Category Archives: USA

05 Nov 2011 · 2:48 AM

These Vagabond Shoes…

New York, New York, the city that never sleeps… well we tried our best to keep up with her but it was a losing battle unfortunately. As we wind down to the end of our journey, we can’t help but feel fairly worn out. The trip has taken it’s toll, and although our travel hungry minds would love to carry on, our bodies have had just about enough and are certainly ready to head home and recoup.

Chrysler Building, lit up at night

As with Washington D.C, New York City was a place that we had previously spent some time and thus had already seen many of the more touristy sights. Well, as many as possible in the sub-zero temperatures that the city was experiencing at the time. The difference between then and now was stark, all of the trees still had their leaves and were slowly changing to the oranges and yellows of the fall, there was a chill in the air but not the nose and toe numbing cold that we walked around in and lastly the incredibly obvious thing was that there wasn’t snow and ice around everywhere, well for a while anyway until the snowstorm hit and everything went pear-shaped. New York is a great big city, with Manhattan only one of the 5 boroughs, and you feel this as soon as you arrive, it is as if you have stepped into a special place that has so much more to offer. It’s a strange feeling, similar to the one I felt when first visiting London and there is a lot of novelty value with new experiences to be had around every corner.

We had booked ourselves into probably the least expensive hostel in the city for two nights to be right in NYC and all of the action before we headed out to stay with some friends who live in the Bronx. The Tone Hostel on Lexington (that was actually closer to 3^rd) was decent, clean and they had free breakfast and wifi… Champion find! And although some of the guests were complaining of bed bugs, we didn’t experience anything of the sort and would really recommend it to anybody visiting NYC on a budget as it was a mere 25 bucks a night. That’ not India or Thailand cheap but when the local Holiday Inn is already charging upwards of $200 a night for a standard room, this find was a great one. There are also a number of Tone Hostels around the city if you would prefer to stay in a different area.

Times Square, the chaos of inner Manhattan

Helen and Judy, our family friends from Cape Town, took us in and spoiled me rotten on my birthday with an awesome roast for dinner and we chilled with them for the weekend up in the Bronx.

Here are some of the memorable moments of New York City… in no particular order!

Brooklyn Bridge connects Manhattan with New York’s largest borough, Brooklyn, with a myriad of cables and some pretty impressive double arched pylons. The roadway runs underneath a pedestrian boardwalk, and a rent-a-cop with a whistle patrols his turf with vigour.It was hilarious watching him trying to warn foreign tourist of oncoming bicycle traffic… waving his hands about and blowing sharp trills on that infernal whistle!

Billionaires in the 30's certainly knew how to deck out a lobby properly, far more specced than any of Donald "Toupe" Trump's creations! - Empire State Building lobby

We took the plunge and forked out the cash to visit the observatory on the top of the Empire State Building only to find out that they don’t take you to the top anymore… Well not unless you double up on your donation to the great city of NYC! But we were still quite chuffed with the 86th floor and had a great view out over all of Manhattan’s tallest buildings and out to the neighbouring boroughs too.

Although we missed the celebrations for her 125th Birthday, we managed to sail straight past her Ladyship on our (free) trip out to Staten Island. Apparently there were massive fireworks and all the hoo haa’s going on but due to lack of advertising… the most important guests (us South Africans) were not invited. The ferry to Staten Island is free of charge and is a great alternative to getting up close and personal with the Statue without forking out masses of dollars to actually ferry to the Liberty Island. The authorities swiftly closed her off for renovation that evening so even if you did want to visit… she’ll be closed for a year whilst they give her a change of clothes… anyway oxidised copper green is so last century.

Sunset from Battery Park looking out towards Lady Liberty.

After dragging ourselves through the security and queues to get into the recently opened September 11th memorial park at the site of “Ground Zero” we were pleasantly surprised by a moving (in motion and emotionally) tribute to the memory of those lost on that fateful day in 2011. We visited another memorial for the lost Staten Island residents, they’ve done well to create some very beautiful and impressive monuments.

