AROUND THE WORLD IN 30 DAYS 2007

Monday 20 August                                    Day 1

The expression “It’s been a long day” has just taken on a whole new significance. August 20 started at 5am in Canberra and finished with us hitting the sack at 10pm in Los Angeles 34 hours later

Denise and I are off to do a lap of the world.

The big Boeing 747-400 with a seating area wider than our lounge-dining area, thunders along at 1,000 km per hour with longitudes flicking yet dragging by and roars across the equator with not a sign of the doldrums which plagued the galleons of old.

Closed eyelids pose as sleep for hour after hour during the pretend night. The pretend dawn brings an airline breakfast of scrambled eggs which no self-respecting chook would lay claim to and pineapple with all the colour and flavour of cauliflower.

Los Angeles

Having made it back through the night to yesterday, courtesy of the trickery of the International Date Line, we land at LAX where the sun, grateful for a second shot at the 20 August, bathes the LA smog in gold.

At LAX, we queue for queues and I get a mild thrill from the tiny Latino woman in black uniform, emblazoned with brass badges, epaulettes and a belt loaded with pistols, two-way radios etc. taking my finger prints and saying “Welcome to America”. If she’d have asked for my DNA, I had a few ideas.

Finally out of the airport, our Canberra winter has turned magically to an LA summer. It feels like Brisbane. The shuttle bus hurls us along hurtling freeways through drab townscapes to our hotel on West 7^th. There, said that like I was a local. After a walk through the area, we have a great salad at a Pizza joint on the corner of Figuero and 7^th. The dawn of August 20 seems a long time ago.

Tuesday, 21 August                                  Day 2

On Tuesday from the window of our eleventh floor room we imagine the mountains through the smog and decide that the threat of jetlag dictates we have an easy day. We catch the train, the Metro Red Line to downtown LA. The train is not full and emerging from the Station, we head for a coffee shop. It slowly dawns that we are the only people in the coffee shop and few people are on the streets. It’s 10am. Asking the coffee shop attendant where the major shopping areas are, we are informed they are back at Figuero and 7^th. We are surprised as we have already seen Macy’s at the intersection and it would rival Jamison or Dickson. We are to find out a couple of days later that there is also a Macy’s Plaza one block down which is much bigger, however there is no huge shopping area like Sydney. Very strange.

We walk past the Civic Centre with its Aztec inspired spire, the Law Courts which I should recall from OJ’s trial and down past the Federal Building. LA landscape architects must have their set-squares poised for a forecourt design for the City Hall. The magnificent building is fronted by a bitumen road and a huge bitumen car park. The puzzle of the lack of state legislature buildings (Arnie’s buildings) is solved when we realize that Los Angeles is not the Capital of California. Sacramento is. Down past Chinatown we drift into El Pueblo Plaza where two pounding male dancers perform to a laid back Latino audience who look like they’ve seen it all before.

Los Angeles, the City of Angels, started out as a Mexican settlement, was taken over by the Spanish and eventually the US. The original LA was an area of a couple of miles square and this plaza, where a rotunda and performance area now stand, is roughly at the centre of the area.

An elderly gentleman who is manning the front desk at the Fire Station Museum proves to be a wealth of information on local history, the history of illegal immigration, drugs and the world at large. Lunch in the huge front entrance to Union Railway Station gives us a chance to admire its beautiful ceiling before catching the train home. On the walk home from the station there is a beggar on the bridge above the freeway. He is a thirtyish black man who is half lying on the footpath with hardly the energy to ask for money for his upturned hat and with only a half hearted attempt to make any eye contact. We walk straight by.

If you are ever going overseas, go with Denise. We have been having trouble contacting Simon as our mobile phone (sorry, cell phone) is very picky about which numbers you key in to it to contact people. Denise sets up a hotmail site on the hotel’s internet computer and contact is made. The computer always has a queue so you are always under pressure and it operates with all the speed of the Encyclopedia Britannica at the Dubbo Library. Denise can also operate the E-Ticket touch screens at airports, understand what railway station announcers are saying through their fuzz-box PA's and set the alarm on hotel clock radios.

Wednesday, 22 August                            Day 3

Today is Bus Tour Day – The Grand Tour of LA. The tour guide Rob, with the radio announcer’s silky voice, introduces us to Pedro, the driver and at our first stop I fall in love with the Hollywood Bowl. Unfortunately our program for the week doesn’t allow us a concert there but if I lived here, I’d be a regular. Last night was Dave Brubeck, tonight the LA Philharmonic and Friday night is Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

At the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, celebrities apply for a Star and if accepted, pay $25,000 to a charity for the privilege. We pose in the foyer of the Kodak Theatre for our Oscars and match hand prints with the stars in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre but I can’t find Doris Day, my first girlfriend, in the 20 min allocated by Rob and Pedro. Hollywood Boulevard needs resurfacing but Rodeo Drive, where the celebrities do their shopping, is a different kettle of fish. You could eat your breakfast off the bitumen. The game there is to wait for a stretch limo to pull up outside a store, beat the rush up the street to see who it is and wait outside to photograph the exit.

We spotted one, too late as usual, but the crowd knew it was David Beckham shopping at Chopard’s for men’s clothing. Strolling nonchalantly into the store behind him doesn’t work as they have locked the front doors. A couple of doors up, the owner of Dijan’s for Men has parked his Mercedes McLaren at the front door. He doesn’t buy cars worth less than a million. He has left the car window open but who’s going to try with the two heavies standing just inside the shop door looking out for losers. I pose for a photo outside Louis Vuitton’s but nobody’s fooled. I think the crumpled Akubra gives me away.

As we head down Melrose Avenue to Downtown LA, Rob explains that the HOLLYWOOD sign up on the hill was originally put up there to advertise Real Estate 80 years ago, has continually fallen into disrepair and been restored, until the letters are now made of, as Rob explains “Australian Blue Steel. The world’s best steel”.

Unpuffing my chest, we head into the downtown LA area we had walked yesterday. At El Pueblo Plaza, Denise visits the oldest house in Los Angeles, built in 1818, while I watch the filming of a commercial for a new Mercury four wheel drive. Flotillas of huge white trucks filming for TV and Film are a common site in LA.

The ‘Walt Disney Music Center’ (sic) is a stunning set of textured stainless steel sails. Rob explains that in many areas, developers are required to allocate a significant percentage of the cost of new buildings to street art. This is a work of art in itself.

Back at the bus base, Rob, who sees himself as one of Hollywood’s main attractions just waiting to be ‘discovered’ explains that he and Pedro “rely heavily on your tips” and that the convention is a tip of about 15%. We oblige, but haven’t referred him on to Mr. Spielberg.

Back home I wander along West 7^th and find, opposite a soccer field of synthetic grass, a large mural which features 11 of the world’s great soccer players – Maradona, Best, Pele and so on, and kneeling in front of the other ten is Beckham. I ask a local if Beckham has been added since joining the LA Galaxy but he says the mural is several years old and Beckham was on there from the start. I start to realize that in this land of Gridiron, downtown LA is peopled by Latinos and kids playing soccer is a common sight. Soccer is the local game. The southern half of LA where we have settled in is predominantly Latino, while to the north, Beverly Hills and surrounds are principally Caucasian.

A surprising feature of LA is the lack of a concentrated high rise centre as in say, Sydney but here and there high rise pop up out of nowhere.  

