Chicago

Presently we’re in the Canadian wilderness, but the blog is out of phase by about a week so I’m attempting to fill in the difference while sitting out a storm under a parasol, being slowly exsanguinated by eagle-sized mosquitos next to a lake. Break out the violins.

When we were done in Milwaukee, we had one last trip for the Donkey before the people from Budget had to mournfully take it behind the shed with granpappy’s shotgun, and that was to Chicago – which was the last US stop in this leg.  Driving there was no problem, and was quite brief by this trip’s standards, but driving though Chicago itself was something else.  It was a maelstrom of blaring horns, aggressive driving and general bad humour.

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Please hold for a moment; a squirrel has just run over my foot. I think that one in Wyoming must’ve put the word around.  Oh god, they’re coming.

As you were.
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Being the cultured types, we took an Architectural tour with the Chicago Architectural Society, where a very keen city planner pointed out the more significant examples of Modernist, Post-modernist and Contemporary buildings in the city centre.  This was more interesting than it sounds.

Examples:

Modernist

Post-modernist

Dickhead

I quite liked the art-deco substation that I spotted:

 
Fans of Bioshock will know where I’m coming from

The other tour we did was around several of the more popular pizza parlours, which we did with the genuinely interesting and funny Javier from the Slice of Chicago team.  You should know that the deep-pan pizzas popularised by the likes of Dominoes, Pizza Hut et al are incorrect to the source material.  A Chicago Deep-dish Pizza looks like this weapon here:

Behold your doom

Which is to say, with a relatively thin crust lining a deep pan containing a vast amount of filling.  A small, double-stuffed variety at Giordano’s contains a pound of cheese. The large contains three. One could rob a jeweller shop window with it. They also take a hour to cook and you may well be waiting an hour for a table to start with (if you are unable to work the internet, peasants).  Once again, it’s good, but nothing’s that good and pretty much any portion size will be too much.

“Two slices of delicious regret coming right up”

I report that the locally-made beer was also of a high standard.  The naming of this one I found in the Virgin hotel bar was unfortunate, however:

Snigger

Here’s some more pretty pictures:

  

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir haben ein Pizza gegessen, dass dichter als einem Neutronenstern war.

Santa Fe

So, on Saturday we made another 560 mile jaunt (all of these big drives have been 560 miles, give or take, which is just about the limit of my driving attention.  So thank you, cosmos) across some more desert to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

It’s mildly cooler than Nevada -but then so is Venus- coming in at a balmy 28°C, but with enough humidity to not desiccate low-flying sparrows.

Hasn't quite lost it’s novelty yet, but we’re getting there

We’d heard quite a lot about Santa Fe with regards to it’s culture and food (certainly in comparison to the casino-polluted cultural vortex that is Nevada) and we were rather looking forward to having a gander. It is definitely a very individual place, as the buildings -new and old- follow the Spanish/Pueblo Indian style of architecture.  Broadly equivalent to the enforced mock-Tudor of Chester high street if it wasn’t shit. 

They don’t have a WH Smiths though. Your move, New Mexico

We caught the market in the Plaza, where there were a couple of hundred stalls selling every possible variation of carved Jesus and other local crafts.  You do realise something about yourself when you find yourself pondering the merits of a hand-carved $100 chopping board.  I reckon it might not’ve fit too well with our baggage allowance, though.  

All the wooden crucifixes in various degrees of horrific detail a man could ask for

Food-wise, they are all about the green chile around here.  I came here looking for a green chile cheeseburger and there is fearsome local competition among the local restaurants to produce the definitive example.   

Behold all ye mighty and despair

I managed to inadvertently eat green chile for three successive meals, including the above beast. I approve, and so does Gaviscon.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Santa Fe war heiß, aber erträglicher als Laughlin. Die Leute da kochten alles mit grünem Chiles. Das gefiel mir aber nicht so viel meinen Bauch.

Seattle

On Thursday we departed Victoria, BC on the Clipper heading for Seattle.

Unfortunately there had been wildfires in British Columbia which has meant that it has been a bit too fuggy (Although when we smelt burning we figured it had something to do with the football) and it meant that the views from the Clipper were not as good as hoped. However I would definitely recommend it as a mode of transport if you are in this part of the world. It felt like travel in the 1930's: plush leather seats and lots of leg room..

Seattle sits on the Puget Sound and in fact the whole area around the city is made up of a number of islands. We were chatting away to a couple on the Clipper who live on one of the islands and they pointed out the various places as we passed, so it was like having our own private guides. My local government geekiness was indulged by our discussions about taxes and the changing community. I was told that a lot of their community has now changed to vacation rentals from holiday homes, a la Cornwall.

Seattle was quite high on the list of places to visit for 13 year old me. Grown up me isn't really interested in hipster bands and to be honest I didn't find Seattle as trendy a place as thought. In fact it felt just like a city which is synonymous with Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing -  85,000 people are still employed here by the latter.

Bit of history that I gleaned from our walking tour with Jake from SFWT: Seattle was named after the Chief of the local tribe, who was apparently a good egg.  Naturally the colonists ended up killing a load of his tribe and forcing the rest onto a reservation. Moving on..

Seattle found it's fortune through logging as the area was covered with thousand year old trees. So they logged like it was going out of fashion...which it duly did 'cause they ran out of thousand year old trees. Apparently there are fewer than a dozen of those old trees left. While they did bring prosperity to Seattle, many of those trees died for naught as in 1889 there a fire started in a glue factory and 33 square blocks of wooden buildings in the city were razed.

The city was not doing too well at all until gold was discovered about 1800 miles away in the Yukon peninsula. Seattle -through the PR genius of a guy called Erastus Brainard- set itself up as the gateway to Klondike and the city boomed. We visited the Klondike National Park in Seattle, which is actually a modest indoor museum, despite the grandiose title. The most interesting thing was learning about some of the women that also headed up there. Enterprising, clever brave and kick-ass women who made the journey and set up restaurants and guest houses or went prospecting themselves.
If you have visited the States , you might have gone to Nordstrom department stores? The founder John Nordstrom made some money in the Klondike gold rush and invested it in his first retail enterprise. Although it was tough, I can see how it captured peoples imagination at the time. Although the City of Seattle made far more money than all of the prospectors combined, from supplying said prospectors with provisions...especially after the Canadian Police said that anyone going to the area had to have enough supplies for a year.

We stayed at the Hotel Five. Very modern. Has a cupcake happy hour every day. We have trekked around the city, visiting Pike Place Market and sampling coffee (or I have been watching G drink it as my non-alcohol tolerance is low). Mondays through Fridays in Seattle from about 3-6 are happy hours in most bars and restaurants. This means that a lot of food and drink is half price if you catch it right. We therefore decided to do some restaurant hopping instead of traditional dinner, drinking and snacking and moving on to the next happy hour. This meant our evenings were actually free. So we went to the Cinema (aside before the movie after the bit about not being a phone pest, they told us where all the exits were and to let them know if anyone was acting suspiciously. I always find it so tough to marry up that America with all my experiences so far) and also went to the Olympic Sculpture Park.

The weather has been early to mid twenties but that darn fugginess has meant that we were not able to spot Mt Ranier, although we have been assured by many locals that it does actually exist.

Today we went for Brunch at the Space Needle. It is a revolving restaurant. Jolly good stuff.