Parading revellers filled the streets of Greenwich Village on the Lower West Side, from eyeballs to skeletons and everything in between. The only thing more impressive were the everyday people who turned up in their thousands to spectate. Easily the biggest fancy-dress party we’ve ever been to.

Greenwich Village was running amok with all sorts of ghoulish characters, at one point we even saw The Incredible Hulk but that may have been the costume that he wears most days… There are all sorts down there…

It was our first proper Halloween and I’d made it a personal mission to carve a pumpkin. After missioning about in the crowded streets of the Village we managed to find this squash at Wholefoods and he turned out to be a fairly cheerful chap. So we named him Jedidiah!

And so with a couple of days left of the URT we head back to the original Empire and to Family and friends in Knapp Hill, London and Worcester… so close! 6 months has disappeared!

T & D

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31 Oct 2011 · 3:20 AM

October Snow

Yesterday we ventured out with Helen to Bethel to the sight of the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969. When we left New York City it was cold but the drive was beautiful with the colourful Fall leaves lining the highway. As we arrived in Bethel it was lightly snowing, and I was ecstatic, jumping around in the little snowflakes, but they were melting pretty fast… After the very interesting walk through the Bethel Center for the Arts Woodstock exhibition, we came outside to find a blanket of snow almost 2 inches thick! It continued to snow and we drove through wonderful white forests, made angels and threw snowballs. Sadly though, we had to leave and we realised that the snow was not going to stop. It continued well into the night and caused chaos on the roads. Many cars were sliding off the road and buried under a pile of snow. We got stuck in a traffic jam for 4 hours only to be turned around, then we drove down a mountain pass (on the GPS’ recommendation) and found the road was closed so we had to reverse back up the steep hill. Eventually, we made it back to the city and found that there was even an inch of snow that fell in Central Park, the first October snow since records began in 1869! Here are some photos to show you our snowy adventure

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27 Oct 2011 · 6:10 AM

Dabbling in DC

Washington, the Capital City, perfectly manicured, museum city and political epicentre to the max… but if you scratch around it’s also home to great bookshops, art galleries, friendly people and wonderful food. Our trip in December/January 2009/10 allowed us to get most of the tourist stuff out the way and that meant that this time we managed far less but enjoyed it just as much.

Jean Pierre, a friend of my dad, let us stay in his immaculate apartment in NW and right on New York Avenue with views to the Capitol and the Washington Monument. A surreal feeling of “you’ve arrived” fell over us and we almost forgot that we were two backpackers travelling around the world on a shoestring.

: Chateau DC

After extending our stay by an extra night, because MEGABUS is so organised, we had two full days in the city and were resolved to make the best of it!

There were a few things that we had planned to do, including some of the Smithsonian Museums and also made a turn at the Hirshhorn Museumon the mall.

: Underneath the Hirshhorn

The gallery, if you are not familiar, is a rotunda with a hollow centre, allowing for three levels with two circular walls open for their exhibits. This provides the best possible space to view Andy Warhol’s Shadows that is on exhibition for the first time in it’s entirety until the end of January next year. My explanation of the gallery makes sense when you see this mega artwork in the flesh. He (Andy) referred to it as one painting, made up of 102 pieces, and it encircles about ¾ of the gallery space, almost 140 meters (that’s the artwork, not the gallery). It is a reproduction of shadows in his studio and is once again reproduced in hand painted and silkscreened images in the bright colours that he is known for. It seems pretty simple at first and then you realise how much work must have gone into producing art of this magnitude. And it just looks pretty cool too!

The Air and Space Museum didn’t disappoint either with a new exhibit (since we were last there) of the Hubble Space Telescope and many of the images that were captured by its deep field imager. Spectacular!

We wandered from Dupont circle, having beers at Afterwords Café in Kramer Books – to Georgetown and the many shops of M Street. We people watched at the front gate of the White House and we sat in the sun at the steps of the Capitol, enjoying the fact that it was still in the plusses and not as unbearably cold as last time! And we ate Mussels and drank South African wine at a beautiful Belgian restaurant with Jean Pierre. He really looked after us and let our travel wary bodies relax a bit.

