Memphis, the Birthplace of Rock n' Roll

After doing some looking Meg "Mega-planner" Muhle found us a reasonably priced campsite just across the road from Graceland (Elvis' home up until his death), out back of Heartbreak Hotel. We rolled into town an hour or so after dark and set up our tent across the alley from row after row of extremely nice RVs. It seems being a bit older, having alot of money and being an Elvis fan are heavily correlated.

Our tent is a tad pathetic in this world

Our first night in the campsite was a little unnerving. It was a little windy, not alot windy, but enough that, combined with the gigantic tree laying torn from the ground beside us (Memphis was somewhat hit by the tornadoes down south), I decided to move the tent away from a big cottonwood beside us sometime around midnight. The tree didn't collapse in the end, nor did I sleep any better, so my efforts were for nought, though I did manage to irritate Meg a bit. The next morning we awoke to a pleasant surprise...we headed over to the shelter area to have breakfast to find that we had a 24 hour Elvis radio station playing in overhead speakers. With a little "Suspicious Minds" and "Hound Dog" to get us in the mood we were stoked to head straight over to do the Graceland tour.

It was amazing how big the trees were that got knocked over

The house ended up being sort of a weird place. Definitely different from what you would expect a rich and famous person to own nowadays. To start, the house wasn't very big, maybe a bit bigger than the house I grew up in. Also, if a person were to buy and move into the house it would probably be viewed as a fixer upper. The first thing to go would probably be the long green shag carpet in the living room, off the floor and the ceiling. Maybe next would be the mirrors that lined many of the hallways and staircases. The racket ball court could stay. I don't know, maybe Elvis' house represents a 60s decorating sense combined with no financial limitations, or maybe it was tacky even back then. Other highlights include his weird wood carved "African" room furniture, entertainment room with three televisions and a giant white couch. A nice thing was the room he had for his parents to live in. Actually, as we got to reading and learning more about Elvis he seemed like a nicer and nicer guy: one of his first big purchases when he started making money was a new house for his parents, at the age of 22 he bought his parents old house and property in Tupelo, Mississippi on the condition that it be turned into a park (his parents had had to give up the house because they couldn't make payments after his dad, Vernon, changed the value of a cheque from $4 to $14 in order to make ends meet), and throughout his life he donated to charities. Maybe he did a bunch of bad things as well, but they aren't heavily advertised at the Presley fan sites. Aside from the mansion, we also checked out a bunch of Elvis' cars , clothes, jewelery and his two airplanes.

The famous Graceland

Living room...ridiculously over the top everything, though it's hard to capture

TV room, including 3 mega-sized TVs...and no, they are not flat screen

Lisa Marie plane...this is only one of many rooms

Thank you, thank you very much

Getting up to speed with Elvis took the better part of the morning and early afternoon. After a quick lunch we hopped on a free shuttle (another bonus of our campsite location) downtown to Sun Studios to do a tour. Sun Studios is where Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Louis and Carl Perkins and a bunch of other artists got their start. The tour was great and was led by a really energetic guide who, along with telling us the history of the studio and stories of the artists, also played a bunch of firsts for us: First Rock n' Roll song "Rocket '88", first Elvis recording (some gospel music), and a bit of the "Million Dollar Quartet" session. After the tour we figured we had had about enough music history for one day and made our way home. We also wanted to try out a restaurant that Jaci and Larry had recommended. They watched a show called "Diners, Drive-ins,and Dives" and it had a restaurant from Memphis on it that was famous for it's Barbeque. We figured it was a must do and programmed the GPS to lead us to Tom's BBQ. It was a worthwhile adventure, the ribs really were the best we had ever had, and the owner Tom was a really nice guy and popped by and talked with us for a few minutes and gave us a free dessert. We didn't really need the dessert as we were already overfull from dinner, but it was a nice gesture.

Thanks Jaci and Larry for the awesome recommendation!

We awoke the next morning and went for a nice run to work off all the calories we had eaten the night before. The next morning, after a bit of a run to work off a bit of the food from the night before, we were on the road again. To eat more Barbeque. In fact the whole reason we took a bit of a zig-zag route route through Tennessee (if we had hit Nashville first we would have saved a few hours of driving) was to hit the World Championship BBQ Competition. We spent the whole day wandering through the dozens, if not hundreds, of tents. Some of the tents were for vendors selling BBQ related paraphernalia, some for food stalls, but the bulk of the tents were for competitors. The competition categories ranged from pork shoulders to pork ribs to Whole pigs. The event was very pig cooking centric. They did have awards for cooking chickens, sauces, coleslaw and baked beans, but they really seemed to be side events. Something funny about the pig theme was that the team names were all had pig in them, all the team logos had smiling pigs in them, and there was a transvestite Miss Piggy dress up competition. But, as the pictures below can attest to, there were no actually happy pigs at the event. Only dead ones. Aside from walking around aimlessly Meg and I got to be part of the peoples choice judging for pork shoulders. This was a fairly disorganized affair: it is a little hard to describe how it was set up and how it went wrong, but suffice it to say in the end we were supposed to have five samples and both Meg and I had about eight and in the end I never voted. That was our only taste of theBBQ'd food unfortunately, we didn't really catch on till too late the politics of the tents. The idea was that each tent had a finite number of passes to let people in, most went to family and friends of the cookers and then at the cookers discretion the rest of the tickets were given out. We had a few chances to get in with some of the teams but didn't really catch on until too late that if we didn't accept offers we would be stuck with nowhere to go at the end of the day. A few places were sort of little clubs that you could pay to go into, but we weren't really in the mood to ramp it up that much (and we had to drive home). So we watched the winners of the chicken category get their award and go ballistic (I think the teams were already into the drink pretty heavy by that point), caught a bit of live music and headed home, crossing paths with alot of well dressed folks just heading in to start a big night of partying.

