The Miami Dolphins (are tasty)

Way way way back when I was still only in my early 30's (ie: April), Gator Girl and I spent a weekend in Miami. GG had to work there on the Friday, so I caught a plane across on the Friday night so we had the Saturday and Sunday to explore. As most of you with access to an atlas would know, Miami is a long way south, near the point of the Florida peninsula. We got up early on the Saturday morning & headed to the other other side of the peninsula to visit the Everglades National Park. It's an interesting national park, technically a 'subtropical marshland'. To the rest of us, this ends up being a large expanse of flat, submerged grassland with occasional highly vegetated islands, just slightly above the waterline. Effectively it's a flood 160km by 60km wide that's gradually draining down to the south.

As a national park it's not really in great shape. Being a marshland it relies on regular influx of water, most of which is now diverted to the water supply of Miami. It's not helped by a concerted effort to drain it in the late 1800's that helped trash a lot of the native vegetation. It is, however pretty spectacular.

GG showing off the swampy grasslands. Note the mound of green in the distance - this is one of those islands.
Up close you can see the water sitting a few cm deep, with occasional holes in the limestone which make it up to 1/2 m deep.
From a distance it looks like grass, but in reality it's all underwater.



The lush vegetation on one of the islands in the middle of the grasslands.

That evening we drove back to Miami and went and explored the art deco district. Miami is a strange city in some ways - full of construction and skyscrapers, stunning views at every turn, yet home to an funky 50's art deco area and a wide array on influences due to it's proximity to the Caribbean and Cuba. So it's a mix of the fascinating and the standard American.

Menus say a lot about the place you live. Nawlins will have the words "roux"; "ettouffe" & "spicy" on almost every menu you see. Texas always has "biggest"; "fried" & "extra cheese". Whereas in Miami I had flame grilled Cuban beef with Hoisin sauce on Mexican tortillas at an Italian restaurant (served to Australians in America by a Spanish waitress). Now that's fusion cuisine.

Next day we cruised South Beach and checked out all the beautiful people sunning themselves. I lowered the beauty quotient by going for a swim in the Atlantic (after wussing out in Boston). We then headed around some of the islands and checked out places we'd like to live.

Here's me admiring my potential new floating home.

What a lovely bunch of coconuts.

We then headed back to the beach for lunch, and the reason for the title of this blog. We looked at the menu (checking out the healthy choices, of course), to find.....


.............something shocking..................


Check out the third option down on the low calorie options. Oh, if only the Desert Rat were here.

And to finish, I'd just like to say to Violet Femme that again, I haven't blogged about the grand canyon. Well, I'm sorry, but I've got a backlog which I'm working on.....so please have patience with me.

The Weekday Water Park Warriors

Back in August, Moistie (see blog link to the right) travelled across the Pacific to visit us in the deep south. Yes, it really has taken me that long to get around to writing this tale down. Moistie was travelling through New Orleans on his way to a wedding in Mexico, then continuing onto London before eventually travelling around the world back to Western Australia.

He was supposed to arrive at the airport around midnight, which would have given me plenty of time to get some sleep, then head off to work while he recovered from his jetlag. Thanks to the wonders of US airlines, the arrival time turned from midnight, to 2am, to 4am, and finally to 5:30am. By the time I picked up him up, I'd had no sleep and had to head straight to work. Not a fun day. Whereas Moistie was able to sit back on my comfy couch, watch cable and surf the internet. Tough life. Gator Girl wasn't around to keep him company, as she was exploring Florida with her parents who were also visiting at the same time.

I got back from work that evening to find him asleep on the couch, against my very strict instructions to avoid jet lag. So I dragged him to his feet, stuck him in the car and started the driving tour of the Northshore. Naturally we ended up at our local pub (the Tap Room), where we sampled the local brew and ate a tasty burger.

I'd managed to score the rest of the week off work, so on the Tuesday we packed up and headed down across the lake. We did our now usual tour 'o devastation, then headed to the airport, as we were on a surprise trip to Orlando! Trip went fine, Gator Girl picked us up at the airport at the other end, and we had two days to spend at Disneyland.