: Only the best!

One more thing worth telling y’all about was a photographic exhibition at the National Geographic Society’s M Street gallery. The photographer, Brian Skerry, is a marine photographer with a career spanning 30+ years. I will let the photos on his website do the talking but if you are in DC soon, make a beeline for 17th Street Northwest and have a look at these unbelievable shots.

Although we did manage to fit quite a lot in, we left DC with a longing to spend some more time there. We would have loved to see the snow, the leaves falling off the trees and the Christmas lights. But New York doesn’t wait for anybody, and Halloween this year is going to be a definite TREAT!

: DC’s fantastic Metro

: Chinatown

: It’s smaller than the one in Austin, Texas!

: DC Row

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Tagged as america, District of Colombia, round the world, rtw, travel, Ultimate round trip, URT, USA, Washington DC

23 Oct 2011 · 2:18 AM

Leaf Peepers

North Carolina is beautiful in the Fall. Just thought I would get that out of the way, although I might say it again. You may think stopping in North Carolina is slightly random when you think about all the major stops we have made on our trip across the States, and it is, I guess. However, we had a few good reasons to stop off on our way from Florida to D.C: The Gurneys in Asheville and the Olivers in Cary… and of course the Fall leaves!

Fall in Asheville

When we arrived in Cary on the train on Monday morning, we were picked up by Enterprise Car Rental to go and get our car. We decided to drive the five hours down to Asheville to visit the Gurneys and to see the apparently gorgeous Fall leaves changing colour. It just so happened that the weekend that we arrive in NC, was the best Fall colours that Asheville had had in many years! Finally, we arrived in a city on time

Our little Beetle

Well, they were gorgeous. I am a huge fan of the shades of green, brown, yellow, orange and red that appear in this season and I have always dreamed of walking down the streets lined with big piles of brown leaves and I love the way they fly up and ‘dance’ every time a car drives past. We were so engrossed by the colours and the beauty, we might as well have been one of the Leafers, or Leaf Peepers who travel thousands of miles to follow the Fall foliage right from the Rockys to the South.

The Gurneys welcomed us with open arms and as I have heard is the norm, made us feel right at home straight away. They have two beautiful big Saint Bernard girls, who we immediately fell in love with, especially as we are really missing our canine friends back home! And so began a lovely relaxing and comfortable few days in Asheville. We ate way too much but the food was oh-so-yummy and we were even treated to real home-made boerewors rolls for dinner. That is one thing that no South African can ever forget, proper perfectly spiced sausages cooked on the fire until juicy and served on a roll with tomato sauce. Both the Gurneys and my family, the Olivers, make their own boerewors, biltong (beef jerky) and droewors (dried sausage) with real South African spices.

Sweet Sophia

Beautiful Bella

While we were in Asheville we had to sample the local fare too, so off we went to Tupelo Honey Café for good ol’ Southern cuisine. And what great cuisine it was. From the shrimp and grits, a maize meal type of starch (much like ‘mielie pap’) but made with goats cheese for extra creamy flavour, to the BBQ pulled pork, the Southerners certainly know how to make comfort food! And to top it all off, they apparently make great beer here too, which T confirmed after a delicious lunch at the local brewery, The Lab.

Lunch with the Gurneys at the Lab

*Side Note: When travelling in the USA, remember that the drinking age of 21 years old is strictly enforced. So much so that using a South African drivers licence as a form of age ID can be refused at certain places, so it is worth carrying your passport around if you’re going to be drinking. But only if you’re responsible enough not to lose it along the way!!!*

Of course, no visit to Asheville would be complete without a trip to the Blue Ridge Parkway, or two. From up on this smooth tarred, cyclist’s mecca, one can see the miles and miles of rolling mountains and the blanket of trees in the shades of Fall colours. Unfortunately for me, the second trip up the Mount Pisgah was detrimental to my already weak ankle. While taking a stroll down ‘Graveyard Fields’ to the lower waterfall, I managed to slip and twist my ankle yet again, which left me squealing in pain and frustration and T trying to help me back up to the car. Nevertheless, an afternoon cuddled up on the couch with my ankle iced and resting did it good and by the time we made it back to Cary on Thursday evening, I was at least hobbling on it.