Thursday, 23 August                                Day 4

I head down to 7^th Street to the edge of the Financial District at about 9.30am, leaving a dollar with the beggar on the bridge. Still very few people. I wish I had brought the camera for some great shots of the architecture but find myself in the “Jewelry” (sic.) District. Jewellery makes me nervous, but I press on and turn into Broadway (not the New York version). This seems to be the fashion district, like Melbourne’s Chapel Street, but I find out later I was skirting the edges. In need of a Cappuccino I search for an outdoor café in sunny California. They apparently never had a Gus Petersilka. (Gus introduced outdoor eating to Canberra after many a war with the authorities.) I have already found I can’t handle many of the indoor eateries for the smell of the spices and sauces of the Central-American foods, having grown up in Queensland on the aromas of lettuce and mashed potato. The cappuccino will have to wait. I see a shoe store and browse for something to replace my Big W sneakers bought from the Canberra Centre for $17.98 reduced to $10. Nothing there. A couple more shoe stores with the same result. Shopping for shoes makes me nervous. They do have some of these big brand names for $100 but I refuse to buy sneakers with the brand logo all over them. If they want me to advertise their sneakers, then can pay me to wear them! One pair I actually like but it would take me ages to unpick the tick.

The corner of Broadway and Olympic Boulevard displays a sign saying “Adult Entertainment. Intimate Girls at the Ultimate Gentleman’s Club”. I turn and head up Main Street, the Methodist in me saying, “Don’t go. There could be someone there from Canberra who could spot you.”

Still no luck with the shoe stores or Cappuccino shops along Main, I turn into 6^th to find a terrific shore store and I’ve just spotted a promising pair when a 30 something attendant with a plunging neckline asks, “Can I help you sir?” Cleavages make me nervous and I move on. Suddenly on the corner of 6^th and Hill is a park. Pershing Square is an inviting park with a sign in the middle which says “Not for the Use of the General Public”. I eventually realise it is because they are setting up for a band to play at lunch time. An enormous security bloke leers at me and I’m hoping I’ve done nothing wrong. He sneers at my sneakers and I slip away.

Back down Grand Avenue (why are no streets called Insignificant Avenue?) and on to 7^th, I solve the mystery of Macy’s by finding a larger Macy’s Plaza. Their Food Hall is too strong for me and outside I find a small takeaway with two tables on the footpath and have a cappuccino. There are two reasons for having a cappuccino – for the chocolate sprinkle on the top and for watching the passing people. Here I get neither but at least it is outdoors.

After lunch, Simon picks us up in his car for a visit to the Getty Museum. Via various hectic freeways (we’ve now found the people) and onto the San Diego freeway I notice the LA National Cemetery, with its platoons of small white headstones flicking through the trees. The US pays a high price for its role as the world’s policeman.

The Getty Museum sits high above the freeway, unimpressive in its architecture until you arrive. The greeting hall features a “Uberorgan”, probably too difficult to describe but a distant relative of a bagpipe with transparent wind pipes the size of Sydney’s Bondi Sewer Outfall passing to and fro above our heads and emitting on the hour a melody similar to a toad concerto at the Pialligo Wetlands. Simon complains quirkily that he won’t be able to get the tune out of his head.

Some of the galleries feature the great Italian masters. I understand the Italians have negotiated for many of these to return to Italy in the next few years. Denise recognizes many of the paintings and the artists but I find myself employing my standard art gallery technique of “Look, another masterpiece, Look, another masterpiece, Look another masterpiece. Where’s the coffee shop?”

I may be an accomplished art cretin but I am able to appreciate the statuesque sandstone columns and the ordered gardens with everything in flower and the lawn in abundant green.

We have dinner with Simon at the Farmer’s Market area washed down with a “Flat Tire” beer. Simon is obviously delighted to see his mother and Denise to see him. Simon has been working in LA as a programmer for 12 months.

Friday 24^th August                                    Day 5

We catch the bus to the fashion district for a proper attempt at shopping. It’s what you do. A quick survey of the passengers reveals that we are the only caucasians among the latinos and black Africans. The fashions are interesting. “Would you like to buy a suit, sir?” asks the very forthright sidewalk salesman dressed in mauve suit and blue alligator boots. The black Americans have added so much colour to their country. I drift pathetically back to the safe conservative haven of Macy’s and buy a shirt there. Back through the financial district, we leave $5 with the beggar on the bridge and feel better for it.

Simon picks us up and we drive along Mulholland Drive home of Madonna, Paul Hogan, etc. Didn’t find any homes but ended up in San Fernando Valley on the other side of the Hollywood Hills where much of the film industry is now centred. Had a coffee at Starbucks. Heinz may have 57 varieties but Americans have 157 ways to have coffee. After the fifth question involving the number of shots, type of milk, do you want the milk steamed etc. a glass of water is looking good.

Driving back I think I spot Charles Bronson driving a black Corvette up the hill but I could be wrong. (You might think he died in 2003 but he’s still alive to me.) We arrive back at Hollywood Boulevarde Walk of Fame and have my photo taken with Charles Bronson’s ‘star’. I still see him chopping the wood in “The Magnificent Seven”. The great lump of wood that he wheeled over his shoulder on the end of his axe may have been cork of polystyrene to you but it was a solid lump of hardwood to me. I also get photos with Peter Sellers and Doris Day, my first girlfriend at the Bungalow Theatre in Maryborough, Qld. I could tell even then that Rock Hudson wasn’t right for her. More seriously I pondered on her subsequent unhappy life after her having lit up my teenage years.

To save Simon driving us home we catch the train at Hollywood Station and arrive back at Fig and 7^th in 15 minutes. Yesterday in the car on the freeway it was over an hour.

Saturday 25^th August                                Day 6

Saturday morning Denise stays with the Laundromat while I head back down to Macy’s Mall to get an adaptor for the camera charger. The beggar on the bridge isn’t there. Maybe he gets the weekend off or he had a big night on the $5 I gave him last night. It was time he had a raise anyway. I get the adaptor okay but interestingly many of the shops aren’t open yet. Probably open at 10.

Heading back, the beggar on the bridge has returned. He must have slept in. He doesn’t notice me as he is too busy setting up camp.

At the little latino supermarket I manage to buy pencil leads for my dried up pencil – a pack of eight sets of 15 leads each (i.e. 120 leads), for 99c total which should see me through to my 90^th birthday.

We go back down town (Fig & 7^th) for lunch at the Macy’s Plaza Food Hall. This early in the day the spicy aromas haven’t yet taken over and we have sandwiches at the Korean Café. It is pour yourself coffee and ask for milk to add as they have only sachets of cream for whiteners. This is one of the simplest coffees I have had.

A stroll then takes us back up to Pershing Square where a young rap group is filming a video. We are asked to keep clear or join in as audience extras. This appears to involve filling out a form, probably involving insurance and staying for two hours, so we watch from a distance. The rappers gymnastic skills are staggering and their busking skills shine through. “Whaddya do when you see something good? You clap! Whaddya do when you see something not so good? You clap same mo’! Whaddya do when you see something you can’t do? You pay up!” Watching some of the young black guys in the area, I realize I have dormant swagger glands.

