"The grass ain’t greener, the wine ain’t sweeter..."

"...either side of the hill."

8. Friday 14th September - Yosemite to Death Valley
Ridiculously long drive from Yosemite Valley through some fantastic landscapes - Olmsted Pass, Mosaic Canyon, Tenaya Lake and Mono Lake. (Not in that order though.)

...to Beatty where we stayed the night in a really cool trailer:

9. Saturday 15th September - Death Valley to Las Vegas
Left Beatty really early and stopped by Rhyolite, a small ghost town nearby:

We then drove back to see Badwater, the lowest point below sea level in the Northern Hemisphere. That was really cool.

From Badwater we drove to Dante's View for an amazing view:

Before a long straight road through the desert. Very dull, very dusty, with cool dust devils every now and again.

Arriving at Las Vegas is mental, suddenly so much is going on! We were very dirty and welcomed the huge shower in our hotel room before heading out for beer, fried chicken waffle sandwiches (I kid you not)

before seeing QUEEN with Adam Lambert in Concert. Which was amazing and I cannot even tell you the feeling I get in my gut when I remember. Sigh...

10. Sunday 16th September - Las Vegas
Las Vegas is awesome. We did a brunch buffet at the Bellagio and didn't need to eat for the rest of the day. And it was a long day.

We walked the whole strip and back, we walked across to the Rio for Kiss Mini Golf (which was amazing and I didn't cheat at all no matter what CB tells you), and saw inside pretty much all the casinos. We saw the dancing fountains, the erupting volcano, the flamingos, the aquarium...We walked over 29,000 steps and I would do it all again.

11. Monday 17th September - Zion National Park
Wow. Some routes were closed due to landslides, but we hiked four of the routes and I was absolutely blown away by how beautiful it is. We hiked the Riverside walk to the Narrows (though didn't hike down into the Narrows):

Weeping Rock

Lower Emerald Pool (others were closed)

Pa'rus Trail

12. Tuesday 18th September - Zion to Bryce National Park
Began the day by driving from Springdale (where we stayed just outside the Park) to Zion Canyon Overlook, a precipitous walk but well worth it!

A few minutes outside Zion was completely different scenery. Suddenly all grassy plains where we saw a herd of buffalo!

We then got to Bryce Canyon - went to Sunset Point and walked to Inspiration Point, then drove to Bryce Point and Fairyland Point.

The hoodoos are remarkable. Just bizarre and brilliant. The colours and shadows were perfect too (espically just before sunset) and provided so much personality and character to the rock formations.

The evening we did stargazing. Just seven of us in the group, so lots of access to the telescopes and able to ask as many questions as we wanted. We were also the last two to leave, after I got the guide to show us a couple more things! We saw Venus, Jupiter (and 4 moons), Mars (and an ice cap), Saturn (and some moons), the moon (which was very bright so we could see a few Apollo landing sites), the Subaru star cluster, a double star I don't remember the name of, and we were taught how to find the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye. I love astronomy.

13. Wednesday 19th September - Bryce to Grand Canyon North Rim
We drove into the Canyon again to see the Natural Bridge, which was cool, though the rest of the path wasn't accessible owing to fires.

We then left Bryce and drove through Utah to Arizona. We stopped to buy a wicked cool t-shirt for me, stopped for lunch at Le Fevre Point (which was a bit disappointing but a good spot for lunch) before driving on to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

Wow is an understatement.

14. Thursday 20th September - Grand Canyon to Monument Valley
After seeing the sunset at the Canyon we decided we wanted to see it at sunrise too. Although we didn't get there for sunrise, we got there pretty soon after and had the run of the place.

We left the Canyon and drove on, seeing a Navajo bridge, failing to see Horseshoe Bend (traffic was backed up along the road for a fair while - just google it) and stopping to resupply at the heaven that is Walmart. I fell asleep in the car and when I woke up we were in the desert. Sorry, stuck in the desert. We took a wrong turn and literally got stuck in the sand. Superwoman that I am, I got out (very sleepily) and pushed the car until we were free. I think that might be up there as one of the most impressive things I've ever done...