Fall colours on the Blue Ridge Parkway

Out on the Blue Ridge Parkway!

Cary is a small town, but fairly affluent and beautiful too. The whole town has stuck to the theme of red brick facades and big old Southern structures, which makes for very picturesque scenery. Sadly, I either left my camera at home (Shock and horror!!!) or my camera battery died during the few days in Cary, so I have little to no photos of the actual town.

As the Olivers are my mothers cousins, and the last time we met was when I was just 7 years old, it was fantastic to catch up on their lives and exchange family news. And of course we were treated to delicious home-cooked food, including more boerie rolls, and a warm comfy bed. Being a small town, there really isn’t much to do in the area, and to be honest, we’re a little tired of the Natural History museums now so we spent the day catching up with news, having lattes and pastries and even drove around Raleigh to see the university and the State Capital building.

Saying goodbye to our family in Cary

But… in the evening we ventured out into the cold (me wrapped up in borrowed winter woollies) to experience a Corn Maze! Yes, you read it right, we went out into the corn fields and had to find ten numbers hidden in the maze. It was so much fun! We were hot-footing it in between sheaths of corn 8ft tall, with a torch and a flag in case we lost our way. If you did get lost, you were supposed to hold up your flag and a man perched on the top of a crane in the middle of the field, would point you in the correct direction. I don’t know how much attention he was really paying though, and you had to be a little dim not to be able to follow the sounds of the road to get out of it in any case. Nevertheless, a great time was had by all, and we even went on a tractor ride around the field, now I haven’t done that in years!!!

Dramatic clouds along the road to Cary

Now, we’re on the Megabus up to Washington D.C for a couple of nights and then on Tuesday we hit our last stop on the USA leg of our trip, New York City!

D x

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20 Oct 2011 · 6:45 PM

Featured on Duty Free Canada

We were pleasantly surprised to see that we have been featured on the Duty Free Canada website this morning! Although we’re not entirely sure how they came across our site, and also how they came to conclusion that T gave up his career to travel Nevertheless, its always nice to get some free publicity!

We’ve been enjoying a few days of comfort in beautiful Asheville, so look out for our next post and gorgeous photos of the Fall foliage.

D x

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19 Oct 2011 · 5:53 PM

Florida Flew By

The first thing we were confronted with in Daytona Beach was the thousands and thousands of motorcycles…Biktoberfest 2011. This is a ten-day festival where bikers from all over the country ride down to Daytona Beach and take over the streets. We couldn’t stay with our friend Veenen as he was already staying with a friend, so we used the Couch Surfing website and this time we were really lucky! We arrived at our hosts door and felt immediately at home, David opened his home for us even while his mum was visiting and he had another three couch surfers at the time. If there is one thing I love, its busy home Once we had rid our selves of our backpacks and said our hellos, we decided to take a walk down to the Main Street which was conveniently located a few blocks from David’s house.

Our Couch Surfing host, David and fellow Couch Surfer, Naomi

When I said the bikes take over the streets, I really mean they are everywhere. The Main St was blocked off entirely so that the spectators could walk around and ogle the bikes, and the bikers could rev their engines all the way down the road. It was fun though, to watch the posers and the biker girls showing off J, or maybe they were just showing their girls off and the bikes were just secondary.

Biketoberfest!

Saturday started out slow, but we took the bus out to the Daytona International Speedway to see the massive track. It was built in 1959 and the track is 4km long. By far the most impressive spec of this motor racing stadium is it’s crowd capacity, 167 785 people squeeze themselves into the park to watch a bunch of cars make 800 left turns! Crazy!