Close by is a young man with his sleeping kit on the bench beside him, slowly drifting in and out of a drug induced sleep. Some of the other characters in the park don’t look too good and I find myself checking my wallet is still in my pocket. Walking back down from the impressive Public Library, we follow an old man whose trousers really do have more holes than fabric and any thought of photographing him is quickly suppressed – something to do with dignity. Back down in 7^th a youngish white woman with red marks all over her arms sits begging on the sidewalk with her pet rabbit in her hat. “One mouth, a habit and a rabbit to feed”

Mid afternoon we catch the Metro and the bus out to Simon’s place. This area, the Beverly Hills end of LA, is very different from the old Downtown end of LA with new homes, shopping areas, office blocks, affluence and no beggars in sight.

Across at “The Grove” a huge shopping park we decide to go to the movies. The theatre foyer is clogged with Hollywood wannabe women who would rather be on the screen than in the audience. Stilettos, sequined heat shrink jeans and low cut dresses are the norm, with silicon cleavages to rival the Grand Canyon. I can’t accept bosoms that big that don’t bounce. We decide on “The Simpsons Movie” for some normality.

An average Simpsons fan, I find myself having the best laugh I’ve had in ages. When you’re on holidays, corny is the finest form of humour.

Dinner afterwards at an outdoor French restaurant, I imagine that a bloke a couple of tables across is Peter Frampton but if it is, he hasn’t aged. Rediscovering Rosé, we have an enlightened conversation with Simon about spherical trigonometry, about international aircraft flying along “great circles” rather than “small circles” which means our flight from San Francisco to London will traverse close to arctic regions rather than across New York as flat atlas projections of the spherical earth might suggest. We also discuss the contribution of Surveyor Wessel in the 1800s to the understanding of the square root of minus one.

I’ve got a blister on my right foot.

Sunday 26^th September                            Day 7

Sunday morning and I would like to walk back along West 7^th to Macarthur Park but I don’t think that I can make it.

At breakfast a white man and a black man come in together. I jump to no conclusions. I am facing the black man. He is about 25-30, his face has a stunning classical profile and he has long slender hands and fingers that any woman would die for. Every move he makes, shifting in his chair, has a graceful natural elegance. I describe him to Denise and suggest she casually glance back to see him. “You’re not in love?” she asks. “Only a bit” I reply. If I was gay he’d be a goner. Well that is if he liked old Aussie blokes. After breakfast I put on my Akubra, walk outside and spit on the footpath to re-establish my credentials.

The pencil leads by the way, are brittle and useless.

After lunch at The Museum of Contemporary Art and a walk through the foyer of The Walt Disney Music Center, we settle in at the front of The LA Music Centre to watch four black guys busking and singing acapella a collection of old Motown songs and anything else they could turn their hand to. Their audience is the well dressed patrons turning up for a performance inside by The Jersey Boys who are doing a Four Seasons Tribute Show. I suspect the audience got two fantastic shows.

Santa Monica Pier on a Sunday afternoon is alive with tourists, buskers, artists, fisherpersons (hate than word) and general millersarounders (love that word). We opt out of the ferris wheel ride as we’ve just been over some of the freeway flyovers and I almost buy the T shirt that says “No Limits”. The beach stretches out of sight in both directions, is wide enough for a bunch of beach volley ball courts and packed with swimmers.

The swimmer/sunbakers appear to be as devoted to the development of their skin cancers as Australians. During my primary school years in Emerald, Central Qld, our sun protection was with hats which always fell off and Mum’s blend of Friars Balsam and  Metho. It was a dark brown sticky mix which couldn’t be applied without streaking and which tricked the sun into thinking we were tanned. This was before UV was invented. It also had the drawback that if you walked into something, you stuck to it. Peeling was a relaxing summer evening activity. At about age 30 I discovered hats but by then my battered and burnt skin suggested that the Friars Balsam mix had an SPF of zero.

Beside the pier, a local group has set up hundreds of crosses in rows in the sand, a row of authentic looking coffins draped in the Stars and Stripes and details on lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. The crosses are named and occasionally a lone person is seen sitting at a particular cross. Apparently this is a regular Sunday activity.

Simon, Denise and I photograph each other in the water, symbolically linking us with Bondi Beach across the Pacific Ocean and head up for dinner at an English Pub. The 3^rd Street Promenade is alive with markets, musos and street performers.

Simon drives us back to the hotel and we sadly say goodbye. It’s been a terrific seven days.

San Francisco

Monday 27 August                                    Day 8

The check in chick for flight A319 to San Francisco requests us to remove our shoes for xray purposes. I am fearful they are checking for sneaker quality or blisters but I get away with it.

San Francisco (SF) is to take your breath away. The City Hall which rose again from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and fires is delicately finished with infills and extremities of gold leaf and surrounded symmetrically and sympathetically by administration buildings, theatres, courthouses, the veterans buildings and impressive sculptures which celebrate their pioneers.

The forecourt is a park, city block size which the LA City Hall could only dream about. The parks have no seats, a problem we had noticed in LA, when suddenly the penny drops. Park benches merely provide housing for the homeless. Funny thing though, there is a conference on in the Bill Graham (not Billy Graham) Centre next to the Square with its main theme as Homelessness.

In the main street, Market Street, we see five people begging in the first two blocks. A 50 something woman has been able to cobble enough together to buy lipstick and her hair is combed.

Many of the homeless live out of shopping trolleys. Just as some of us get by in a one bedroom bed-sit and some in five bedrooms with ensuites, some of the homeless get by with a knapsack and some with a shopping trolley packed to the rafters. One man had two cats on the upper storey shielded by an umbrella fixed to the end of the trolley.

The sight of some of these people talking to themselves and to thin air suggest that mental health is a significant part of the problem.  

I don’t like to travel over here to criticise their country. There is so much to admire in what the Americans have achieved, but I would hope they could set aside a larger portion of the billions they use for showing the rest of the world how it should be done, to provide for their own disadvantaged.

The same could be said for the country I know and love but I would hope we are travelling a little better in this department.

Tuesday 28^th August                                 Day 9

At breakfast a guy from Alberta regales us with stories of the success of his end of Canada, the money it now makes from oil sands, the mining of which has become economic with the increase in the price of oil over the last few years. I try to bring his wife and children into the conversation but fail. I suspect he would have noticed that we had a foreign accent but it didn’t prompt any questions from him.

Denise puts a band aid on my blister and I bite my gun belt like Charles Bronson does when Steve McQueen digs the bullet from his shoulder with his Bowie Knife.

The organized tours of SF concentrate on the city area, Fisherman’s Wharf, Golden Gate Bridge, the Cable Cars, Haight Ashbury and many attractive inner city and residential areas. Occupying an area bout seven miles by seven miles, freeways are few.

In the afternoon I walk down Market Street from 7^th Street. Gradually I realize that I have never seen such architecture in a single street. SF has so many buildings, not just in the main street, that seem to be saying  “Hey look at me”, but not in a boastful way. Many buildings are decorated with motifs, projections, variations, sills, arches and so on and there are few of the vast slab areas seen on many modern buildings.  The streets on the eastern side meet Market Street at 45° giving two streetscapes for the price of one at each intersection.

I follow Market Street down to the Clock Tower near the Bay. Usually when I go to cities I watch people – can’t help it – but I realize I have walked many bocks and not seen a face, only architecture. At street level, some of the shop fronts are closed, some drab and part of the main street is a red light area.