Porkfiction...why not?

Another BBQ team...there were many different theme tents

Whole hog prep...hogs, hogs, everywhere

Rib time...a minute fraction of the meat that was cooking!

Meg is a cultural chameleon.

The next day, we were back to being serious. Our first stop was the Civil Rights Museum. The museum included the actual hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Much of the museum focused on MLKs life, fair enough considering his huge impact on the movement, though it also included a history starting all the way from slavery. The exhibits were all interesting and helped Meg and I gain some more insight into the civil rights movement, but the section focusing on Martin Luther King Jr. was really moving. He was such a great orator and he was so brave in the face of the threats against him that we were saddened at his loss even 40 years on. There was a final section of the museum that was a little unfortunate. An entire wing is dedicated to a conspiracy theory questioning the official theory on who killed MLK and why it was done. In the end you just get the feeling that people can be very unreliable when questioned several years apart.

After that we headed off for some more music history in the Rock n' Soul museum. The museum was great! It followed the progression of southern music from the cotton fields all the way through to the Beatles to contemporary bands that have recorded music in Memphis to capture the feeling of the city. The museum included tonnes of recordings that could be listened to along the way to demonstrate people and milestones in the history of the Memphis music scene. One of our big take aways from the experience was how many artists in the south who are big names started off dirt poor and often as children of sharecroppers on cotton fields. Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King.

We closed down that museum and wandered the streets of Memphis for a bit. The city was a little flooded, though not badly in the downtown area and around many of the tourist attractions, so we were able to see everything we wanted to. It seemed like much of the town shut down early so we made our way to Beale Street. Beale street was at one point a big party place for local blacks in Memphis and has overtime changed to a touristy party street. There are no cars allowed down a few blocks of the street, alot of live music, and even more beer joints. We grabbed a beer, sat on the street corner listening to music for a few minutes, and then checked out a few gift shoppes before calling it another full day in Memphis.

Flooding along the river

Beale Street at night...party central, at least for tourists

The next day was Sunday, so naturally first things first we headed to church. No, really we did. We attended a service of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, the church of Al Green. At some point during his music career Al Green left soul music to become a preacher and we were keen to see him. Upon arriving at the church and seeing that all of the regular attendees were dressed up extremely nicely, we realized that our cargo pants and t-shirts were not going to cut it. After Meg informed me that, no, we could not change in the church parking lot, we zoomed around the corner to an empty lot, changed and were still back by 11:30. It turns out that church started at 11. This wasn't really our fault as the website indicated 11:30. I am not too sure what we missed, but Al Green was not yet present and the folks up front were still talking about Sunday school so I can't imagine too much. The start of the service ended up being the best part actually. We got to witness a couple young fellows getting baptized and then a pre-preacher came up and gave a fairly rousing sermon that had alot of folks in the audience yelling "Amens". There was also some great singing from the choir and, as I was secretly hoping, a few people were up in the aisles really getting into it. And then Al Green came out. I have to admit that I was curious about a few things before he came out. For example, how could the famous Al Green only fill about 30% of a pretty small church with regular parishioners (Another 30% of the seats were filled with gawkers like us, you could tell because they were white). That question was soon answered when Bishop Reverend Al Green came out and after some incomprehensible garble started asking all the visitors in the room where they were from., ALL of them. I can imagine that as a local I would rather not spend the better part of my morning hearing that some joker from Vancouver was visiting my church. Then Al Green proceeded to talk about how nobody believed that Al Green would last even 43 seconds, let alone 43 years. As I sat there a little bored I got to imaging whether he had this same shtick every Sunday, right from the beginning.

"Nobody believes Al Green would last even 42 seconds, let alone 42 years"

"Nobody believes Al Green would last even 4 seconds, let alone 4 years"

...

"Nobody believes Al Green would last even 30 seconds, well it just happened!"

I was starting to see why he had such a small congregation. He then told a baby to shut up, "Shut Up Baby!", talked a bit more about himself, sang a little bit, complained about teenage boys with low pants (the girl in front us approved of this comment, "Mmmm Hmmmm that's right") and then had the congregation read a section of the bible. All in all I was pretty happy to get out of there.