Daytona International Speedway

This day though the bikers were king, choppers and Harleys and “Crotch Rockets” all over the place in as many colours that you can imagine. Along with all of the retail that goes with the festival, it’s a biker’s heaven where they can add to their badges on their jackets or buy a new faring with iPod and Navigation support. The beer was flowing and the sun was out so the cops had a lots to keep them busy. We saw a couple of blokes picking up their bikes because they’d lost the ability to keep them rubber side down.

The real reason we made our way over to Daytona was to catch up with The Incredible V, turns out he makes for a great superhero name too. Ourmate who has been studying to be a commercial pilot for 4 years at Embry-Riddle the premier aeronautical university in the States. And catch up we did, starting with some beers at the biker-flooded beach bar Ocean Deck. It’s worth a visit for it’s evening time karaoke and pitcher specials but it was a bunfight with all of the tattooed and hefty making a rager out of their weekend at Biketober! We did manage to produce a long winded and detailed account of the URT thus far and talked away, and drank a bit too much… oops, all in good fun eh! Damned pitcher specials!

Catching up at the Ocean Deck

Rocking out with the bikers at the Ocean Deck

Sunday bloody sunday! Flying day and the weather was splendid! We headed out to ERAU mid morning and Veenen set about getting us ramp badges and headsets, he was decked out in his instructors uniform complete with epaulets and we were both quite impressed to see how professional he’s become! Such a champ! After a pre flight inspection of the plane we started her up and Dom taxi’d us down the ramp and to the runway. And then it was full power and Ven let her take off too, just pulled back on the yoke and we were up in the air! I can say how exciting it is to do because I was the one sitting up front on the way back to Riddle. We headed North and landed up at Flagler County Airport where V parked up the plane and we followed the air traffic controllers direction and enjoyed our lunch. Highjackers, the diner right on the runway is known for it’s burgers and we got stuck in to their seasoned fries and hush puppies too… So goood!

Flying!!

Unfortunately we had to have the aircraft back by 16h00 so we headed back up, Ven showed us some cool stuff the plane could do and also some of the surrounding area from the air and we headed back to land at Daytona Beach. It’s an incredible thing to fly the plane but in such a small craft you feel all of the bumps and by the time we were about to land I was feeling a bit nauseated so I was glad to be back and at the same time sad that it was all coming to an end. It was such an amazing day and reminded me of how much I missed by bike back home because flying is what V does and we could see how stoked he was when he was up there!

Embry Riddle Cessna 172 N454ER

We spent the rest of the afternoon/evening back at Mai Tai’s cocktail bar having beer and Lava Flows and saying cheers to Veenen. And as the bus system is so shocking, our original plan was thwarted by the route being closed on Sundays so our amazing hosts David and his mum drove us the 40 minutes to Deland to catch our train.

Daytona was super fun, bikes, beer, flying, burgers and catching up with a great friend! We both wished we could have stayed longer!

Great day out!

D & T

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18 Oct 2011 · 6:21 AM

Kissimmee Quick

Arriving in Orlando after a 15-hour bus trip, we found that the air was more humid here and it smelled a lot like the heat of India. Two hour-long city buses later, we arrived in Kissimmee, where we had booked a couple of nights in a cheap hostel, Palm Lakefront Resort.

Sunset over the lake behind the hostel

Driving through Disneyworld was a highlight and brought back fantastic memories of my time in the States with my family in 2000. The hostel was a nice change from the usual as we now had a nice clean private room for under $40 per night. We actually arranged to stay in Orlando to visit another high school friend, Paul, but we soon realised that we were quite a way from his house, with no way of getting to him. A few phonecalls later and the plan was that he would pick us up the following afternoon and we would spend the second night at his house in Lake Wales.