I am wasted on the retailers as I rarely go inside the shops but Bloomingdales is so beautiful it deserves to have me spend some money in there. I’ll go there tomorrow. Maybe they’ll have some sneakers.

It’s unhealthy for a 60 year old to be this excited about tall buildings. I am worried Denise will bring up the subject of you-know-what envy but many of the buildings are only five and seven storeys so they will be the envious ones.

I would suggest that Architecture Students from Uni of Canberra should be given a thesis year in SF, fully paid. The only proviso would be that they return. I wouldn’t want to live here for fear that over time I would grow used to it and not appreciate it.

I want to walk back along Market Street but decide to drop down two blocks to Howard Street. I start to notice the people again. Along 6^th Street between Market and Mission I feel decidedly uncomfortable with a lot of seemingly drug and alcohol affected people yelling abuse back and forth.

We have been told that 33% of the SF population is Asian. I hadn’t noticed up to now but that seems right. In LA it seemed that everyone was going somewhere. Here it seems like everyone is from somewhere. LA claims to be the most culturally diverse city in the world but SF must be up there. London, in a couple of days will be interesting.

The cable cars are icons of SF. They travel up and down steep hills, picking up and setting down people in the middle of intersections where the ground is level. They are pulled by an underground cable at 9 ½ mph. Much of SF is actually flat and push-bikes abound, but the steep areas have become famous through car chase scenes in movies.

The cable car takes us to dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf. Entertainment includes a blues band, the kind where the singer’s eyes focus on an out of focus spot just the other side of infinity, a spot only blues singers can see. After dinner we stop for caricatures of us by a street artist, followed by the highlight of the trip so far.

An African-American with a grey beard is sitting on the footpath, back to a rubbish bin and concealed by two bush branches he is holding in front of him. As unsuspecting pedestrians approach, he throws back the branches and roars like a bull. The victims are of course scared witless but better still, those in the know who are standing nonchalantly down wind of the action crack up hopelessly. One victim who drops a dollar in his can is greeted with “It was funnier than that man!!” while another is greeted with “For your next holiday man, why don’t you go to tight-ass New York”. None of the victims died of fright but a few of us come close from laughter. When you’re on holidays, laughing at someone else’s misfortune is the finest form of humour.

Wednesday 29^th August                         Day 10

Breakfast is at a small family deli down the road. The retail industry probably runs courses called “On the creation of atmosphere in the retail environment” or words to that effect. Why don’t they just send them all here. We suspect the family is Middle-eastern (they are Italian, Laurie) and work all day, every day. The big bland chains can’t match this. I keep thinking I’m in New York even though I’ve never been there.

Bus tour drivers are a special breed. Some are frustrated actors or singers who become the main attraction themselves rather than presenting the attractions. Some are different. We take a trip to Muir Woods, north of the bridge, to see the Redwood (sequoia) forest and to Sausalito on the northside of the Bay.

On leaving the forest to head for Sausalito, the driver starts to tell the story of John Muir, for whom the wood is named, as he negotiates the winding road. The story probably took 20 minutes and was beautifully and sensitively delivered. It was obvious everyone on the bus was spellbound.

For a long time I have had a theory that Americans are more articulate than us. We tend to speak in unfinished phrases, with subjects, verbs, predicates and clauses entangled, entousled, truncated and unnecessarily paranthesised (this includes me), giving full stops and commas identity crises. We lack the lilt and flow our language can provide when beautifully presented. Even those Americans who appear to be uneducated can display a wonderful turn of phrase.

I am writing this in a Laundromat and have just heard one young girl say to another “We were like going out for like six months and when I pushed the issue, he was just like, whatever”.

I don’t have a rubber to rub out the last few paragraphs so will just leave them in. I bet the word ‘like’ never realized it was going to evolve into some pseudo, pop-up punctuation mark.

We have dinner tonight at a French restaurant (more Rosé) and the waiter is from Turkey. His family is still in Turkey, but businesses have struggled there since the Iraq war started.

After dinner we go to Bloomingdales as promised earlier. We have a coffee and play spot the Caucasian. I spot Denise and Denise spots me. I don’t last long in Bloomingdales. Everything glints too much.

Thursday 30^th August                             Day 11

After breakfast at our favourite deli, we settle into a quiet day before catching the plane at 5.20pm. I spend the morning writing at Union Square, a popular tourist, shopping area which has tables and chairs. The police apparently don’t allow the homeless to sleep here.

After lunch we bus to Mission Dolores and take photos inside their oldest building and their newer cathedral built after the earthquake. The mission was established in 1776. A huge number of the headstones in the small graveyard are Irish. We relax down by the waterside near the clock tower, sleep on the grass in the park and didn’t even get moved on by the cops. The plane leaves on time.

Friday 31^st August                                   Day 12

Let’s say Friday 31^st August starts as we get on the plane to London at San Francisco Airport. This will be another of those trick days where the plane will flick around the world to meet up with the sun coming round the other way. We have those little TV screens on the seat back-rests. As the movie image quality is bad I settle back to watch our flight map unfold. The American place names on the map trigger a competition between the US and us on the beauty of the indigenous place names we have both adopted – Albuquerque, Shoshone, (rhymes with pony) Yosemite (emity) for the US and Coonabarabran, Diamantina and Mutitjulu (put a jewel oo)for us. It’s probably a draw.

As we head for the UK, my mind flicks to English heroes of mine. Peter Sellers, Sir Francis Chichester, Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker, the E-Type Jag, Stirling Moss, Manuel and Coen Ovett.

Five hours sees us north of the Great Lakes and heading across to Greenland. We just miss the southern tip of Greenland but are close enough for me to claim I have been there. Probably within the first line of breakers anyway. Probably need your flannelette cossies there. A wink of sleep would be good. My knee has left a bruise on my chin. All it would have taken Mr. Boeing, is one more inch, maybe two. Why is the passage between Iceland and Greenland called the Straits of Denmark? Has Denmark been told? Sleep’s not all it’s cracked up to be anyway. Just try shifting onto my left cheek for a while. At least I won’t need to have a hip replacement. Just replaced it with my coccyx. What’s Mr Boeing’s address? Maybe just try putting both legs along the corridor. “Oops, sorry ma’am, let me help you up with that. I’m going to see the Queen.”

Ah, breakfast. My favourite. Rubber bun with plastic ham. Heathrow at last!

London

Our London hotel room is about the same size as a walk in a wardrobe in LA and we’ll need to install pedestrian lights along the side of the bed. We have dinner two blocks away in Queensway. Hope they can cook fish and chips in England. They can!

Saturday 1^st September                          Day 13

The centre of London on a Saturday is a cavalcade of tourist buses and every tour guide has a PhD in History. Charles Dickens wrote this down that street, Tennyson wrote that down this street. Oscar Wylde has performed in this theatre, Phantom of the Opera opened in that theatre. Florence Nightingale did much of her nursing down here, Marilyn Monroe spent her seven honeymoons down there. Maggie Thatcher lives up here (but must be out because the policeman’s gone) and 10 Downing Street is down there. Downing St used to be open to the public but now the end of the street is fenced off. (Denise blames Humphrey). This is the Hotel where Peter Sellers died, that is the street where the Beatles lived. Up there is where Samuel Johnson invented a dictionary. Down there was the war office where Winston Churchill did this and that. Over there is the new MI5. This is where King Nigel III was beheaded and that is Oliver Cromwell’s favourite fish and chip shop. Don’t ever do the bus tour until the jet lag is done.