First day we got up stupidly early so as to avoid the crowd and headed off to the 'magic kingdom'. This is the classic Disney experience, and I thoroughly discourage adults from going. But if you do go, whatever you do avoid the 'It's a small world' ride. Basically everything is designed for kids, so the rides are really not that exciting. The only decent one was Space Mountain, which is basically a roller coaster completely in the dark. The rest ranged from average, to boring, to lame. Look, I'm sure it's awesome if you're young, or young at heart, but I'm old and cynical so it didn't really work as well for me. I'm there for the rides. And you spent a lot more time queuing than you did on the rides.

Having said that, we did run around like kids a lot of the time. And Gator Girl had a great time, so perhaps she's not a cynical as me. Space mountain was great, the wild west roller coaster was ok, splash mountain was very dull with one really exciting drop, and pirates of the carribean was more an experience than an actual ride. Oh yeah, and the jungle cruise was dire. However the teacups were impressively nausea inducing.

The crowds straight after opening charging to the castle.

It's a castle!

Can you tell we're tourists? Gator Girl, GG's Mom, Me & Moistie out the front of our disney hotel.

A sight we saw a lot - people backs in queues.

Passing time in the queues for Space Mountain.

Passing time on the wild west roller coaster.

Aaarrrrr, there be pirates!

Come out of the barrel, and put the silly accent away.

Desperately holding my lunch down.

The queue for the lamest ride of all time - the Jungle Cruise. We waited over an hour for this.

And this plastic hippo was probably the highlight.

GG Mom showing her excitement after the jungle cruise.
We stayed at the magic kingdom until about 2pm, then we headed over to the part of the Disney trip I'd really been looking for - Blizzard Beach water park! Woo!

Now to set the scene, the temperature was easily 35+, it was school holidays for some of the schools, and we'd been wading through crowds all day. We were hanging out for an exciting ride, preferably involving water, and when we arrived at the water park we saw in the distance.........

.....the tallest free-fall body water slide in the world waiting for us. Oh yes.

The place was seriously packed, so we started out with a relaxed family water slide. Moistie and I then couldn't wait any longer and started queuing for the summit plummet (yes, that's what the big slide was called). It took about an hour to get to the front of the queue, an hour happily spent discussing who was likely to win the speed race, as naturally they had a radar gun trained on the slide. Moistie had the edge in weight, I had the edge in talent (in my opinion of course). When we got to the top, it was a little nerve racking as you couldn't actually see over the edge of the slide - it was too steep. 36m pretty much straight down. Who won?


Fun on the family slide.

The rest of the afternoon was mostly spent checking out the many other water slides they had in the park. The most fun was probably the 3 side-by-side mat slides which went down a slalom course. It even had starting lights so that the races were fair. At least fair for most people, GG's Dad had a tendency to ignore the light and just go whenever he felt like it :-).

The evening rounded off by watching a shuttle launch from Kennedy space centre from the top of the waterslides. We were about 40km away from the launch site, so we got a spectacular view.

That evening we went the 'adult' Disney. Now this isn't what it sounds like, no skimpy pictures of Mickey. Instead it's a series of bars and restaurants where, sadly enough, every night is new years eve. However after a hard day, we didn't even make it as far as midnight, so we didn't see the celebrations.

As you can tell from the photo......

Next day (Wednesday only by now), Gator Girl and family headed off to Daytona for some Nascar craziness - I'll leave it to GG to blog about that one (should she blog again this year...ooooooh, narky). Moistie and myself had a flight back to Nawlins about 4pm, so we realised we had just enough time to head to the other water park for another morning of water slides.

Being the slightly fanatical people that we are, we planned our day properly. We decided that the major attraction (the crush 'n gusher) at this park would get packed early, so we'd get there as soon as the park opened, then sprint to this and go on it as many times as possible until the line gets too long. Then we'd check out the rest of the park.
First run down the crush 'n gusher.

The slide was a two-person slide on an inflatable mat. The highlight is that in three spots it actually goes uphill, blown upwards by a jet of water. This is an incredible amount of fun, thought with the amount of water being sprayed around it's pretty hard to see for the second half of the ride.

It's probably worth pointing out at this point that generally the oldest people getting really excited were about 14. Anyone older than that was acting a little more maturely. However Moistie and I made so much noise (read: screaming) coming down the water slide, that a couple of park employees took us aside.......

.... and gave us special mickey hats for really getting into the spirit of the occasion.



Which we of course wore on the next run down the slide.