That evening however, the wheels fell off the bus. It is not often that we actually tell of the bad times in these posts, mostly because they’re so few

Big truck fun at the Old Town theme park

and far between and also because its not fun to read the negative bits. Nevertheless, there are times when traveling around the world for six months actually starts to get to you and this was one of those times. I know, you’re thinking, “you’re the luckiest people in the world seeing so many places and amazing things”, and I do agree, I really do appreciate how lucky we are… but just because someone’s problems seem smaller in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t mean they aren’t real, right? Anyway, getting back to the story, I honestly couldn’t tell you what set it all off, but I was miserable that night and Trist came to my rescue. After just missing the bus to Downtown Disney, and me throwing a fit, we waited a while longer and a different bus came along. It was all for the best though because we took that bus instead and ended up spending a great evening wandering around the Old Town theme park and watching the people on the bumper cars and the roller coaster scream and whoop! And I went to bed with a smile on my face.

The next morning though, we had a call from Paul to say he was in hospital with a stomach infection and so plans had to change. So then you realise that things could be worse. We were really indecisive about what to do, whether to take up the offer of going down to Lake Wales with a friend of Pauls and visiting him in hospital, or staying another night in Kissimmee and hopefully seeing him the following day if he was out of hospital. In the end we chose the latter option and spent the day exploring Downtown Disney, the only fee free ‘park’ in Disneyworld. It is mostly just shops and restaurants, but it is quite a fun place to wander around and get the Disney feel. It’s not often you get a night off on trips like these either, so we took the opportunity to make dinner at the hostel and watch some TV that evening.

Walking down the road in Downtown Disney

The Lego Dragon at Downtown Disney

We were glad we chose to stay the extra night in Kissimmee because it actually gave us time to plan more of the USA leg of our trip. We have been trying to make decisions about where to go and how long to spend in each place as we are coming up to our last two weeks here in the States! We made the decision to spend the weekend in Daytona Beach to see our great friend Veenen while he was not working, and then head up to North Carolina on the train after that!

Luckily for all of us, Paul did end up getting out of hospital and came up to Kissimmee to meet up and have a catch up. It has been really fun to see a lot of our high school and college friends who have moved away from SA! We took a drive up to the Universal City Walk in Orlando and after getting a leeetle lost on the way, we spent a couple of hours chatting and checking out the themed restaurants in the park.

At Universal with Paul

And then, it was time to go again. We had packed all of our luggage (it’s building up now) into the trunk of Paul’s car and he dropped us at Orlando International just in time for us to catch the shuttle bus to Daytona Beach You become pretty resourceful when traveling on a budget, so when we found out we could take an hour-long shuttle to Daytona, instead of paying double the fee for a flight or a taxi (there is no public bus route), we jumped on and off we went!

That’s the just of our visit to Orlando, I know its far from the usual adventures, but that’s life hey, ups and downs. Just wait until you see what we have to tell you about in our next post

D x

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13 Oct 2011 · 1:01 AM

The Big Easy

New Orleans is not called ‘The Big Easy’ for nothing… This city is chilled out to the max. From the blues and jazz on every corner in the French Quarter, to the laid back street cars rolling along on their own schedule. The epitome of this being after eight when every second car is heading back to the ‘station’ for the night.

Our time in NOLA, New Orleans Louisiana, was just as laid back, and for a change we forgot about our big rush to see everything we could and rather relaxed into the city. We were supposed to leave on Monday evening but extended our stay one more night. We slept late, ate a lot of great food, listened to some great live music and walked around taking in the Southern atmosphere ’til our feet were aching!

Jazzing it up in Bourbon Street

NOLA has an interesting fascination with anything haunted or spooky, so you’ll find Haunted House tours, Voodoo gift shops and a lot of cemeteries. The cemeteries are interesting places to visit especially because not many cities boast their cemeteries as attractions for tourists. These cemeteries are in fact pretty interesting, owing to the fact that New Orleans is built below sea level and the water table is very high. Add to that the risk of flooding in this area and it makes burying your loved ones a difficult task, unless you want to see them float up to the surface to say howdy again. They solved this issue by burying bodies in family tombs and also in three layer mausoleums above the ground. A lady we met on the train put it fairly graphically when she said that they bury a body and within a year the body has already decomposed because of the climate down here. So when they next bury a family member they just push the body over and the remains fall through a grate so they can put the next one in there! Pretty gruesome!