We had packed our bags and tent before going to church, but had one last stop in Memphis before we headed out. After hearing all about these musicians coming from cotton backgrounds we decided to visit the Cotton Museum. The museum was setup in what was once the equivalent of the stock market of cotton; prices were written up on a blackboard, deals were made, cotton was graded, all in this little street in Memphis. We learned a bit about the cotton grading process as well as the evolution of cotton picking, from hand picking and the manual removal of seeds, through the cotton gin (we finally figured out why the cotton enGINe was so important. It basically made the removal of seeds from cotton significantly faster, making the bottleneck in cotton the picking process, where alot of slave labor could be used), up to modern genetic modification of cotton which is Round-Up ready. It was all pretty high-level but about right for us. We also got to see a little of the King Cotton culture of Memphis, with kings and princesses of cotton at the annual fair in their fancy garb.

With that done, we were back on the road. This time to Nashville for a bit of country.

Alabama

I don't entirely remember what my preconceptions of Alabama were before we arrived, but I do recall expecting a pretty foreign place. I figured there would be strange accents and, if I were being honesty, a bit of racism. I was right on both accounts. Driving through the back roads of Alabama we came across some pretty strong southern accents when we stopped for gas or groceries. A number of times after being spoken to we had to sit there for a few stunned seconds while we tried to parse what was being said to us, or, in Meg's case, hoped that I could figure it out. I think the racism charge was maybe a little harsh, but there are Confederate flags everywhere down in the south. Until 2000 the flag flew atop the South Carolina capitol! The claim from the flag wavers is that it represents southern heritage and their cultural distinctiveness from the north. I wonder though if my heritage was fighting a civil war mainly over the right to enslave people I might be less keen on celebrating it. But I guess that's another part of the claim, that the civil war was fought more over the southern states' anger at a strong federal government and high taxes, than slavery. Anyway, for Meg and me it is weird to see the flag so much, and we definitely haven't seen any black people celebrating their southern heritage with a confederate flag.

Our first stop in Alabama, literally right across the border from Columbus, Georgia, was Phenix City. My cousin Ashley married a fellow in the U.S. army who is based at Fort Benning (there is some confusion between Meg and I here, he might actually be in the air force since he is in charge of parachute rigging, but Fort Benning is an army base?). It was Meg's first chance to meet Ashley, and the first time for both of us to meet Chris since we had missed their wedding by just a month or so at the start of our trip. We had a really nice visit. Chris tried to explain to us a little about the military: squads, platoons, brigades... And also gave us a tour of Fort Benningwhich was absolutely huge! Evidently it contains 120,000 people. We can't confirm that, but it did have a full hospital, many restaurants and hang outs, several neighbourhoods, and a heck of alot of young guys with short hair. After touring the base we went downtown and after a nice pub dinner with some really good local beer, toured around a bit. The next day, while Chris woke up at 5am to get into work and drill the young guys under his leadership, Meg and I slept in. By the time we woke up Chris had already been at work for five hours and had jumped out of a plane. Had we not been so lazy we could have actually gone down and watched all the fellows parachuting down which would have been great, also it was a big day for Chris as he had accumulated enough jumps to achieve his Master Parachutist badge.

After cursing our laziness and getting barked at by Ashley and Chris' dog a bit (he didn't like me at all, I think I may have had cat fur on me from Adrian and Tamara's) we made our way down to Montgomery. We were entering the civil rights portion of our American history tour, it was in Montgomery that Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. This led to a year long bus boycott which ended only when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that segregating buses was unconstitutional. There is an excellent museum about the event in the city center, and that was our first destination. I don't know much about this chapter in American history and it was eye opening to read more about it. I was surprised to learn how organized and thought through the event was; Rosa Parks was a member of the NAACP; her lawyers had discussed using her case as a test case for bus segregation but decided against it for some technical reasons. The bus boycott that followed the initial event was also interesting. Through pay-as-you-can church run "taxi" services, and an alternate, station wagon, bus system almost everyone within the black community was able to go about life for a year without riding the bus. The bus company actually lost money during this time period and tried to have the boycott stopped (I didn't actually understand how that would have worked, would they have forced people onto the bus and then taken their money?). It was crazy too how few demands the boycotters had: bus drivers had to be polite to bus riders, there must be a fixed dividing line for white/black segregation, people must be seated on a first come first serve basis, and the bus company must higher black drivers for routes through the black neighbourhoods. They didn't even ask for desegregation of the buses at that point! Rather than give into their demands though, there were efforts to shut down the make shift taxi service, people lost their jobs and others were beaten and even killed.

After the Rosa Parks museum we did a walking tour of the city and of all things we found the first white house of the Confederate States as well as the first white house of Jefferson Davies. At the capitol they had the spot where Davies made his inaugural address marked with a star. It's a strange juxtaposition of civil war and civil rights history intermingling so much in one city.

Uniquely, someone decided that this state capitol should be made in the Greek revival style. Also, the Confederate government ruled from here briefly after the southern states seceded.