Anyway, I say we were at the desert, but to be more specific we were at Monument Valley. We could see the buttes from where we were staying, but of course we drove down to see them from a closer range. Although I don't have Western film memories of the landscape, I was still suitably impressed I must say.

*Quote from the Grateful Dead.

"There is a road, no simple highway..."

"...between the dawn and the dark of night."

CB and I have been back from America for about a week now, and I've finally found some time to look through some of the photos and start to put together a brief canter through our fantastic road trip. We went for 4 weeks, flying out on 7th September and landing back in the UK on 6th October. I obviously won't be able to fit it all in one bloglet, so here's the first of a few.

1. Friday 7th September - Flew from Manchester to San Francisco. 
I thought I would be exhausted, but actually I was really wired! Despite only getting one hour's sleep on the plane journey. CB was flagging sine the plane landed though, and we both finally crashed about 6pm and were in bed by 8.15pm!

We went for a general wander around the city - walked through Chinatown, which is massive, gaudy, beautiful and fun:

Walked up a big hill to see Lombard Street, which insane and yet brilliant:

Sat for a little bit in Washington Park, walked through North Beach where the Beatniks lived, and got over-excited by seeing streetcars, panda cars and very shiny firetrucks:

I felt a bit overwhelmed by it all to be honest, but in a wonderful way.

2. Saturday 8th September - San Francisco
Woke after 12 solid hours of sleep and, after buying some very expensive groceries, made our way to Golden Gate Park.

The Park is beautiful and smells gorgeous from the pine trees. We walked all over the park and by the end of the day my feet were just broken. We didn't go into any of the attractions in the Park because there were just too many, and to choose one above the others was too difficult. Plus we just didn't have time to do it all! The Shakespeare Garden was a particular highlight, as were the Bison Paddock and Dutch Windmill:

After lunch at the Windmill we walked up to the Legion of Honor to see the art exhibits, especially the Rodin sculptures.

I LOVE Rodin - the emotional expression, the feeling of movement, the texture - and I was not disappointed here.

3. Sunday 9th September - San Francisco
We started with a stupidly steep walk uphill to Coit Tower before making our way back downhill to the bay to get the ferry to Alcatraz.

It was absolutely fantastic. So pretty, in a decrepit old building sort of a way. My only gripe was that there wasn't enough info about the Indian Occupation in 1969, but I guess most people want it all to be about the prison history. Though having said that, I would have liked to have learned more about the officers' lives as well as the prisoners.

We also went to Fisherman's Wharf to see (and smell and hear) the sea lions:

I could watch them for hours, they are really silly and cute. They really stink though, and the wind was so fierce you got too cold to stay.

We decided to get a streetcar home which was SO MUCH FUN! I loved it, I cannot praise it enough. I do have a thing for trams though, no idea why. But this was like a mash-up of a tram and a roller-coaster. So cool.

4. Monday 10th September - San Francisco
Another beautiful day - SF might be known for clouds but we barely saw any! Taking advantage of the glorious weather, we hired bikes and cycled round the coast and bay area...

...before going over the Golden Gate Bridge...

...and the down to Sausalito before getting the ferry home.

5. Tuesday 11th September - Yosemite
We picked up the car (soon to be named Drive Boy, after his number plate) and drove from SF to Wawona, where we stopped for a short hike at Mariposa Grove to see the giant sequoias.

We learned a lot about their growth - they need fire to make the seeds grow, and their roots only go down about 6 feet but they spread really widely to anchor instead, and all the trees' roots sort of mesh together to support each other. Hence the groves. We also saw a woodpecker going to town on a pine tree, which was really cool and a lot louder than I expected!

We stayed at Big Trees Lodge which I found to be a bit of a mix between the holiday camp in Dirty Dancing...

...and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

Take of that what you will...

6. Wednesday 12th September - Yosemite
Drove along Glacier Point Road and hiked:

• Sentinel Dome
• Taft Point
• Washburn Point
• Glacier Point 

All incredible, all breathtaking, and it may sound corny, but doing it all with CB just makes everything better.

Seeing the effects of the recent fire is a bit scary. There are places that only reopened a few weeks ago, and we actually saw a few small fires still going strong. They must have been controlled ones, but still.