The bus trip has been swirling in ever decreasing circles until it has disappeared up the Tower of London. We’ve done so many circles that my north point is shot like a magnetic compass at the Port Kembla steelworks. Every time we cross the Thames it is flowing the other way. I’m overawed, overcome, overwhelmed, overdone and we clamber off the bus at Buckingham Palace. Denise points out that a three feather motif on a column beside the road represents the Prince of Wales.

Everything in London represents something, everything else is in memory of something, every other person has a statue for him (except me) and whatever’s left over is buried in Westminster Abbey. In this part of the world for the past couple of millennia, countries have been conquering the daylights out of each other and each victor and his accomplices now stand on plinths all around the city with pigeons on their heads.

My thoughts lie more with the conquered than the conquerors. I realize it is a topic which shouldn’t be trivialized but I sometimes wish the conquerors and aggressors were a little further back with the Mandela’s and the poets a little more to the fore.

If I had a dollar for every monument in London I could afford to live in Kensington Palace.

We get back on the bus and get off again for lunch at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. There are no speakers. These days I think they’re all in the Internet Prat Rooms.

One more try at the bus but by now I couldn’t tell the Houses of Parliament from Piccadilly Circus, Big Ben from Nelson’s Column and Westminster Abbey from London Bridge. Next time just try the Monopoly Board – one ring road, four right-hand turns and Bob’s your uncle.

We give up and walk, only to find that the whole world is having its holidays on Oxford Street. One and a half miles of shopping and 40 shoe shops. Don’t even think about it. We are carried along the footpath like salmon going upstream to spawn, occasionally getting separated as one of us is washed back downriver.

Time to go back to the hotel and work on the jetlag.

Sunday 2^nd September                           Day 14

One of the advantages of jet lag is that your best thinking and reminiscing is done during broken sleep.

1 am.

Yesterday was 1^st September which we think of as Spring back home, which reminds me in a round about way that on flying the Pacific I thought about crossing the equator but completely ignored the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. I know the equinox is actually the 21^st September but this is advanced thinking for a (non-paying) member of the flat earth society like me. At Uni I hoped, as a conscientious objector to the spherical earth concept, that I would be able to get exemption from the subject Spherical Trigonometry but Universities can be very unenlightened. I faced this issue by adopting the philosophy of being a believer when it suited and a non-believer when it didn’t. This method hasn’t worked in the ice-cream vs cholesterol debate as fear of death wins every time.

I am simply hoping that the airlines, whose designers haven’t come to terms with the distance between a human being’s knee and hip, can get me back home to the other side of the earth, regardless of the earth’s shape.

3 am.  Cup of tea sounds good.

Back home with the summer equinox approaching, the daffodils will be in flower, the grevilleas, callistemons and banksias will be thinking about it and our new red flowering gum will hopefully be having its first display this year. The silver eyes, eastern-spine bills, red wattyl birds and crimson rosellas will be drunk on spring and no-one will give a rat’s where Charles Dickens wrote his first book.

8am

Maybe we’ll avoid London today. Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park link with Green Park, Buckingham Palace and St James Park to form a huge green haven from the mayhem all around. The walk from the NW corner of Kensington Park to Speakers Corner in Hyde Park displays the usual array of joggers, dog-walkers, meanderers and walkers using that modern dork style of arm pumping. But Hallelujah Brother,– Speakers Corner is in full swing. The prat rooms must have shut down.

The first four speakers, in spite of their best intentions are not helping Jesus’ marketability at all. The speaker from the Socialist Party of Great Britain is yelling “Lenin was not a socialist. I’ll tell you what Lenin was. He was a …..”, only to be cut off by a heckler with “Arr. Mate. This is worf payin’ for”. Another speaker opines “And who fought in the Civil War. I’ll tell you who fought in the Civil War. Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Calathumpia.. and why? Because their bleedin’ leaders sent them. That’s why! And what happened? The English army mutinied. That’s what they did!”

The biggest crowd was held by a Muslim man who claimed “Why have we Muslims in the Middle East got problems? Because we are gutless, that’s why. In the last five years the Middle East has earned five trillion dollars from oil and where has the money gone? To the despots and dictators and we haven’t had the guts to rise up against them.”

With a recharged battery I set off back up through Hyde Park and find a vast inland sea of paddle boats surrounded by picnickers, skaters and overfed ducks.

The parks are cleverly designed with paths which lead in diagonal fashion to new surprises such as the many flower beds, drunk with colour. My return trip through the parks to my start point has been a little like setting out from Albury for Brisbane and ending up in Charleville. Fortunately, the Charleville to Brisbane road is Kensington Palace Gardens. This is actually a row of mansions adjoining Kensington Palace and I am in no danger of ever owning one. The road is flanked by massive plane trees, each one the size of South America.

After lunch we return to Kensington Palace. It is ten years and one day since Princess Diana died and the front fence is lined with Princess Diana fans placing sprays of flowers and signs to her memory.

It is ten years since Denise and I first went out together and the speech by Prince Harry at the memorial service reminds me that following Dianne’s passing, while I was able to move on and marry again, it was more difficult for the children. Sherriden and Clayton, like William and Harry, have lost and can’t replace their mother and that’s the saddest part.

Monday 3^rd September                           Day 15

The London Eye is a massive ferris wheel with enclosed passenger pods which takes a half an hour or so to do a lap and the views from the top are not only breathtaking but put London’s layout into a better perspective. I can feel my north point readjusting and the only distraction from the views is the engineering of the wheel itself. It is the 59^th wonder of the world.

This is followed by a tour of Westminster Abbey. If you thought London was lousy with monuments, don’t bother coming here. The interior is a maze of alcoves, crypts, tombs and rooms of all sorts where a student of English history could be engrossed for centuries. Every step you take seems to be on someone’s grave. Mary Queen of Scots looks very relaxed in her allocated spot.

Also immortalized are the great poets, authors, playwrights, actors and don’t even bother trying to cover all the categories. More importantly however is the Cappuccino shop where

Eateth ye in cloistered deli
Yon cheese and salad and Worcester Sauce
While tired feet resteth respectfully
On the Venerable Basil Wilberforce

The main regret was that we couldn’t come back at 5.30pm for the Men’s Choir because of the rail-worker’s strike on the underground.

Lunch is at the café in the huge nearby Methodist Church centre and it would have warmed my Mum’s heart looking down from above to think I was back in Church.

We take the Jubilee Line to Tottenham Court Road, walk part of Oxford Street and make it home before the 5pm rail strike.

All over London we see the most beautiful young women from all over the world. If I was a young bloke I would be over here with pheromones on full. However being the age I am, I scarcely noticed.

I have a new blister. A sister blister to my LA blister.

Tuesday 4^th September                          Day 16

On completion of Laundromat duty, the plan for Denise to go to the British Museum and for me to walk the West End looks good until the tin teller swallows my Visa Card. An hour and half later we are back to Plan A but we won’t be using that card again.

The West End has almost as many theatres as London has monuments. Every turn reveals another Theatre playing musicals of the last 40 years which I had thought were dead and gone.