From Montgomery we made our way north. We intended to stay at a state park just outside of Guntersville, but we hadn't done our research very well. Coming up on the city things started to look a little strange, all of the hotels along the way were jam packed. As we got into the more wooded areas we could just make out in our headlights fallen trees along the way. By the time we got to state campsite it was obvious that we were in the area that had been affected by the tornadoes a few weeks previous. The state park was closed. Every other campsite was also closed and when we finally gave up on the idea of camping we were lucky to find the last available room in Scottsboro.

The next morning we woke up and hurried to our destination for the day... the Unclaimed Baggage Store. The idea of this store is that if there is luggage that is unclaimed, or maybe gets lost, it is sent to this store where the contents are sold off. When I originally heard of this store I got pretty excited. When we were visiting Jaci and Larry we had watched a t.v. show called Storage Wars in which people bid on the contents of storage lockers which hadn't been paid for. The people only got a cursory examination of the contents and hoped to find some treasure buried underneath. I had envisioned a similar thing for the unclaimed baggage store. I figured we would bid on an unopened piece of luggage and maybe inside there would be a treasure of some kind, maybe artwork, or really rare comic books or something else that would fit inside luggage and be worth alot. I would even have been happy with laptop, or a fold up bike. Anyway, these daydreams were crushed when I found out that, in fact, the unclaimed baggage is all opened, sorted and displayed like a department store. After perusing the aisles for a bit I was pretty much as bored as I am when I have to go to the Bay. We did find some good deals though, I got a few books by authors I have been meaning to read and Meg got a cute hat and some jeans that look really nice on her. The other fun part of the store is wondering how things ended up there. Aside from the clothes and books and what not that you could just replace if you lost it, there were things like laptops and smart phones which would be a real pain to lose. Probably the strangest things though were the wedding dresses! What the heck is going on that women aren't picking those up.

Me stoked to claim some (possibly YOUR) unclaimed baggage.

Someone decided not to claim this puppet from Labyrinth. Had it been for sale, I may have picked up a new co-pilot (Meg of course would still be with me, just in the back seat).

Scottsboro was a one hit wonder kind of town, so after checking out the unclaimed luggage we were back on the road again. This time up to Lynchburg, Tennessee, the home of Jack Daniels. The drive up that way was absolutely beautiful! Tennessee in general is a really pretty state, they have huge, huge deciduous trees that seem to cover much of the state in a green blanket. Around Lynchburg there are nice rolling hills dotted with farm houses, farmland and the occasional cow peacefully grazing up to it's belly in grass. The JD tour was informative (I have never gone through a distillery before)and the distillery was well maintained and fun to walk through. There was also a new museum of sorts which told the whole history of the company. Evidently it is the longest running official distillery in the US (I think the official bit comes in as JD was the first to apply for a license when the government started regulating/taxing distilleries). The only downside of the tour is that you can't try any of the whiskey because the county is dry, in fact a special law had to be passed in 1995 to allow the distillery to sell the whiskey on site. Meg and I hummed and hawed a bit about buying a bottle until we came to the realization that neither of us liked it. Since we could only buy big bottles at the store, it seemed like a big investment just for the novelty of it. The town of Lynchburg is quite cute, but we quickly ran out of interest when we realized that every store is selling the same junky Jack Daniels branded merchandise. It wasn't all that junky actually, we just didn't want it.

Me in front of one of four Lynchburg store fronts.

Meg and Jack, and then me in the background. I feel I look like a third wheel in this picture.

We hopped back on the highway and back into Alabama for one last night visiting a fun little cluster of towns in the NE. We spent the night beside a big dam in a place called Muscle Shoals. It wasn't too great a site, but it was full of people nonetheless. It seems that there was good fishing in the river and many fisherman camped there. The section of river under the dam was full of boats. Some people were tucked up right against the dam casting back into the river. Meg got to talking to some fellow campers from Mississippi and apparently they were all fishing for catfish. We spent the day touring around some of the sites of the towns. One of the highlights was Helen Keller's birth place and home while she was young. Amongst other things on display was the well where Anne Sullivan poured water on Helen's hand to teach her the word "water".

The actual well where Helen Keller learned "water". I am not sure whether Meg is supposed to be touching it.