7. Thursday 13th September - Yosemite
Drove from Big Trees Lodge to Tunnel View (lots of views of Half Dome and the Valley) then to Bridal Falls (which were still going but much diminished at this time of year) then to Yosemite Village for a wander round.

We then did a bit of the Mist Trail until we could see Vernal Falls before coming to the campsite and moving all our food and toiletries into a bear-proof box for the night. Scary stuff!

In the evening just before sunset we went to Cook's Meadow and Sentinel Meadow, where the photos just don't do it justice it was so beautiful.

Well that's a week recorded and quite a long bloglet! More next week perhaps...

*Quote from the Grateful Dead

"Get me away from here..."

"...I'm dying."

Dear Reader. Do you remember how much I hate moving? If not, please revisit this post and familiarise yourself with not only my hatred in general of moving house, but the specific issues we had in moving into our current flat.

Well now we’re moving out of that flat, so we have all those issues in reverse.

You start with the box in the flat. You take it to the lift and lock the front door. You go down in lift to ground floor and go through two doors, one of which is locked.

Luckily we then had the van outside rather than having to go down a flight of stairs and through another locked door and then across the garage.

I just keep reminding myself that the pain of moving will be worth it. I’m leaving Sheffield. I have not enjoyed living here for the past year or so. I’m sure it’s a great City for a lot of people, but I am not one of those people.

This time we had more furniture than before (Hello outdoor table and chairs! Hello BBQ!) but we had already taken most of the fragile things over in the weeks preceding so I didn’t have any ‘smashed glass’ worries. We got a massive van (as you can see) and only half-filled it, but I'm glad we had the extra space just in case we had needed it.

I think next time we get professional movers as by then we’ll have a bed and mattress to move not to mention all the other pieces of furniture that seem to accumulate. As an aside – why is it that whenever you have a bigger house it gets filled? Why can’t my possessions stay at a stable level rather than rise to fill any space I’m living in?

I can only imagine what would happen if I lived in a mansion. Rooms of miscellaneous tchotchkes. Hallways of tables. Omg it’s kibble! I will be smothered by doodads and whatsits.

(For the people with lives, Kibble is the useless objects which multiply over time as noted by J.R. Isadore in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I think it also covers the emotional baggage of the characters that is ever increasing and threatening to overwhelm them, but let’s not open that can of worms.)

*Quote from Belle & Sebastian

“We are all in the gutter…”

“…but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Leaving work to one side, what do I think about Sheffield as a place to live?

Things I like

• Proximity to the Pennines.
• Markets at Christmas.
• Good choice of ales at most pubs.
• Cheap cinema
• Shops being on m.y doorstep

Things I will miss:

• Piccolo’s restaurant
• My 5 minute walk commute to work

Things I don’t like:

• The amount of rough sleepers/beggars – how are there so many in such a small city?
• The people – it sounds harsh, but I have found people mostly to be parochial and narrow minded who don’t like  ‘outsiders’ or anyone different and are resistant to any sort of change
• Lack of nice, non-chain restaurants 
• Old man pubs – but not in a good way, in a urine-soaked-sixties-dive kinda way
• The Town Hall bells every 15 minutes  (drives me mad)
• Promotion of anything local, even when it’s significantly worse than non-local versions

Things I won’t miss:

• The loud cathedral bells all Sunday
• Being scared of ‘Spice Zombies’
• THE NOISE - why does everyone feel the need to shout all the time?

*Quote from Oscar Wilde

“What do you get when you guzzle down sweets?”

“Eating as much as an elephant eats?”

In my quest to bake everything from Mary Berry’s Baking Bible, I made double chocolate cookies recently - my god what a disgustingly huge amount of condensed milk. Personally I prefer to have a smaller quantity of condensed milk in the recipe (so I can eat spoonfuls of it later on. Sigh…).

I was worried the dough was too warm to add the white chocolate buttons to so I chilled my dough before adding them in. Big mistake. The dough became very stiff and didn’t mix well with the buttons. Luckily it was okay forming them into  little balls as I could manually manipulate the dough around the buttons.