And the next one.....


By this stage the queue was getting pretty long, so we skipped out on a fourth run and explored the rest of the park. Lots of different waterslides, and lots of fun, thought the only thing that really stands out is the time I uncrossed my legs doing down a speed slide. It took several minutes to extract my togs after that experience.

We ended the day with a casual float around the outskirts of the park, only occasionally trying to sink each other's inflatable rafts. All in all it was a huge morning, and we headed back to the airport fairly exhausted.

So back in New Orleans my store of photos starts to run out, so I'll try and wrap this up a little faster. We had rented some accommodation in town on the Friday and Saturday nights so that we could get really really drunk and not have to drive home. This seemed like a foolproof plan.

Everything went to plan on the Friday, we cruised Bourbon street, listened to morbidly obese Al Carson play some blues, drank the local ales at the crescent city brewhouse, wandered down to the Marigny and Snug Harbour to listen to some more blues, only to find a whiny jazz singer. Wandered back to Bourbon St, found a Gyros for a late night snack, then eventually staggered back to the hotel.

Woke up the next morning with a nasty hangover and a stabbing pain in my ear. Several litres of water and some panadol removed the hangover, but the stabbing pain continued. Luckily Gator Girl was home by this stage, so she arranged a doctor's appointment for me - turns out the water parks had given me an ear infection. This kinda cut short the drinking weekend, as I had to go home and lie on the couch and complain about the pain. This probably wasn't the finish to the week that Moistie was hoping for, but we did manage to feed him some more po-boys so at least he wasn't too unhappy.

Sunday night I was still no good (ended up off work Monday & Tuesday as well), so dropped Moistie in town so that he could get to his Monday flight on time. And if you want to know the rest of his adventures, you'll have to wander over to his blog (and wait for him to update it).

So in summary, it was great to spend a week catching up with the moist one as we hadn't seen each other since we'd left Oz. Disneyland is pretty lame unless you're a Disney fanatic or you enjoy queuing - however the water parks are spectacular and really worth a visit.

And I beat Moistie in the water slide speed race 97kph to 92kph. Yeah!

Chowder? Chow-DAH! Chow-DAH!

If you've been following our adventures you would know that Gator Girl took me to the snow for my Christmas present. In return I organised a trip to her favourite town in the US of A - Boston. However given Boston is cold at the best of times, we held off on the trip until May when the weather was supposed to be much better.

Boston is famous for a bunch of things - the first settlers landed near here seeking freedom from religious persecution. Which they promptly used to persecute other religions instead. They've got a baseball team whose record in the last 100 years makes Richmond look good, they have one of the few decent major breweries in the US, US presidents go for holidays at an island off the coast, they're unjustifiably proud of their coffee (pronounced quaff-ee) and of course they are famous for their clam chowder. Now if you've ever watched the Simpsons you'll know why I spent a lot of the weekend shouting 'Chow-DAH! Chow-DAH!' at each place we ate. Gator Girl was a little embarrassed by my behaviour.

We arrived late Wednesday night and stayed at a nice little residence in the seaside suburb of Winthrop, just near the airport. We arrived pretty late and left early so didn't get to look around much. We did have time to have breakfast at a real locals place - two huge serves of pancakes plus coffee all for about $7.

Now we did a bit of driving while we were here, so I'm going to break with tradition and stick a map in here so that you can play along at home. It's easier to see if you click on it and open it as a separate tab. Boston is right up on the north-east coast of the US. On the Thursday morning after breakfast we drove south down the coast, eventually to Provincetown which is on the very tip of Cape Cod. Cape Cod is the sticking-out bit of the land which goes first east and then north from the mainland. To the south are the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. The first stop we came to was Plymouth which is about half-way down the coast to Cape Cod. This is famous as it is where the pilgrims made their first permanent settlement. They arrived in 1620 and supposedly stepped onto 'Plymouth Rock' when they first made landfall. This set us up for the lamest tourist attraction we've seen in a while. Not only is the rock quite dull (and I'm an expert), it's also not the actual rock they stepped on; it's been moved several times snice 1620; the story that they stepped onto a rock in Plymouth is supposedly a myth and besides they first made landfall in Provincetown. So with a dismissive 'bah' at the gaggles of school students gaping at this blatant falsification of US history, we continued south.