It gets better… If two family members die within a year of each other, the second one can be put in a temporary tomb until the remains can be moved to the family grave. At least you get to have some different neighbours for a while! We visited a few cemeteries and found it morbidly fascinating to see the old and broken tombs with inscriptions of hundreds of peoples names on them. Many of the tombs date back to the 1800′s. One tomb which stuck out was that of Marie Laveau and her family. Her and her daughter, Marie Laveau II, were very well loved people in their day and were also practitioners of the popular Voodoo practices in those days. Even now people still leave gifts at their tombs in hope that they will grant their wishes.

Family tombs in St Louis Cemetery No. 2

There are a few main areas to see in the city, the French Quarter, the Garden District, Uptown and the Riverwalk, amongst a few others. The French Quarter is by far the busiest and most touristed area, and for good reason. This is the home of the famous Bourbon Street, and a few other beautiful old laneways full of antique shops and cafes. Live music is the drug of choice in this city, with live bands playing all over the quarter every night of the week. One street in particular is popular amongst the twenty-somethings is Frenchmen Street where brass bands and jazz musicians play in small joints with cheap drinks and no cover charge. Here you can get your fix and not break the bank. Bourbon Street is fun and definitely worth a visit, especially to get a signature Hurricane from Pat O’Brien’s, but the drinks are generally overpriced and quite frankly, it smells funky.

Enjoying a signature Hurricane at Pat O'Brien's with a souvenir glass!

The Garden District and Uptown are situated on the St Charles Streetcar line, so you can hop on the one side and go all the way to the end and then come back to the French Quarter. It is a beautiful old area, lots of Southern homes and lots of money. We wandered around the Garden District for a little while but to be honest, if you don’t have money to spend in the little shops and cafes, its more fun to be in the French Quarter. Uptown is beautiful just to look at the houses and we stopped off at the University to gape at the massive old stone buildings and big old trees in the squares. An inspiring place to study, that’s for sure.

St Charles Streetcar

Along the Riverwalk there are the normal popular tourist attractions such as the Aquarium and also an Insectarium situated a little way down Canal Street. However, as I said, we took it really easy so we didn’t do any of those things, but we did stumble upon one cool event, the New Orleans leg of the Redbull Mississippi Grind. An ingenious idea by the guys at Redbull, to put a skateboarding park on a barge and float it down the Mississippi river holding contests at various stops along the way! We watched a bit if the competition on the first day and decided to go back to watch the finals along with the local skateboarders of New Orleans the following day. We spent Sunday afternoon whooping and cheering as 8 skaters aged 14 through 23 competed for $2000 and the chance to be the best skater to set foot on the barge! The great thing was that Redbull also donated the skate park to the city for all of New Orleans’ skaters to enjoy!

Skating tricks at the Redbull Mississippi Grind

The hostel we stayed in, called India House Hostel, was really nice and just a block away from the Canal Street Streetcar line, so it was easy to get to the French Quarter from there. It has a nice big kitchen and lots of fridge space so you’re able to cook your own stuff, and it also sells good local food for $5 per plate in the evenings. Great for lazy tourists who are sick of fast food Although, we did come across a great restaurant called Cafe Maspero on the corner of Decatur and Toulousse Streets, which had fantastic food, massive portions and $1 Strawberry Daiquiris, could you ask for more?:)

Cafe Maspero, great food, great value!

Lastly, a visit to New Orleans wouldn’t be complete without a visit to Cafe Du Monde, a French-style cafe which started out as a 24-hour coffee stand in the 1860′s still serving cafe au lait and hot beignets. Beignets are french-style doughnuts which arrive in a bowl full of icing sugar. They are delicious! We also found some creative things to do with our leftover icing sugar Oh and of course, a visit to the everything-Tabasco shop, where they sell, you guessed it, everything that you can think of with Tabasco!