We also visited the birthplace of W.C. Handy. I am going to be honest, I had no idea who the guy was, I had just heard his name in that song by Marc Cohn "...W.C. Handy won't you look down over me, yeah I got a first class ticket but I'm as blue as a boy can be..." Anyway we got there, and the lady tours us around a bit and is telling us this and telling us that about W.C. Handy's upbringing and at one point I just had to stop her and ask, "so, what is W.C. Handy so famous for?" It turns out he is the considered the father of the blues. Not because he invented the blues apparently, but because he was the first fellow to record an album with the word "blues" in the title. So that was great, there we were in the birthplace of the father of the blues. But not really, because the house was moved from it's original location, the layout had been changed and the furniture was not his. The logs were the same logs from the original home though, which was pretty cool as W.C. Handy's grandfather had hewed the logs himself and you could see the adze marks. For lunch that day we went out, a nice change from the daily regimen of peanut butter and honey sandwiches that Meg subjects me to. Everyone in town was really stoked on this little restaurant down in the park so we went to check it out. Most of the women also insisted that Meg try the chicken salad (I guess guys don't eat salads down here). In my head when I heard chicken salad, I figured there was some kind of salad with a chicken breast on top. I think partly my ignorance stems from the fact that growing up I never ate chicken salad sandwiches. Actually I can still remember my repulsion when I saw a chicken salad sandwich as an adult. So I was amazed when the chicken salad came and it was the same as the sandwich, just with no bread. How is that even a salad?! I found it all a little strange. I mean the whole town just loves the way this restaurant combines chopped up chicken and mayonnaise?

After cruising the towns for a few hours we were off again. This time onto the birthplace of Rock n' Roll, Memphis, Tennessee!

Sunny Florida

Florida welcomed us with continued sunshine and heat. We jumped on Highway A1A, the Federal Highway, which runs along the beautiful coast line...beautiful because of the ocean, but also because of the gorgeous homes that are built along the shoreline.

We spent a quick evening and morning in St. Augustine, America's first Spanish settlement. We could have spent more time wandering, but did get a chance to walk through the town and see the historical buildings.

We arrived at Julie (my cousin) and Mike's place ready for some R and R. We had a great few days with them and their 3 year old daughter, Abbey, just hanging around the house, enjoying the pool, doing a little shopping and generally taking it easy. We were very lucky to be able to join the Carters for a night of their vacation down in the Florida Keys. Cameron and I left the house early with the intent of spending a couple hours in the Everglades--missing the turn off sign forced us to give it a "next time" label. Instead, we decided to go for a nice lunch at a marina with the highlight being a piece of key lime pie! We met down in Bahia Honda State Parkand had a gorgeous swim, followed by good BBQ (thanks Mike) and a good evening of visiting.

For some reason we didn't take any pictures in Florida except for this one and the one below. We did make it out for a walk at a local marsh/park in Boyton Beach and saw lots turtle and birds.

We left Julie, Mike and Abbey the next morning and headed back up the state to Satellite Beach, near Cape Canaveral. Here, Tamara and Adrian (friends from Vancouver who have since relocated to Florida, Cameron went through engineering with Adrian) live right on the beach in a pristine apartment--not only was it awesome to see them after so long, it felt like we spent a night at a 5 star hotel! After eating too much, we finished the evening with a sunset walk along the water....hmmmm, maybe we'll also move to Florida?

Thanks all you guys for having us!

Our Way to South Carolina

From Mount Vernon we headed along scenic backroads to the northern entry point onto the Skyline Drive, a scenic drive through Virginia's western border. This drive runs right into theBlue Ridge Parkway, another beautiful drive that spans both Virginia and North Carolina.

We've (finally) hit the timing right on the nose, and the trees were in perfect green-ness (we've did a lot of driving in the "off" season when going across Canada in the fall). There wasn't much to do except enjoy the drive, and poke into a few small cutesy/run down (yes, it more often than not a combo of the two) towns here and there.

Cam and DJ, loving the scenery on the Blue Ridge Parkway

Our routine of late has been to stop at a nice park and cook up dinner, then hit the road for an hour or two in the lovely dusk lighting

From the end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, we drove back to the east coast and hit up Charleston, South Carolina for a couple days. The hightlight there was touring our first plantation, Drayton Hall, and seeing our first antebellum homes.

Drayton Hall was a preserved plantation home on the outskirts of Charleston. It was built in the 1800's by a rice farmer, though of course Mr. Drayton himself didn't do the farming...his 200 or so slaves did. The house itself was grand in size, and would have once upon a time been elegantly decorated (currently it's empty of furniture with the focus for tourists being on the original structure). We had an amazing hour long "lecture" in the gardens led by a professor who was discussing the lives of enslaved African Americans.

Drayton Hall

This was only the beginning of our insight into the period before the Civil War. Charleston's Slave Market Museum was inside the original city slave market and had much more to teach us. There were audio accounts of people reflecting on their time as slaves (yes, one woman remembered being sold in that very market as a 15 year old girl--chilling). We've learned heaps and here's a few things we found surprising that you might too:

-the import of slaves from Africa ended early in the 1800's and between then and emmancipation the slave trade was run American-born slaves

-it wasn't all cotton! Rice was a huge crop for plantation owners (and brought malaria to the US) as was tobacco and indigo

-if slaves were lucky, they could save enough money to "buy" themselves and then in turn try to "buy" their family members

On a lighter note (though still related to slavery, as many of the luxurious homes were summer homes for plantation owners and their families) we walked the town and saw the antebellum (pre Civial War) houses. These are exactly what you picture in the south...the big porches (always facing north-south to get the southerly wind!), rocking chairs, three stories high, and beautiful gardens.