We took the road less travelled as we weren't really in a hurry, so took the local roads east out onto Cape Cod. On the way we came across a bunch of rather funky little shops selling everything from antiques, artwork & kitchen accessories. Naturally we stopped at the shop selling kitchen accessories. In there I found lots of cool ingredients that I'd been missing in Louisiana, specifically Ketjap Manis & Shrimp paste. Thai & Balinese curries here we come! I refrained from buying the pizza stone as I didn't want to try and get it into my carry-one luggage. I got so excited I had to show my appreciation to the man out the front.

Further along the road we stopped off at some of the southern beaches which were very nice and also pet friendly. Shame we'd left the puppy in the kennel for this trip. Somewhere in the distance in this photo is the island on Nantucket, which inspired me to compose a limerick.

In the distance the isle of Nantucket
I might see it if I stood on a bucket
It's a very long way
Getting there takes a day
Should I bother? Nah....

We then headed north up to Provincetown, placed right on the tip of Cape Cod. This place was sensational, I can't rate it highly enough. The town itself is - how shall I say it - tolerant towards alternative lifestyles. We stayed at a beautiful B&B called Carpe Diem which is run by three wonderful German guys. The room was great, they had wine & cheese at 5pm every night, spa, breakfast made on demand including a mix of German & US staples, port in the main room if you feel the need for an evening snifter, and everything you could want for a brilliant weekend away. If you ever get the chance to visit Provincetown, stay with these guys, you won't regret it.

Gator Girl posing in front of the Carpe Diem. Our room was on the top floor, at the front corner.

Ok, blatant advertising over, we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring Provincetown. It's a old fishing village that has become a pretty vibrant artist community. Every second shop is selling artwork of one type or another. It's also surrounded by coastline which is mostly undeveloped, hence there's a large network of dunes with only walking and cycling paths to help you get around. In a way it reminds me of Rotto as there's lots of beaches you can't drive to, so getting a bit of sand to yourself is easy to do. We hired some bikes and rode to the other side of the cape and thought about having a swim.

Gator Girl showing off the main street on Provincetown.
The beach of the far side of the cape. And this is getting towards summer!
I said we thought about having a swim - we got in up to our ankles even after a long bike ride. The weather might be warm but that water was still seriously chilly. Nice beach to just sit and relax on though.

I was particularly amused by this sign - why is it necessary to ban pet flying? There's got to be a good story there.

All good towns have a old tower in the centre of them.
So naturally we climbed it.

We ended up having dinner at a local restaurant, drank a bottle of champagne and a bottle of wine and rolled home to the B&B, a little too overindulged to properly enjoy the snifters of port on offer.

Next morning we regretfully had to get up and continue our explorations. We would have quite happily stayed in Provincetown a lot longer, but still had long lists of things to explore in Boston.

We didn't head directly back to Boston, instead we took a detour to the south coast and headed to Newport for lunch, stopping at a few little towns along the way. Newport is actually over the state line into Rhode Island (for those of you ignorant about US geography, Boston is in Massachusetts). And if you know your Gator Girl history you'll know she spend several months here doing summer camp way back before she knew the joys of the swamp.

We had some clam chow-DAH for lunch which was pretty good, but the high point of any chowder dish is the ordering, not the eating. After that we went and did a drive-by of Gator Girl's camp, then heading north back towards Boston, stopping briefly in Providence on the way through.

A nice beachside building in Narragansett (nowhere important).

Looking back now at the the pictures of the two days we spent in Boston, I now realise that we have 6 of Faneuil Hall, 1 of the outside of Cheers, and nothing else. This is a pretty lame effort as Boston is a fantastic city and really worth visiting. But you're not going to get any kind of visual encouragement from this blog.

Let's see what I can describe. Boston has been doing major roadworks for the past 15 years, on a project generally called the 'big dig.' They have put pretty much every major road in the CBD underground, so that everything at street level is pedestrian friendly. It's really easy to walk anywhere in the center of town, and in fact it's a lot easier to walk than to drive. They've also got a great subway system with stops every few hundred metres in the centre of town, so that you're never far away from a train station.

They have a vibrant italian district in town where we went for dinner on the Saturday night. They have a huge green space in the centre of town called Boston Common which was great to walk around. It's got bustling marketplaces like Faneuil Hall and lots of cool old buildings.
One of the six photos of Faneuil Hall and a statue of Sam Adams - don't know what he did in the past but he's got a beer named after him now.

