of the day.

Monday was Museum day and we visited the National Gallery, the Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain, as well as a few more Potter sites we had missed the day before. We walked by Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. There was a huge line to get into Westminister Abby, so we went into St. Margaret's Chapel. It had beautiful stained glass windows and these super lovely embroidered kneeling pads in the pews.

Today, we are going to the Globe Theater to see a Shakespeare play and one final Potter site. Tomorrow we will meet up with our tour group and spend the next 9 days with them. It has rained off and on every day. Yesterday we avoided rain until 6pm, but it was only a drizzle, so maybe it's clearing up. We've had interesting English breakfasts each day at our hotel and enjoyed Fish and Chips from a street vendor on Sunday. So far British food is living up to it's reputation. Cheerio!

Beyond the U.S.A.

We hope to continue the blog this summer, but we are traveling outside of our home land, so we'll see how it goes connecting with the internet. This is the itinerary: July 15 - 21 London. The school group arrives on the 20th and we will take a side trip to Windsor on the 21st. Next, we will cross the English Channel and visit Normandy, St. Malo, Mont St. Michel. On the 25th we will visit Chartres Cathedral and then it's on to Paris! The school group will depart on the 28th and then our friend Shelly will join us until the 31st. After Paris we will train up to Amsterdam and then head back home on the 4th. It should be a great trip, check back for all the details.

We're home!! (facts and figures)

We drove from Cameron, MO to St. Paul, MN today, stopping in Des Moines at the Waveland Cafe for lunch. It was quite a funky place with good food, so we were revved for the final four hour drive. When we got to St. Paul, Mara was reunited with her fousin.

We drove a total of SIX thousand SIX hundred twenty SIX miles!!! The average MPG was 50, a bit lower than previous years. It was the longest drive in the fewest days. Many times I thought we were pacing ourselves a bit faster than other years, and now I see that, sure enough, we were moving pretty fast. Here are some more trivial facts:

most pickup trucks - Louisiana
most Honda Elements - New Mexico
best cactus - Arizona
most interesting road kill = Louisiana (armadillos)
fastest speed limit - Texas (of course (80))
most tolerable radio stations - Oklahoma

Nobody wins the song contest, the lyrics are from the Little Feat song, Willin'. Where are all the people I knew back in the '80's?

Sara's top two stops - Watts towers and Georgia O'Keeffe's home and studio
Sara's bottom two (non)stops - closed art car museum and cancelled chuckwagon breakfast

Mara's top two stops - City of Rocks and Disneyland

Mara's bottom two stops - walk of fame (too many people!!!!) and the top of the St. Louis Arch (the bottom is better)

In 2011 we are taking a field trip to France and England where I will return to my role as "chaperone". It is not clear, at this point, if the blog will have a European chapter. In 2012 we might be heading east. We still have the entire east coast and a few inland states to cover. And then, Alaska and Hawaii. Thanks for all your comments, we sure enjoy hearing from you.

Last Tour

Sculpture in front of jazz museumFrank Lloyd Wright Design

Price Tower National Historic Landmark Plaque

Signature of Frank Lloyd Wright

The Price Tower

This morning we woke up late, too late for breakfast. So we hurried out of the hotel so we could see the Price Tower Art Center. Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper. The walls were lined with metal with patina, to create a bluish green color. The floors, walls and ceilings were covered in triangles, and other shapes created from them. The building was mostly red, which was Wright's signature color. The whole building was supposed to be like a tree. The elevators were around the size of a squirrel hole. The building was designed for New York, but they built it in Bartlesville, OK. Originally it had offices, apartments, and retail stores. Now it is a hotel, a small art museum, and a tourist spot. After that, we drove by the the Jazz museum in Kansas City, but didn't go in. Before driving to our hotel, we had dinner at the Rosedale BAR•B•Q. (Yes, Rosedale.) We took a swim on our last night on the trip. Tomorrow: HOME!

I been from Tuscon to Tucumcari

Whoever can name the title tune first gets a prize! Wednesday morning, while we had breakfast at the Plaza, "someone" apparently put toothpaste on our brushes. The hotel is haunted!! After checking out, we walked around the Las Vegas square. Lots of nice old architecture, but it seems like many are soon to be demolished. We went into a store across the square from our hotel that had signs that said, art, beads, rocks and a few other things. They were having a sale with everything between 25 and 50% off. We found lots of interesting beads and a few rocks that we just had to have and all at a substantial savings, so how could we not?

The Historic (haunted) Plaza Hotel

A lovely rest stop in Texas

On the way to Amarillo, just for kicks (it is on Route 66), we drove through Tucumcari. There were many interesting signs along the road, but nothing that made us feel the need to stop and get out. Before we left on this trip, I made reservations for a Chuck Wagon breakfast at a ranch outside of Amarillo. It is at a ranch in the Palo Duro Canyon (the second largest canyon in the U.S.). After a large breakfast of all the traditional cowboy vittles, there is entertainment by traditional cowboys performing the great "old cowboy classics, poetry and humorous cowboy storytelling". I'm sure you can understand why I felt this had to be a part of our trip. As we neared Amarillo, the phone rang. It was a woman from the ranch saying that only 6 people had signed up for the breakfast and they needed more like 30 to make it worth their while. So, the Chuck Wagon Breakfast was canceled. Bummer. Just as I hung up, I saw exit 60 ahead and we got off the freeway so we could visit the Cadillac Ranch. The Cadillac Ranch was built in 1974 by Stanley Marsh III, the helium millionaire who owns the wheat field where it stands. Ten cars are buried in a straight line. They are covered in graffiti and we witnessed many people adding to the art work as we were there.