We learned a thing or two about architecture during our tours...and what we walked away with is that they loved Greek renaissance style

The porches weren't on the front of the house like we're used to, but on the side in order to catch the lovely southern breeze

We went to The Wreck of the Richard and Charlene for "the best fried seafood in the US" (or maybe they only claimed South Carolina?) and it completely lived up to all expectations, and perhaps exceeded as well! We had oysters, grouper, crab cakes, shrimp all with sides of hush puppies, red rice, fried hominy square and slaw. YUM!

The next day we went to Beaufort, just a couple hours south of Charleston, and still on the water. Here we did a fantastic walking tour with just the two of us and our guide and got a great host of stories about the prominent antebellum homes in town. Beaufort is so typical of the south that many Hollywood films are staged here...think Forrest Gump!

One of Beaufort's highlights were the 200-300 year old Oak trees, which are protected by city law and can't be cut down

A few more hours driving on the I-95 and we reached the Florida state line.

Onto Washington, D.C.

Neither Meg nor I knew what a good deal we were in for when we set up camp in a state park outside of Washington, D.C. For just $16 (compared to $25 or more for provincial parks these days) we got a pretty isolated site, good running trails, access to hot showers and, best of all, a subway station within walking distance. We were in Washington for three nights, giving us two jam packed days in the city.

During our first few hours in the city we managed to hit up the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court. We made an effort to get into Capitol building, but they didn't have storage lockers and it turns out I was packing my Leatherman (multi-tool/pocketknife) so we had to forgo seeing that for the day. The Library was really cool, aesthetically it was lovely. The coolest part by far though was an original copy of the Gutenberg Bible they had on display (that was the first major book every printed with movable type) and across from it they had a beautiful bibleprinted by hand in roughly the same time (~1450) which was a neat comparison.

The Supreme Court was incredibly white. Painfully so in fact. Apparently it is made from American marble which is very bright. There was some interesting history of the Supreme Court within the building (most of which I have forgotten already) as well as a great tour of the actual court room where we got to learn how the court works now. Meg and I aren't really up and up on our political science and law so everything was really new to us. Apparently there are 8000 petitions to the Supreme Court each year and only about 80 are heard so it seems alot of work goes into whittling the cases down. Also, each "trial" is only an hour long, with half an hour for each to make their case. Obviously most of the work goes on before the trial and the half hour is just used for the judges to ask questions of each sides lawyers. I also learned that each state has their own Constitution. Who knew? Maybe Americans do.

The Supreme Court

After our visiting these major sites we experienced the first downfall of the U.S. capital. In the government area, there are no restaurants or markets or coffee shops. Just government buildings and maybe banks and what not. Basically, nowhere for us to get lunch. Actually I guess there are little, expensive cafeterias in the government buildings, but we are trying to save money where we can. Anyway, we walked our way to the closest market indicated in our guide book and had good hot dogs.

After our long march for lunch we made our way over to the national archives where we got to see original copies of the founding documents of the U.S.A. The Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and then the Bill of Rights. It was really interesting to read how it all came together and how basically they designed, from scratch (with some historical precedences), how the U.S. government would run. Something that stuck out was that they intentionally left the powers of the president a little vague, since they knew Washington would take the job and they trusted him to define the presidency.

I think one of Meg's ancestors might have modeled for this statue.

After getting hyped up on America we did a really long walk down to check out the Washington Memorial and then the Lincoln Memorial. With Americans' penchant for building things really big, I wasn't aware of how long the walk was going to be. I figured maybe a kilometer or something but in the end it was more like 3-4km from the capitol to Lincoln on his chair. Luckily there were people playing California kickball, softball and even Ultimate to entertain us as we walked by. By the way, I hadn't seen California kickball since I was in elementary school and seeing adults play it, I realized why. It was lame. We didn't see any home runs or anything like that and I feel like kicking that gigantic ball might be a recipe for a knee injury.

Proof Meg and I were actually in Washington, D.C.

Anyway, after doing a cruise around the Lincoln Memorial (quote in the Lincoln museum I had no idea would have come from Lincoln, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."), night was falling and we meandered over to the White House. Sadly we didn't get to see Obama outside doing anything cool or even his kids, maybe they have a backyard patio they hang out it at.

Lincoln Memorial

That was it for our first very full day in Washington. We headed back on the train and made our long walk, with Meg claiming near fatal exhaustion the whole time, back to the campground.

The next morning we were up again and on the train first thing. Our first destination was the Capitol. Again we waited in line for a bit only to learn that we couldn't take Meg's water bottle into the building, even though it was empty! I am not sure what the logic was behind that but I didn't think arguing about it would have much benefit so we headed off to have a strategy session. Meg was all for burying the bottle somewhere, I thought that was ridiculous, and might lead to us getting attacked by some zealous patriots (burying metal canisters might look suspicious). In the end we decided to go to the Library of Congress and rent a locker and then come back to the Capitol. That ended up being a really good choice as there is a tunnel from the library to the Capitol and we were able to bypass the big line up the second time. Anyway, after all that hullabaloo the Capitol was pretty unexciting. We did a tour which had as its highlight a room full of statues (two from each state) of famous Americans. I'm not much of a statue-of-mildly-famous-people sort of guy. There was an informative exhibition describing the history of congress and the Capitol which was good.