On the Sunday we went for a tour around town and saw Cambridge & MIT, Fenway Park (the home of their loser baseball team), the common, the harbour where the Boston tea party took place and lots of other neat stuff that if I'd taken a photo of I might have remembered. That night we had tickets to see the Blue Man Group (performance art, ok, outstanding in parts, average in parts) & went to dinner at a tasty indian restaurant. We also explored the funky shopping strip of Newbury street, where Gator Girl bought new clothes and hiking boots and I finally got my first decent haircut since coming to the US.


This ran a close second to Plymouth Rock in the 'lamest tourist attraction' contest. I was quite cold, by the way.

We didn't have much time to look around on the monday as we had to start the long flights back to Louisiana. Apologies again for the lack of photos of Boston, but trust me, it's a fun city and worth exploring.

Seattle: The Geology 101 Refresher Course

Wow - long time no blog. It's very easy to fall out of the habit of writing a regular blog. It's a shame really as quite a lot has happened in the past few months since Mardi Gras. That includes Jazzfest; New Orleans fest; visiting Boston & Cape Cod; exploring plantation homes along the Mississippi; Miami & the Florida keys; San Antonio Fiesta & lots of other day trips. Stay tuned....

The weather has really heated up in the past month. Weather reports are boring & consistent - the week lookahead is always something like: Monday 90 degrees; humid; 50% chance of rain; Tuesday 89 degrees; humid; 50% chance of rain; Wednesday 91 degrees; humid; 40% chance of rain......etc etc. And the rain that is forecast always comes in the form of a thunderstorm at about 5pm.

Naturally we'd been looking for an opportunity to get up north and explore the colder parts of the country while the weather down here was hot & humid. We heard that ex-Blue Sun friends of ours J1 & J2 were heading back to Australia via North America, so took the opportunity to visit them in Washington State. This also meant that I could see two volcanoes in the one weekend! We took two days off leading up to a weekend, and flew into Seattle very late on the Wednesday night. I had a magnificent view of the top of Mt. Rainier through the clouds as the plane came into land.

We got up Thursday morning to find the weather cold & overcast. Woohoo! We had planned to run straight down to Mt. Rainier; but we had plenty of time so stopped off to check out the bay in Des Moines.
Check out Gator Girl wearing a fleece!

Got on the road and drove to the Mt. Rainier visitor centre where we met up with J1 & J2. Arriving at the visitor centre was when we discovered we hadn't brought enough warm clothes - it was above the snow line! We hadn't managed to get a glimpse of the mountain the whole way up as it was well above the cloud line. But soon after we said hi to J&J the clouds parted and we could see the mountain towering above us.
Nice forests on the drive up the mountain.

The clouds parting.

J&J & me stuffing our faces.

We had a quick lunch and then decided to hike part of the way up the mountain. Hiking to the top of the mountain was really not an option as it about 4,400m high (or 2 times the height of Mt. Kosciusko). It takes a day to hike to the base camp before the final ascent, and then then another full day to attack the final slope. So we settled for strolling up a few thousand feet to get a view of the glaciers.
How hard is it to get lost when you can see for miles?

J, J & Gator Girl pretending walking uphill in the snow is fun.

Success! Finally made it to the glacier views.

Somewhere at the top of this picture is the overnight camp for the serious climbers. Looked way too hard for us.

Chilling out before the slide back down the hill. Why oh why did I leave my snowboard behind?

After we'd hiked back down to the visitors centre, we headed back down the hill, this time stopping at some of the impressive views along the way.

This waterfall was so huuuuuge I wasn't able to get it in one shot. I'm also possibly not a very good photographer.

Birdy. Num Num.


Check this river valley out. There was a massive flood in this national park last year, and a lot of the water flowed down here. Check out the small twigs in the bottom of the river- they're full sized trees.


Now just imagine when Rainier erupts next time. Either the heat will melt the snow and you'll get an incredible flood, or the lava will rocket* down this valley. Either way, the bottom of this valley is really not the place to be during an eruption.