Cadillac Ranch

Finally, on to Amarillo and the Big Texan Motel. It's a very western themed dive hotel that I read many mixed reviews of but decided we should stay there, for its quirkiness and the Texas shaped swimming pool. When we presented ourselves at the check-in, we were told that they had no reservation for us. I checked my copy in the car and sure enough, I'd made a reservation for the day before. Oops. We had passed many hotels along the way, so we turned around and easily enough, got in at an alternate spot, though with much less character. We did return to the Big Texan for dinner. They offer a free 72 ounce steak to anyone who can eat it and all the sides within one hour. We watched several men make the attempt as we ate our delicate and delicious 6 oz. sirloins. We did not stick around to see if they were successful, but the man who started first had about 20 minutes remaining and he seemed well on his way to success.

The Big Texan free steak contestant

Today, we drove to Tulsa, uneventful except for the rain. When we got into town, we went to the Philbrook museum. It's a beautiful building with a very nice collection of art including Native American (they have two paintings by Pablita Velarde and one by Helen Hardin!), American, European and African collections. And a really nice gift store.

O'Keefe Country

Pooh on Palace. Wait...

The Monk's Corner.

Old Abandoned Cabin

Window in the mosque

The mosque

A smaller mosque

Yesterday morning we went shopping in Santa Fe. All of the stores were very authentic. We had lunch at the Blue Corn cafe, which we tried to go to the night before, but we couldn't find it. We had blue and white corn chips and dip, and blue and white corn enchiladas. One of the stores we went to was the Monk's Corner. Aaaaaah. We had ice-cream at Haagen-Daz, and walked around for a little more. After shopping, we drove to Abiquiu, Georgia O'Keefe's home town and stayed at the Abiquiu Inn. It was such a sweet little hotel, in a wooded area with pretty little flowers and wild life. I was in awe at the hummingbirds who moved so fast and sounded like giant bees. We drove around Abiquiu for a while, and it was beautiful. The rocks were in amazing hues, and after seeing her paintings, you saw that what you thought was abstract, are actually quite realistic. My mom bought a book about Georgia at the O'Keefe museum, which had a map of places in Abiquiu. So we followed the map to Ghost Ranch, where Georgia stayed when she visited New Mexico. She loved it so much, she bought a house there. This morning, we visited it. When she first bought it, it was merely a few large clumps of mud, and a couple walls. It took her ten years to restore it. It was a simple house, but the view was amazing. In almost every room, windows look out to the rocks and mountains. Her room has two windows that look out to a flat topped mountain, which she made her own. After the tour we drove to Dar al Islam, the mosque. It is around the "White Place" which we couldn't visit for they were filming the movie "Cowboys and Aliens" there. No Harrison Ford sightings. The mosque was very large, but we couldn't go into all of it. It was an adobe building with interesting windows and doors. We drove on to Las Vegas. No, not Nevada, New Mexico. We checked into our hotel which we thought looked like the Stanley, the haunted hotel we visited last year. (See "Mint Room Survival" from July 8 last year.) When we got to the room, my mom started reading up on the hotel. "OK, it turns out, this hotel is haunted." Hmmmm....

Windy Windy Roads

We didn't make it to Roswell, but we found these in SonomaIt was a very windy day

It was a very windy drive

a very accurate map

petrified forest guard

is it a tree? is it a rock?

we found a car for Mara!

a bull in Madrid

On Saturday, we headed to Albuquerque. Leaving Sonoma, we drove up the same winding road we drove down the day before. We made two unscheduled detours on our way. The first was at the top of the ascent out of Sonoma. There was a scenic view and a Native American craft market. We pulled in and walked to the amazing view. We could see the winding road, but not the town below. The crafts seemed more authentic than the stuff we had seen in all the tourist gift shops we had already visited, so we picked up a few things. About two hours later, we decided that we needed to spend some time in the Petrified Forest. We drove past many interesting views and finally, we found the forest. Pretty amazing rock/trees. With all our detours, we didn't make it to Albuquerque until 8:00. We desperately needed some clean laundry, and there were some laundry room problems, so we stayed up quite late and then got up quite early to finish the drying. There was a 12:00 parade we needed to get to, about an hour away, so Albuquerque will need to be visited some other time. I'm sure it's very nice, but the little corner of it that we saw left something to be desired. We drove to Madrid, NM along the Turquoise Trail scenic route. The GPS send us on a bit of a "short cut" to the route that involved about 10 miles of unpaved rocky rutty road. We got to Madrid in time to find a good spot to park and then walked to a good viewing spot for the parade. It was a "peace parade" with many interesting animals and lots of hippies. From there, we drove on to Santa Fe and we visited the Georgia O'Keeffe museum where we saw a very nice collection of her paintings and drawings. Then we visited the New Mexico Museum of Art where they had a show of cowboy boots. Later in the evening, we drove to the High School and waited for the fire works. They were lovely and the people at our hotel had another show in the parking lot, so the 4th was complete.