I am looking forward to seeing Covent Garden which has been immortalized in one of my poems (true!) but Covent Garden turns out to be a large area of markets and restaurants. Amongst the many buskers is a young group comprising four violinists, one cellist and one bassist playing the more popular classics and doing exactly the kinds of leaps and pirouettes to accentuate the high points in the music that their symphony conductor would frown on. The takings in the can suggest the pirouettes are working.

I still haven’t found the Covent Garden Opera House though and querying a passer by as to it’s whereabouts, he replies, “That’s it! You’ve just walked by it.” In typical British fashion there is no sign at the front to say what it is. The Sydney Opera House leaps out and pokes you in the eye. I imagine that the New York Met (also immortalized in the same poem) would be yelling at you in Neon, but the Brits are more tasteful than that. I photograph the building for comparison with the Google search I will do just to make sure the passer-by wasn’t pulling my leg.

Okay, if you insist ….From “Poems Lament” in which one of my poems wishes it was a famous performance piece.

“Pavarotti, Carreras, Domingo, Dame Joan
I can dream. There’s hope for me yet
Before an audience that’s dripping with diamonds and class
At Covent Garden or the New York Met
But here I am at the Murrumbateman Pub
Being said by some worn out old squatter
And look at this lump of layabouts here
Bet they’ve never been to the Opera.”

Back at the Museum, Denise has been studying relics of recent millennia including the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone.

During the laps of the West End my North Point is again going in circles but I get a chance to pause and recalibrate at a four-sided monument to “Fortitude, Sacrifice, Humanity and Devotion” Sloth never rates a mention.

I am wondering if the North Point problem is partly due to the fact that the sun is always to the south this side of the equator and always to the north at home, not to mention walking or driving in circles.     

England

Wednesday 5^th September                     Day 17

Up the M1 in a rent-a-car for the next ten days, we turn west to see Rebecca and Lawrie at Burcott. They have just moved into a 1960’s house in the High Street so named for the shop which might have been there in 1642? The house has fantastic views of green meadows and distant hills from the large second storey bedroom. Furniture at the moment is largely cardboard boxes.

English meadows are generally much more pleasant than Australian paddocks. Grass that sheep can eat without gravel rashing their noses and more shades of green than the most prolific colour-charts.   

A grey squirrel runs across the lawn. We are told that the original red squirrels of England have been conquered by the grey squirrels of North America and I imagine a statue to Samuel Squirrel in New York gazing purposefully to the east.   

We have lunch at the Lock Gate Pub. The canals of England are extensive and became redundant with the advent of rail and road however tourists now ply these canals in purpose built houseboats. It is fascinating to watch the lock filling through the upstream gate and emptying through the downstream gate as boats pass through.

I am thinking of the song on an Eric Bogle CD called “Lock Keeper”, written by someone else I think and will get it out as soon as we get home. We will be seeing Lawrie again soon when he will be flying balloons in Canberra over the summer and Rebecca will be doing likewise early next year.

We continue west to our first B & B at Broadway. which is very close to the mid-way point between the east and west coasts. A bit like The Alice, but not a lot.

Thursday 6^th September                         Day 18

We meet up with Philippa in Worcester. She stayed with us in Canberra a couple of years back and it’s good to catch up again. The huge Cathedral here is the burial place of King John of Runnymede and Magna Carta fame. Like Westminster Abbey the structure is extensive and awe-inspiring compared to the Queensland country churches of my youth. No weatherboard here.

Meanwhile the local bird watchers’ group is set up with telescopes and high powered cameras at the base of a spire known as “The Glovers Needle” where a pair of Peregrine Falcons have set up camp. Glove making used to be a local industry, as was Worcester Porcelain, but both industries are now centred in China, or India or somewhere. The Falcons are nowhere to be seen at the moment as they are probably on one of the other spires or out hunting. We re advised there are 1500 breeding pairs in England.

Following the recent floods we see the records on a wall by the river showing that the largest flood of the Severn River was in 1770 and high on the list is the new flood of 07/07. Tomorrow being the 7^th, I intend to take up (or invent) Numberology.

Another significant event seems to be The Great Petunia Plague of 2007. Petunias in England average 478,000 blooms per plant compared to five back in Oz.

Worcester, has a beautiful central area of pedestrian friendly cobblestone roads and walkways. A statue of Edward Elgar looks down to a town in mourning as his likeness has recently been removed from the £20 bank note. Worcester threatened to secede but there was nowhere to secede to.

After lunch with Philippa we head west at 3pm to do injustice to Wales. Arriving at Fishguard on the coast at 6.45pm with just the one stop along the way, the trip is a little like The Alice to Perth but not a lot.

Wales

There is not much sight-seeing from the motorways through England and Wales as the views are restricted by the plantings along the sides of the carriageways Our views are mostly bitumen. If we are to come this way again we will have to include some time in Wales.

The sign posts are in both English and Welsh and I expect there will be a monument somewhere as a tribute to the consonants who have conquered the vowels in the Welsh language. Vowels are definitely a minority group.

The radios are running Pavarotti specials as news has come through that Luciano Pavarotti has just died. As you can imagine, although he is Italian, it is big news in Wales.

We have fish and chips at Fishguard, on the west coast of Wales - the real deal. It is a beautiful sea port for fishing and for ferries to Ireland and about a dozen kids are out sailing on small cat-rigged dinghies.

We are advised to leave buying petrol to Ireland where the taxes are much less.

Friday 7^th September                              Day 19

Fishguard seems to have not changed in centuries, except for the ferries. Winding one-lane roads flanked by old stone walls or steep embankments lead us to an old stone Church exposed to the winds off the Irish Sea.

The big catamaran leaves at 11.30am on, thankfully, a flat sea and the wind on the side deck reminds you the big cat must be doing about 30 knots.

Ireland

In Ireland the Tin Teller switches us over to Euros and with a new tank of petrol, we drive to Carlow.

In about 1840 my great grandmother, Eliza Condell, at age 18 left Carlow for Australia. We think she lived at Old Leighlin (Lachlan) and Agharue and we intend to visit there tomorrow.

The town of Carlow in the County of Carlow has a population of about 22,000 people, similar to my high school town of Maryborough in Queensland.

Saturday 8^th September                          Day 20

The morning walk through Carlow is the usual fare for this part of the world – the Cathedral, Courthouse, Town Hall, Church and old Castle remains.

A visit to the library provides some valuable contacts in the family history search.

Even though we haven’t made it a mission to search out intricate details of Eliza Condell, we go for a drive to Leighlin Bridge and Old Leighlin where we walk through the grounds and graves of the local Protestant Church. We don’t find Agharue although we don’t look very hard.

Driving along one country road, wide enough for one car only, a local gives us some directions which consist of “first left, second right till you come to the stream, go another 100 yards, on past O’Flaherty’s place till you see the ….” We thank him very much, wait until he goes and take the first U turn opportunity.

It’s Saturday night and Ireland is playing Czechoslovakia in the Euro 2008 Qualifiers. Loughlins pub is packed and I find a space in the next pub (every third “shop” is a pub) and slip into a Guinness or three. Ireland are leading 2 – 1 going into extra time but Czechoslovakia equalize 90 seconds later. The crowd in the pub is like the crowd on the television – devastated – but 60 seconds later are patting their players and one another on the back having accepted the result. (I wonder if it is an Irish thing?)