From there, we had a day full of Smithsonians! We spent the bulk of the day at the American History museum. I got stuck for an hour or so in the engine section. Starting from waterwheels and the different kinds of wheels and their efficiencies (I had no idea there was so much engineering that went into waterwheels) it went through steam engines and all the way through gas engines. It is always interesting to see how something we take for granted has evolved over the years. Aside from being interesting the engine area didn't have thousands of students oozing everywhere. I forgot to mention that earlier actually, everywhere we went in Washington there would be groups of forty or so kids with matching t-shirts on and their matching parents blocking the normal flow of foot traffic. It was irritating of course and you know I don't think they were learning a whole bunch, overhearing their conversation at the Vietnam War memorial, "Their is a BIG rift happening in the popular kids...." Gawd!

Kermit!

After spending time in the pop culture, Edison and electricity, and American wars exhibits (all well done) we made our way to National Space Museum. By that point we were completely tired out from all the reading, but that was okay, we just walked around looking at all the space ships which were well displayed throughout the building. From their we made our way back to the trains and then our campsite.

Space Shower

Space Rocket

Space Robot!

We were done with Washington but had one last stop on our way out of town, Mt. Vernon, the plantation home of George Washington. We had a chance to learn a light biography of the first president as well as see our first plantation house. We also got to see Washington's dentures which were pretty gross and looked really uncomfortable which they say is why he is never smiling in pictures.

George's House. Pretty nice.

Washington had been a great starting spot for our America tour, we are now armed with a wealth of American history knowledge.

Our Ontario Peeps

Ontario was a splendid two weeks full of visiting friends and family that we don't get a chance to see too often. Our Ontario tour started off with a bang in Picton, as we were there for a wedding for our friends Jarrod and Alexa. The wedding was perfect, and we got to spoil ourselves for a night by staying at the hotel the reception was held at--beautiful in itself (and a big treat after months of very basic guesthouses in Asia). Lucky for us, we also got to snag Jarrod and Alexa for an extra night and had a great post-wedding chaos visit.

Jarrod and Alexa, looking might fine and happy

Cameron giving marriage advice: "It's easy, quit work and lolly-gag around, fun as can be!"

We left Picton and back tracked a little bit to Peterborough to visit family. Jane and Ian, with their little ones Evan and Kate hosted us for a couple nights and we had a great visit--kept busy by the kids endless energy! Cameron was the official "rotten hotdog" and just couldn't get a hold of the ever changing rules of tag. We had great weather and went on a nice bike ride around Peterborough local trails, and checked out the awesome Canadian Canoe Museum on our way out of town. Thanks guys!

Unforunately we didn't get any pictures of Evan, Jane or Ian, so here's Kate representing the entire McIntyre family

A nice scenic drive through Kingston and and north from there, took us to Ottawa to see friends, Dana and Charlie. NOt only did we have a lovely visit with them, but our visit was filled with "our Nation's Capital" highlights. We took a tour of parliment, ran along the Rideau Canal and Gatineau Park, saw the Museum of Civilization, checked out the National Art Gallery, and Byward Market. We went to not one, but TWO sugar shacks and stuffed ourselves silly on pancakes, sausage, eggs all ladened with maple syprup--top that off with maple syrup pie and cake, and it was a little slice of heaven!

In "OUR NATION'S CAPITAL" (our personal slogan while in Ottawa)

Making taffy on snow, just like Little House on the Prairie

Enjoying pancakes, sausages, bacon, eggs, potatoes all smuthered in a very healthy dose of syprup...in OUR NATION'S CAPITAL (or at least, very close by)

We pulled out of Ottawa and took the northern highway to Capreol, a small town outside of Sudbury. Friends from my time working in Sudbury, Laila and Frank, live there and have just built an "off the grid" house on a lake. It was great to see them, and also get a tour of their new house that runs on solar power! The property is gorgeous and we went for a lovely walk along the swollen river. Good food and good chats.

Beautiful piece of property, and the river was wild with run-off

Back down south to Toronto, a city we've both been to and this time around we decided not to sight see so much, but just relax. Thanks to Jaci and Larry and their very lovely house, we were in perfect comfort and spent a great couple days lounging around with them. We had a great dinner with Auntie Ida and cousin Jessi at their place, after Cameron slaved away making lasagna and ribs. Marie and Jeff, more cousins, met us for coffee downtown and we saw Cameron's old coworker, Aria, for a gigiantic meal in Greektown.

Easter rolled around and the Easter Bunny met us at Auntie Ida's place. We had to work hard for our chocolate, and successfully made it through various tricky challenges to earn our eggs from the Game Master (aka Auntie Ida). Off to St. Catharines for an Easter dinner! There we saw everyone for a great dinner--thanks for having us Auntie Vickie and Uncle Paul, and for making the drive down Uncle Ron!