* Although the magma composition here tends to be quite high in silica content, which implies quite viscous lava. So maybe the flood is the real danger. Assuming you survive the initial eruption, pyroclastic flows or ash falls.
We stopped at a scenic spot called Cougar rock on the way down the mountain. I think we got jibbed - there was no rock that looked like a Cougar anywhere to be seen. Here's me looking quite upset by the lack of cougar shaped rocks.

Also stopped off for a nice walk through some tall trees.

And saw a deer up close. Actually it's half a deer - it had it's head deep in a bush and wouldn't come out for the photo. And since it smelt pretty bad I wasn't keen on getting too close. But given that you can't see it's head, does that make it a no-eyed deer?*

*Sorry.

Ok, got the the bottom of the hill and found some log cabins to spend the evening in, right at the entrance to the park. This of course gave us a great excuse to build a huge wood fire and drink some tasty bottles of red. Ate dinner at a local roadhouse and enjoyed the local delicacy, which is fresh blackberry pie. Mmmmm, tasty.

Gator Girl working it at the entrance to the log cabin.

J&J modelling the entrance to the Rainier national park.

Next day we got up and drove across to Mt. St. Helens. For those of you who don't follow geological events with interest, St. Helens erupted catastrophically in 1980. The unusual thing about St. Helens is that it erupted sideways, after a landslide released pressure on one side of the mountain. Inside 30 seconds trees were flattened within a 17 mile radius on one side of the mountain. It's been erupting quietly on and off since that time, mostly with small dome-building lava flows.

The area around the mountain is part of a national park, and you can't get close to the mountain itself. However from the observatory across the valley you can get a good impression of the devastation that the eruption caused.

Again the weather wasn't kind to us in the morning. It was overcast and for most of the day we unable to see the top of the mountain.

On the way up you can start to see signs of the eruption. Here, about two valleys away, you can see the flattened trees pointing away from the mountain.

Notice the unusual topography in this shot - this is the valley that was filled in by the mudslide and subsequent eruption. You can see that for the most part it hasn't recovered, even 27 years later there is only very sparse vegetation.

You can see the steep valleys caused by water eroding the extra-soft ash/rubble mix in the valley.
Somewhere in that cloud is the mountain.

And as the afternoon wore on, the clouds parted and we could finally see the remainder of the mountain.
And I mean remainder - there's not much left of the top.

Just think about it - the entire side of the mountain disappeared in under a minute. Can you imagine how much power that eruption must have had?

That night we camped at a site about half-way back down the hill. It was great to spend a night in a tent again, as we haven't really had the opportunity to camp since we've been in Louisiana. Admittedly it was a luxury campground - it had toilets & a shower, but it's the principle of sleeping in a tent that counts.

Got up the next morning and drove to the south side of St. Helens and went for a walk in a lava tunnel.

Well, what did you expect? It's a tunnel underground. Of course it's black.

After that we needed to start heading back to Seattle. On the road back I saw a sign that looked familiar, so convinced the troops to take a 10 mile detour to...

Battle Ground! Hi Volcboy! I think it may have got bigger since you lived there, as there was quite a nice main street. We ended up having lunch there at a cool little cafe.

After that we parted way from J&J, as they were off to continue their trip down to Oregon and further south. We on the other hand headed north for Seattle. We didn't have much time to explore when we got there, only enough time to check out some of the shops & the famous (but closed by the time we got there) Pike Place market.

The most impressive shop was the REI store, which is an enormous outdoor equipment shop with amazing facilities. For example, not only does it sell mountain bikes, it has a mountain bike track outside around the store so you can test your bike before you buy. It has climbing walls, hiking paths, everything. It also had a great section on hiking with your pet - including awesome dog booties so they can go snow hiking with you.

The next morning we got up and quickly ran to the market again so we could see it when it was open. No real time to see the throwing fish unfortunately. We did however discover the original starbucks store, and bought a hot chocolate.
The Pike Place market. It's more exciting inside, trust me.

I had to wonder if Starbucks is like a vampire. If we kill the head, will the rest disappear?

After that we had to rush back to the airport to head back home to Nawlins. Well, at least I did, Gator Girl headed off to Tennessee to go to work. In summary - Washington State is a beautiful part of the country, and has some fantastic geology to check out. I think we'll try and get back there next year for a longer trip, and maybe fit in a bit more camping and hiking. But given how cold it was up there in the middle of summer, I don't think I'll be visiting in winter :-).