The bloke next to me at the urinal offers “We had it bloody won and lost it – but we’re used to that”. “Know what you mean”, I say, knowledging noddably? (Wonder if it’s a Guinness thing?)

I hear there will be traditional Irish music at Reddy’s at 10.30pm but the muso doesn’t turn up and no one knows why and no one’s too worried. (I wonder if it’s an Irish thing?)

However the young people, teens and twenties, are out in force and modern music fills most of the pubs. For those interested, hot pants and heels are in for the young girls and sloppy is in for the boys.                                                                                                

Sunday 9^th September                            Day 21

We drive to Dublin and park by the Liffey River. The “banks” of the river are ancient vertical brick walls and bridges cross at every second block.

We catch a tour bus near the Dublin Spire in Connell Street after enjoying the pedestrian plazas. After St Stephens Green, Europe’s largest square, we have a break near the statue of “Sweet Molly Malone wheeling her wheelbarrow” and enjoy the buskers in the pedestrian plaza - a singer/guitarist, a grey painted “statue-man” and a bloke covered in bronze, seated on a bronze suitcase behind a bronze dog and tapping and gesturing to his canned music and fascinating all, especially the children.

Past various churches, museums and courts, we see Phoenix Park, the largest urban park in Europe covering 1750 acres housing wild deer and the residence of the President of Ireland.

On the trip north there were no signs to indicate the position of the Northern Ireland border, however, the mobile phone goes off letting us know we have changed provider, yet again.

We settle into a country B & B at Dromore, County Down for the next three nights. We have beautiful views east to the Mountains of Mourne. We have dinner at a very busy Half Way House Restaurant near Dromore where they have run out of mashed potatoes but have plenty of boiled potatoes? With our meal we get eleven potatoes – to make up for the famine?

Our itinerary sounds like the index of one of my dad’s old song books. The Castle of Dromore (which is actually the other Dromore in County Tyrone), Rocky Road to Dublin, The Belfast Mill, Mountains of Mourne, A stroll by the Liffey, In Newry Town Where I was Born, Follow me up to Carlow and Carrickfergus.

Monday 10^th September                         Day 22

We can’t find a Laundromat in Dromore, so drop the washing in Banbridge and head inland to Amagh. My great grandfather, Archibald Nixon has some connection with Amagh so we walk the town and picture him walking the same paths.

Having lunch in the Mall, a beautiful green park in town, we get a call from Clayton in New Zealand to say that Trudi miscarried yesterday. Very sad but they intend to try again.

Heading back to the motorway we are reminded that rural roads are often one car wide with lush green grass up to the door handles on either side and were designed before road design was invented. The original track would have been selected by Dobbin picking out the line of least resistance for him and his dray. These tracks, totally untroubled by trigonometry, have survived for centuries but have been modernized by the addition of bitumen. This ‘line of least resistance’ method of route selection still applies today but engineers and surveyors go to uni for four years first to learn Dobbin’s craft.

The lush green grass adjoining the bitumen, even on the modern roads, contrasts with our barren gravel edges back home.

Lush green is very common over here.

Tuesday 11^th September                        Day 23

Belfast is a beautiful modern city with large industrial and maritime areas adjoining. The City Hall, built in 1906, is the next most beautiful of City Halls we have seen after San Francisco and the park to the front is packed with people having lunch and relaxing.

Belfast promotes itself as the second safest city in world tourism after Tokyo.

Famous points of interest include Trinity College, the Lagan River, the leaning city clock tower, Samson and Goliath, the two huge ship building cranes (Titanic was built here), the stunning Parliament House in its expansive parklands and George Best Airport, more famous for George Best than for being an airport. And yes. there is a Thai restaurant here called The Thai-Tanic

When George Best was a teenager, he was told by one of the Irish Football Clubs he wasn’t good enough and Manchester United signed him up. Such is life in Ireland.

The mood of Belfast is very positive with people optimistic that the “troubles” as they call them are over. They also believe it would only take a few ‘idiots’ to set things back again. Many of the problems in Belfast seemed to originate from a couple of suburbs and some claim that at the time of the troubles, there were probably only 10 to 15 Irish mafia hoods in the housing estates who were generating most of the problems while much of Northern Ireland simply got on with life. A tour of these suburbs reveals many murals ‘celebrating’ the troubled history.

Wednesday 12^th September                   Day 24

The Stena Line ferry from Belfast to Stranraer is a massive 126m catamaran and as for our crossing five days ago, the sea is flat. Two of the four engines are 747 engines.

Scotland

The drive up the west coast of Scotland is easy and we stop at Kilmarnock where Denise’s great great grandparents were married in 1824. Kilmarnock has the typical mix of very old and very new and appears to be a busy little town.

On arrival in Edinburgh at 7.30pm we are advised by the hotel that they have let our room go! It appears there is a glitch in the booking system procedures. About seven or eight phone calls later we find a place but as the proprietor is out, we can’t check in until 10.30pm. We keep ourselves amused at a local pub which is playing country and western music. One of the regulars, a loner at the corner of the bar, knows all the words.

Thursday 13^th September                       Day 25

Morning reveals a flat, calm, Firth of Forth from our attic room window. The owner of the B&B came to Scotland 32 years ago from Kurdistan where he grew up speaking the local language but as he was forced at school to write in Arabic, he can’t write in his own language.

One of the guests at breakfast is a young doctor from Catalan. During Franco’s reign, the Catalan language was not allowed. He is spending a few weeks in Edinburgh where he is studying English.

I didn’t bring up the language difficulties we have back at home with our kids speaking American.

Edinburgh Castle absolutely dominates the city skyline. The city itself features stone buildings turned grey with time, grey bitumen and grey skies yet is remarkable beautiful. Green park areas provide relief and the central area is alive with people. We are told that a few weeks ago during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it was impossible to move.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s old house is behind the Red Door of a long row of units and it is said that the Treasure Island idea grew from the small pond and island in the park across the street.

The new Parliament House has won architectural awards but didn’t turn my head.

The Castle is not so much a castle as a small village which we explore in a couple of hours. It should take more than that. The 1pm gun firing keeps the ear specialists in business and the wedding which takes place would have been booked more than a year in advance.

During the afternoon we meet Stephen and Rikka by the Andy Warhol exhibition, signified by the columns of the gallery being wrapped in Campbell’s soup cans. Dinner is up in the “Old Town” at an Indian Restaurant. Stephen and Rikka are enjoying Edinburgh (especially the recent Fringe Festival) along with the attendant problems of finding work and adapting to the new life-style. I am sure it is a great place for young people.

Friday 14^th September                            Day 26

Today is pretty much a travel day. Up at 3.30am for a 7am flight via Frankfurt to Rome. Lufthansa has a better class of rubber bun than previous airlines and the view from the aircraft window across Germany, Switzerland (snow on one of the peaks) and Italy is stunning.

The other trip of the day is through the Frankfurt terminal from our arrival gate to change planes to Gate A36 in outer Bavaria.

Rome

Our shuttle bus arrangements to the Piccadilly Hotel in Rome have fallen over and the taxi trip is €60, however the trip is a revealing introduction to the vagaries of Rome traffic and to a non-English speaking country.

