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More Tales From American Bars
In our short stay in the well heeled wine country town of Napa we were to fall in love with Downtown Joe’s, one of many bars around the World which have etched themselves into our travel memories. Our first call there though was ahead of the fun of nighttime and was instead in the bright afternoon sunshine, outdoors rather than in its welcoming interior. As ever, it doesn’t take long to get into conversation, the guy in the Santana T-shirt at the next table was soon in conversation, welcoming us to the state he loves and interested to know who we are, where we come from. Not long into our…
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Looking Back And Planning Forward
Our garden looks strange as we take our first look at it after 12 weeks away. So much has died in the unusually hot and dry summer, but the heavy rain which has now fallen in the last few days has turned all the dead stuff into an untidy grey. Green patches try their best, but there is precious little colour and the whole garden looks a kind of damp monochrome with splashes of green paint. Within minutes of our arrival home, we are alerted to the drama unfolding at Balmoral and, around four hours later, the Queen’s death is confirmed. As the BBC plays the national anthem Michaela and…
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The Grandest Of Canyons
It’s only ten days since we crossed off a bucket list item with the seaplane flight over San Francisco, and now here we are boarding our first ever helicopter with pen metaphorically poised to cross off another. Is there conceivably a better place to do this than here at the Grand Canyon? A brief walk to the Bright Angel trailhead on the day of our arrival has given us our first glimpses of this wonder of the world, so our excitement levels as we receive our safety briefings are absolutely off the scale. There’s a short delay to check the craft – a bird has hit the windshield on its…
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A Ghost Town, Route 66 And Rock ‘n’ Roll: Yosemite-Barstow-Arizona
It’s not hard to work out why we chose the town of Barstow, and the Route 66 Motel, as our overnight stay on our longest drive of this trip. A Route 66 town? Route 66 Motel? Classic cars preserved in the motel grounds…why wouldn’t you?? The route from Yosemite to Barstow is ridiculously diverse: first the mountains of Yosemite, then the richly verdant fruit farm regions, then the flatlands as the world becomes more and more spartan. Once past Bakersfield, Spanish language signs reappear, something we didn’t see to the same extent in Northern California but are commonplace down here. Over the mountains we go, dropping next into the Mojave…