The Easter Bunny spoiled us rotten...we're just finishing our chocolate now!

A good couple days in St. Catharines soaking in our last moments in a house I feel like I know very well (Auntie Vickie and Uncle Paul have since sold in the week since we left!). We then spent a day in Welland, near Niagara Falls, for another Easter dinner with more family--good visit with all the Karners.

The happy gang at Easter dinner

Thanks to everyone for having us, especially on such short notice for most of you. It was lovely to visit you all and we look forward to our next visit in Ontario.

A Week in London

On the flight over from Bangkok Meg and I were both feeling a little low. We had really loved our time over in Asia and, though we were looking forward to seeing all of our friends back in the western world, it seemed that our real "adventures" were ending. A few glasses of wine in though we had come to terms with the situation and were starting to plan our time in the UK. After spending the first week or so with friends (Meg has quite a posse of people over in London as she worked there for two years back in 2005-2006) we figured maybe we would head up north and do a bike trip, or maybe hang out in Paris if the weather was poor. After arriving though, we decided to get back to Canada in time for a wedding (for our good friends Jarrod and Alexa) that wasn't planned when we booked our tickets 10 months ago! Meg busted into super planning mode and after some wrangling we had tickets home. We also had a new urgency to our time in London.

Stopping for a picture in front of the English Parliament on our first day walking through the city.

We dragged our bike boxes and panniers onto the tube and into a downtown London hostel. That is a lesson Meg and I learned during this trip; don't try to combine a bike trip with other travels. It is a real pain to box the bikes up so we didn't reassemble them when we arrived in London. Instead, we wrestled the boxes through crowded busses and subways while also trying to carry the rest of our gear. We then stored them in a storage locker at a train station.

Since Meg had seen most every London highlight during her time there, and I had seen none of them, and since Meg had many friends in London (and they don't really care much for me) we decided to split up for some of the week. I would stay in the hostel downtown visiting the sites of the city during the day while Meg tubed around the outlying cities staying with, and visiting, friends.

Meg, Gaya, and Kuldeep and Mark and me. Mark, being English, forced me to drink allot of beer while I was in London. I went through with it to humor him.

I had a chance to visit St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, the National Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Imperial War Museum. Everything was amazing! The national galleries/museums were fantastic, contained so much interesting information, and they were free! It made it guilt free to walk into the galleries with just an hour or so to spare and only view a section or two. The big historic buildings were equally good, though cost quite a bit more than nothing. The buildings are so integral to the history of London and it was neat to imagine people 1000 years ago being in the same building as I was standing in. In Westminster Abbey there was the oldest door in England which I think they said King Edward the Confessor probably opened at some point. The green where Anne Boleyn was beheaded is enclosed in the walls of the Tower of London. Princess Diana married Prince Charles in St. Paul's. To cut off the ridiculous gushiness, let me just stop by saying that it really is like the really old history you read about coming to life. That's actually how much of London was. The city is really fun to walk through as there are so many interesting buildings, and so many stories. We did a few walking tours of the city and again saw places straight out of history; one that jumps to mind is the place where William Wallace (Braveheart) was executed (that was on the Ghosts of London tour, it seemed like killing people in really gruesome ways was all the rage for awhile).

Some pictures from London. The London Eye, the Tower of London, and a bus of London.

I am not 100% sure what Meg was up to while I strolling healthily through the city and eating Tesco sandwiches. When we caught up in the evenings she often appeared unwashed and disheveled from days of heavy drinking. Nah, that's just a joke. She was out getting well caught up with Gaya and Ben, Brad, Sarah and Graham, and Kuldeep and Mark who were visiting from Canada at the same time we were there. She seemed to have acquired a few items of clothing along the way as well, though I think that was just through Gaya's overflow.

Aside from just touring about the city of London itself we got a couple really nice days in the country with Meg's quasi-relatives, Derek and Theresa. They took us through the countryside to visit some proper English pubs, with proper English pub food. We even got to see a first class football match when we went to see Derek and Theresa's grandson play in the end of season gold medal game. Sadly they lost, happily we got a chance to see some Ref heckling-English style-from some of the parents. Kuldeep and Mark joined us at D&T's as well which gave us a good chance to catch up on the last six months.

After a frantic and enjoyable week of visiting and sightseeing we made our way back to the airport, again with the bike boxes in tow. Our flights were leaving fairly early in the morning and the trains wouldn't start early enough for us to get to the airport in time. Since it would have been an expensive taxi ride we decided to take the last train (1:30am) instead and sleep in the terminal. As can be imagined this made for two fairly disoriented and disgruntled people. We had ended up on different flights getting home (to minimize the cost of changing our flights) and I thought it was a good thing when I left Meg in her line at 4am so I could change terminals and catch my flight. What I didn't realize was that Meg had food poisoning from our previous nights dinner and didn't end up having a very pleasant day. I had quite a nice flight.

A picture of the lot of us.