Icing sugar was just too hard to resist

Next time we go back I’d love to take a horse and carriage tour of the city, eat more beignets and maybe spend some more time exploring those galleries on Royal Street! For now though, thats all we had time for, but it was a great few days in the Big Easy!:)

Sadly we’ve entered the last month of the URT trip, but it is coming to the point when we are missing those little comforts of home. However, we still have lots to see and after another long bus trip we have arrived in Orlando and we’re thinking about checking out the Disney nightlife this evening!

D x

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Tagged as Bourbon Street, budget backpacking, French Quarter, New Orleans, Pat O'Brien's, round the world, rtw, the Ultimate round trip, travel blog, URT, USA, World trip

09 Oct 2011 · 4:12 AM

Austinists

We had too little time in this city… and that is an understatement.

First however, some bitching and moaning has to be dished out! We arrived in the airport after flying for only 4 and a half hours from San Diego that effectively took all day considering the 3 hour layover in Denver and the 3 hour time difference. Add to that, Frontier Airlines managed to break Dom’s backpack after we’d managed to drag it through some of the roughest places on Earth intact! Feel better now!

Broken rucksacks aside and after a bit of a walk, we found our hostel in a great spot on the edge of the river and set about deliberating over whether or not to go out into the city. Our choice not to was a bad one, but I’m getting ahead of myself now.

I enjoy a good hostel and this one was one of the best. That said, it really is in a city that is completely suited to young travellers like us. The staff at HI Austin have gone out of their way to bring the sights and sounds to their guests, the receptionists are awesome and the hostel has all the live music, bars and places to visit posted up on a board that’s updated daily!

There was a reason to go to Austin, TX, that wasn’t to do with the great nightlife and vibe… and that was Mellow Johnny’s bike shop. Some may

Cyclists Mecca

say that it’s a pilgrimage, and it certainly is. There’s not a cyclist in the world toddy who can say that they don’t know who Lance Armstrong is… if they’re a fan or not, he has made a massive impact on modern day cycling both as an inspiration and as a leader in technology and change in the cycling world. Let me not digress… MJ’s was super fun! They have a great shop that has all of the latest tech with a lot of great history and the most amazing collection of bikes of all shapes and sizes thanks to Lance’s obsession (not dissimilar to my own except without a budget).

Bicycles and more!

One of Lance Armstrong's bikes

MJ’s also rents bikes out so we took a couple and rode around the city for the afternoon, riding down the side of the river and up 6^th street which is the most happening street in a very happening city. After dropping the bikes off we settled down on the side of the river to watch one of the largest urban bat colonies head out for their nocturnal business. It was quite a sight with black clouds of bats contrasting the sunset.

Bats coming from the Congress Bridge

From a beautiful evening on the river, we made our way to 6^th Street to take on a bit of the Austin nightlife. 6^th Street was already live so we sat up on the balcony at Iron Cactus for a frozen margarita and Texas’ own Lone Star beer.. Not to be called boring, we finished up and headed to a bar called Friends in search of some decent live music and discovered Swamp Sauce who were kicking up a great din and we jived along before calling it a night.

Swamp Sauce at Friends

We had to head out to New Orleans the next evening by train so we spent the morning on a walking tour of the city with the indefatigable Harrison Epright, a self confessed Anglophile, who led us on a historical tour of note. After a far less informative tour of the City’s Capitol (quite impressive) State building we headed back to the hostel to pack up and head off to the Austin Amtrack station where passed the time listening to a young girl with verbal diarrhoea tell her life story to a old lady with a serious case of hypochondria. Isn’t America fun!

The Texas State Capitol Building

Like I said, Austin was great fun and we felt like we could have stayed there for much longer. I suppose that’s another reason to take a trip around the world… to find the places that you want t return to!

We survived a 20-hour train trip and made some friends along the way! We are currently enjoying the vibey city of New Orleans!

T.B.S O.U.T!

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Tagged as Austin, budget backpackers, New Orleans, photo, rtw, Swamp Sauce, the Ultimate round trip, travel blog, travel photos, URT, USA