Washington DC, or, The Canberra Problem
First rule: if you’re going to take an overnight flight, make sure the destination is interesting enough to keep you awake.
In DC I found myself making the same excuses I make in Canberra and talking up the positives of the place. Yes, the parks are lovely and the museums are great but where is the city centre with some sign of life? North-west of Dupont Circle had a certain buzz in the evening and plenty of restaurants and bars. Georgetown was leafy and pretty but it verged on being painfully quaint.
We hired bikes near the Washington Mall area to meander through the monuments and museums. I’m sure American tourists get a lot more from this place after hearing about it in school for years. My main connection was with the Lincoln Memorial where I remembered The Simpsons episode where Lisa went to him for advice. He certainly was imposing in real life. It’s a massive shrine that looks down upon the memorial pond.
The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum was next. It was huge, having to accommodate planes after all. We walked through some old planes and looked at space food sticks, so I can’t really say it was the most riveting museum experience. We then crossed the park to The Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, an imposing building, all stairs, columns and heavy doors without signs. This building was amazing, possibly more amazing than the art it contained. The rooms had the all the ambience and style of a European art gallery but without the crowds. A few rooms in was an indoor garden, green and lush with water features and garden furniture to sit and appreciate. Of course, more marble columns and a high skylighted ceiling.
Across the road at the east wing of the gallery is the contemporary collection. This one impressed with both architecture and content – Jackson Pollack, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein.
It took me a while to pinpoint what felt odd about all of the museums and then it clicked. The only people working in the museums seemed to be security guards. Security guards checking bags on the way in and more guards spread throughout the galleries. They were completely free of the usual information desks, membership signs or art students working between studying. If felt like no one was really curating exhibitions or enhancing the collection. They had a big pile of of great artefacts and art and so it’s just been housed in these museums and forgotten.
Of course, maybe I’d think differently if I’d slept the night before.
San Francisco – down the Mission
Walk down almost any street in San Francisco and you’ll come across someone talking to themselves. Not always crazy people, sometimes it’s people just talking to whomever will listen. Street car drivers, buskers, perky homeless people requesting a quarter, they all add to the ambience which is very different to anywhere I’ve been on the east coast. Maybe it’s the balmy but mild conditions year-round that give this sense that the street is a place to hang out, not just for getting from point A to point B.
Down in the Mission on a Monday night, waiting for a bus, a Cuban band plays unnofficially in a corner square in front of a supermarket. A couple start dancing in front of the crowd and passers-by jump up on park benches to get a better view. We’d just finished a burrito (shared because even a single burrito in the US is family sized) at Farolito Taqueria after discovering Artillery (24th and Mission), a shop full of gear by really local, as in Mission area, designers. At first glance I thought it was just a hipster-den, but beneath the surface it actually had some substance. I walked out of there knowing I was doing my bit for the local community by buying a bag, a dress and a t-shirt for Peter.
Speaking of hipsters, there’s about 10 times more of them in the Mission area since we were last there in April 07, particularly on Valencia. Not that I mind. More cool shops in addition to the bookstores and record stores we visited last time, lots of bike porn (although far too many fixies) and even a decent coffee place.
Given the general low standards of coffee in the US, Ritual Coffee Roasters was quite a find only hours after I got off the flight from Sydney. I ordered a machiato to go and the guy tried to convince me to have it in a real cup in the cafe “to keep the temperature high and not have any paper taste.” I somehow didn’t think their coffee would be so precious to deserve such treatment and I was right. What came was more like a piccolo latte rather than an espresso with a drop of milk, but it was perfectly nice, almost as good as the stuff around the corner from work. I couldn’t believe that people were lining up out the door only to order grande mochas. Surely the single origin goodness wouldn’t come through in a milkshake sized chocolatey coffee? Baby steps, baby steps.
But the hipsters haven’t taken over this area, rather, they sit nicely in the varied pot of cultures. While Valencia is becoming gentrified, Mission St is still full of local stores, and most importantly for me, cheap good food. Mexican, African American and Vietnamese still dominate the area named the Mission because the first outsiders to arrive, the Spanish in 1776, they set the local Native Americans to work building them a mission. It never really turned out so they ended up handing it over to the Mexicans who made something of the area. Two Mission Mexican meals into the trip, I’m grateful for it.
Cotswolds and more
We left Leeds with a day of driving ahead. We loop-de-looped through Sheffield only stopping to give way at the many roundabouts, and there was no time to stop and sit down in Chesterfield despite the enticing name. We were bounding down the M1 for a lunchtime stop in Nottingham, aiming to make it to the village of Nailsworth by evening.
But this was England and this was the M1. Two miles from Nottingham we all came to a standstill and soon traffic stopped flowing from the other direction as well. Turns out there was a major accident further down the road closing off both directions of England’s main motorway. That means everyone was going to Nottingham for lunch! Two hours later and our two mile crawl into Nottingham was over.
On the road again we were on the road south. Somewhere along the way we (I) decided we needed to go via Bicester, just outside of Oxford, for its factory outlet shops which included a Camper shop (yes, yes, the Camper shop tour of the world, I know). The delay meant I only had an hour to choose between pretty shoes, gorgeous leather and soft angora from Pringle before they closed.
It was now around 8pm (and still light, of course) so the original plan to cook at the Cotswold cottage went out the door. We stocked up on food at the supermarket next door but decided to go to Oxford, just down the road, for dinner.
By the time we finished dinner it was getting close to 10pm and we still had about an hour long drive to the Cotswolds and this is where things started to go wrong. Well not so much wrong, as things were’s going as I planned so I started to worry. To summarise: we were low on petrol and there are no open petrol stations at that hour in country England; we were vaguely lost the whole way there, thanks to the confusing numbers and signs of England’s roads; and we realised we didn’t have the street address for the cottage.
It’s just a cottage in Nailsworth. Turns out Nailsworth is full of cottages and we had no way of knowing which was the right one, except for Peter’s memory when he’d been here a good ten years earlier. I couldn’t believe we were in a town where everyone had gone to sleep, in a car with no petrol, looking for a house we didn’t know the address of!
Peter worked out the street quickly enough, and luckily it was daytime in Australia so we could’ve called the relos who know the place more intimately than us. Once we’d found the street we had to work out which of the 6 or so houses matched the description of where the owner said the keys would be left. Acting like cat burglars we felt around the front garden of one house looking for a table and a pot plant. No luck. A couple of houses later we found a gate and a table and a pot plant that had to be the one. The sound of the front door unlocking was the best thing I’d heard all day.
The next day the sunlight showed us just how beautiful the little cottage was. We were in the top storey attic room, three floors up winding stairs from the street. Even the carpeted bathroom with a bath and no shower was cute.
Just down the road from the cottage was the amazing Hobbs House Bakery, which was so good it makes we weep not being near it now. Oh how I love solid English/Irish bread with it’s wheaty flavour that, with a good slab of butter, can’t be matched by any bread around the world. There was also a gourmet grocer, a flower shop and everything else you’d hope for in a stereotypical (but fashionably upmarket) English village.
Over the next couple of days we drove to Bath and Bristol, we contemplated driving to Wales because it was there, and we met up with fellow Aussies who were temporarily working and living nearby Mike, Jackie and Brendan in the quaint town of Broadway for a pub lunch.
On the way back to London we spent a day in Oxford with Peter’s friend Oz who is doing a PhD there in something scarily academic and physics-like. Highlights: burritos for lunch, cookies and milk stall in the market, an insider’s tour of the insides of an Oxford college, long walks through parks, watching people (badly) punting and eating French for dinner.
And that was is for the green rolling hills of England because the next and last stop on the European voyage was London.