A point for future bakes – cover the dough when chilling. Mine formed a sort of skin which changed the texture of the finished bake a bit. Also push down the cookie-balls on the baking sheet before baking as they didn’t flatten as much in the oven as I thought they would. Also, use smaller chocolate chips than buttons (even though that’s what’s used in the photo in the book) as you wind up with fewer than two buttons per cookie. Alternatively, I could use more than the specified weight of buttons…Hmm...much prefer that solution!

Anyway, after making a batch of 36 double chocolate cookies I was all chocolated-out for this week. I don’t know how 36 seemed to be way too many considering the eating habits of CB and myself, but I was glad to see the back of them by the end of the weekend.

So this week I decided to go savoury. I made cheese straws on Sunday (perfectly fine, but nothing to write home about) and a cheese and celery crown loaf on Monday. I was amazed that with no yeast and therefore no proving I still ended up with a risen and bread-like texture. The celery tasted slightly too salty for my tastes (something to watch for in future bakes of this recipe) and not cheesy enough despite an artery-clogging quantity added to the dough and sprinkled on top. Perhaps it wasn’t strong enough cheddar?

I’m hoping to use the rest of the cheese up in a cheese scone round, but then I worry I’ll be all cheesed-out following my over-chocolated week. Plus I should probably start to worry about my increasing waistline…


*Quote from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

“I have this feeling, that all it will take will be one moment, even a tiny moment, provided it’s the correct one.”

“Like a cord suddenly snapping and a thick curtain dropping to the floor to reveal a whole new world, a world full of sunlight and warmth.” 

As I’m currently reading a book that I’m hating but am obligated to read (long, very boring story), I thought I would reminisce about a book that I absolutely loved but that I know I will never read again.

There’s actually a couple of those (shout out to 1984, a brilliant book which broke my heart so thoroughly I don’t think I’ll ever recover) but The Unconsoled is worth a blog entry as it’s not mentioned very often.

Picture from Wikipedia

It’s not an easy read, which might be why it often gets sidelined when compared with Ishiguro’s other novels (i.e. Never Let Me Go; Remains of the Day) but it is engaging and challenging, and it sucks you in and, much like a good maze, after a couple of turns you have no idea how you got there are how to get out again.

I suppose that might be frustrating, but as your protagonist is similarly confused about what’s happening you can take comfort of someone being in the same boat as you. Which is unusual in a novel where you’re either in someone’s head or a third party watching it all happen. I like the subversion of normal novel structure. Expectations of knowing what’s happening and why are never met.

In the Unconsoled, our narrator Ryder falls into these situations which transform into others after a few pages, but he remains calm, sincere, and absorbed by the moment he’s in rather than waste energy trying to unpick everything around him. So, as boat-buddies, we do the same; swimming peacefully through the narrative and watching the landscape swirl and change around us.

Like him, we don’t know where the path we’re on is going and we don’t know why we keep walking down it. But yet I keep walking – the lack of knowledge serves to pique my interest more, and further down the rabbit hole I fall.

Important things come sharply into focus before blurring out again. People step out of the wings for a few pages before disappearing again. Threads are picked up, dropped, and picked up again.  Time doesn’t fit together and nothing ever gets resolved. But there’s not just confusion and narrative interest. There’s also joy and humour here, not to mention incredibly poignant moments and characters.

I don’t think it’s original of me to compare the novel to a dream (in fact I assume this is what Ishiguro was going for) but it’s more than that. It’s a stress-dream. The fear of performance, the doubt over whether Ryder is who the characters think he is, the interruptions every time he tries to sleep. Like the frog in the pot of water, you don’t feel the stress and tension rise until your shoulders are up by your ears.

And it’s probably this stress that stops me from ever picking it up again. I know now the extent to the twists and turns and I know the inevitable toll it will take on my body and, although I am so pleased I put myself through it once, I could never do it again. I would try to read too much into it; try to make sense of it. That would normally bring me much joy, but I loved this novel because it forced me to drop all that, it forced me to drift dream-like through the pages. A singular experience and one which I would not wish to taint or try to recreate and experience some ersatz simulacrum.

All in all, the Unconsoled is not for the faint-hearted, but it is an unforgettable, thought-provoking, and worthwhile read which I highly recommend.

*Quote from Kazuo Ishiguro