Saturday 15^th September                        Day 27

It’s a long time since Rome was a paddock, 1700 years in fact. The city is spattered with ruins in varying states of decay and stunning ornate marble cathedrals, basilicas, civic buildings and monuments pop up on every second block.

The tour of the Vatican, including the Sistine Chapel, involves queuing for over two hours with an Italian (but English speaking) tour guide. You would imagine that people queuing for this length of time would be frustrated and angry, but the tour guide keeps our crowd of about twenty enthralled through the headphone system with stories of the history of this part of Rome. We will be nominating him for The Nobel Prize for Crowd Calming.

This is followed by Vatican Coffee and then follows a staggering array of paintings, statues, sculptures, tapestries and rooms with walls and ceilings completely covered in works by the masters.

The Sistine Chapel is the highlight of these and forgetting the artistic beauty for the moment, one can only wonder what Michelangelo went through physically to complete the work. The 30 minutes we spend in here shoulder to shoulder with the crowd is a memorable experience.

St Peter’s Basilica and St Peter’s Square are similarly overpowering. I suspect modern town planning has lost the ability or the will to create grand open spaces.

In my list of heroes, I think Michelangelo has just slipped ahead of Laurie Daley.

My propelling pencil has collapsed. After finally finding a pencil shop I choose a new one. Italian is probably a very good language, but after some confusion “Dué?” asks the assistant. I nod in Italian, signifying my agreement that dué Euros is an acceptable price. He hands me the packet. I hand him the money. “No. Cinque Euros.” he replies. I hand over the money rather than add to the confusion and leave with the packet. In the packet I find dué pencils, not uno! When you’re on holidays making a goose of yourself is the finest form of humour.

It’s Saturday afternoon and the modern is meeting the old with an MTV rock concert being set up next door to the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano close to our hotel. It could be a loud night.

Inevitably, on the way back to the hotel, I find myself browsing Italian sneakers, made of course from the finest hand-crafted Italian canvas.

Still nothing tempting.

Sunday 16^th September                          Day 28

Sunday is a day of rest. Any touring can wait until Monday when the queues are shorter. Besides we have run out of cash and can’t get the ATMs to accept our card so will have to wait until the Banks open tomorrow.

We have now been on the road for 28 days and travel can apparently wear you down. The enthusiasm which abounded in LA and San Francisco has abated a little and, strange as it seems, we need to give ourselves a rev-up to properly appreciate Rome.

The day is spent walking in the nearby parks and along the ruins of the old wall around the old city. “Some rest” says Denise! They have flies by the way, which we discover when we sit in the park to write and ponder.

The Piazza Tuscola on Via Magna Grecia, has become our favourite place for coffee, wine and happy hour and the waiters teach us how to say Vini Bianca and Vini Rosa. Rome has a series of six or seven way intersections usually called Piazzas. Amazingly, it is relaxing to sit at the wine bar and watch the traffic weave and unweave its way magically through the maze.

We eat at our favourite restaurant, the only one that opens at 6.30, and acquaint ourselves with the local Rosés. Denise has managed to fall pathetically in love with a series of several swarthy waiters.

The fashions, both in the shops and on the footpaths, generally seem to be more, well, ‘fashionable’ than back home and as for me, a bloke can only take so much. I am all cleavaged out!

Monday 17^th September                         Day 29

The Colosseum is a stunning structure built in eight years between 72AD and 80AD by 40,000 Jewish slaves and about two-thirds of the structure remains today.

Elliptical in shape and 187 metres in length, much of it is built of marble while some consists of very thin ‘bricks’ where the mortar is almost as thick as the bricks.

Much of the marble has been pilfered over the centuries for other construction projects but thankfully the remains are now protected.

The elliptical shape makes me wonder about the surveying set out involved in that era. An ellipse can be drawn on a piece of cardboard by putting a pin at each of the two focal points on the major axis, tying the ends of a loose piece of string to each pin and then, keeping the string taut with the pencil, trace out the curve.

My minds eye sees a massive piece of rope tied to two huge stakes and being moved around the curve by thousands of slaves. 

However, they probably calculated the set-out using the formula x²/a² + y²/b² = 1. Not half as exciting. The ellipse was first studied by Menaichmos in 350BC.

The Colosseum specialized in a form of entertainment where people and animals ripped each other apart before a screaming crowd of 80,000 people. Early in the 5^th century a monk named Telemarchus martyred himself in the arena as a protest against the violence and this set in train the demise of this wholesome entertainment. There’s always one party pooper.

Rome’s traffic rules, as alluded to earlier, seem to be suggestions rather than rules. Cars seem to make up their own lanes as they go and park where they like, frequently on pedestrian crossings and also around the kerbs at intersections. The parking is frequently nose to tail with only about a foot between vehicles so how they get unparked is a mystery. Frequently there will be one of the new “Smart Cars” parked reverse in. A great idea. Double-parking is common.

The bus tour we take in the afternoon is “The Christian Tour” which features only religious sites. That’s not the tour we intended, but we get on before realizing. However it is still interesting.

One of the interesting buildings is Palazzo Di Giustizia (The Palace of Justice) which hits me as totally overdone, featuring too many columns, too many steps, too many sculptures, too many plinths and too many everythings.

Tuesday 18^th September      The long trip home

It’s a sad and happy day to be leaving. We haven’t seen as much of Rome as we had hoped but it will be good to get home where I understand it is still tomorrow.

Singapore Airlines is five star, with meals you would happily line up for and hostesses who Denise describes aptly as china dolls, and beautifully attired in traditional dress. There is however the usual knee room problem and the bloke in front of me has dropped his back rest into my forehead.

Heading for Singapore, we pass north of Athens, south of the Black Sea, across spectacular mountains and fields, the bottom third of the Caspian Sea, north of Nagpur, across the Straits of Malacca and over Kuala Lumpur, aided in parts by a 200 kph tailwind.

At Singapore Airport we meet up with a couple of blokes from the Canberra Pipe Band who are just finishing a two week trip to Moscow where they were blown away by playing in Red Square. They hope to go again next year.

Somewhere on this trip it will become or has already become 19 September and I haven’t bothered to work out when.

The trip to Sydney across Derby and the Alice provides more wriggling and squirming and after changing planes in Sydney for the trip to Canberra we finally walk through our front door at 11.00pm.

This has been a holiday of cities and I have no idea which one I liked the most. Los Angeles with it’s cultural contrasts between the north and south, San Francisco with it’s architecture and the Bay, London with it’s history and crowds, Carlow (hardly a city) with its family connections, Dublin which we only passed through, Belfast with its troubled past and new positive attitude, Edinburgh with it’s grey beauty and Rome with its long history and ancient architecture.

This has been a holiday on the move, where we have seen the cities but haven’t got to know the people. If time and money were infinite, we would certainly go back to any one of these cities and spend time there. We estimate that to see the world properly would take about 400 years and we’re planning that one next.

Thursday 20^th September                     At home

The house feels strangely alien after being away for 30 days but feels a little better after we collect the cat. She seems to be walking in circles just like us.

Wednesday 10^th October

It is three weeks since we arrived home. The sleepless nights with 2am cups of tea lasted three to four nights, the house again felt like home after a week or two and the cat agrees. Going to work is just feeling normal again.

I still can’t hide my disappointment however that the retail capitals of the world haven’t been able to come up with a single pair of sneakers to my liking.

Next time I’m going to Paris.