Washington - the "THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM" edition

On 11th September, I left Colorado for Washington. Well, more correctly, I left for Baltimore because that was the only direct option from Denver. But I digress. When I first booked my flights, my mum claimed that I would die a horrible flamey death if I flew anywhere on September 11th (*I* claimed that it would probably be the safest day of EVER to fly anywhere. HI MUM!!). Obviously, I didn't. 

Megan dropped me at the airport at about 7.30am. I walked through the doors and right into (almost literally) a bunch of military guys carrying flags and a minute of silence. Thankfully, I looked up from searching my handbag for my flight information in time, or I actually WOULD have literally walked into them, and the morning would have been CRAZY AWKWARD... Anyway. After a substandard delicious bagel eaten sitting at a table in a civilised fashion on the floor next to a travelator, I spent a large chunk of the four-ish hour flight to Baltimore watching Pirates of the Caribbean 4. About an hour outside Baltimore, we hit turbulence. Turbulence to the point where the plane was dropping a millionty several feet every few minutes. The seatbelt sign was turned on, and a stewardess came on the PA.

Stewardess: The captain has turned on the fasten seatbelt sign, and has advised the flight crew to remain seated until landing. This means we will be unable to perform our final safety checks. Could you please make sure the people around you have their seat backs upright and their tray tables secured. And in the event of an emergency, please leave all cabin baggage on board the aircraft.

Me: Crap. My mother was right. Horrible flamey death is clearly imminent...

And then absolutely nothing happened. Having now had subsequent flights with the same airline, it appears that such comments are part of their normal pre-take off and landing spiel. But it's pretty much the opposite of reassuring when the plane is periodically dropping out of the sky into a thunderstorm...

Despite the weather's plans to the contrary, I made it to Baltimore in one piece. I then proceeded to spend a millionty years an hour and a bit getting from Baltimore Airport to the hotel in Washington. The first leg was on a bus, which drove through a hail storm so severe that every other car on the road stopped because they couldn't see. The second leg was on the subway from Greenbelt, which took FOREVER, despite only being eight or nine stops. The third leg was on foot, and involved me walking a block in the wrong direction because while I can read maps, I really suck at translating what's on the map onto what I can see around me...

After what seemed like the longest time ever, I finally made it to the hotel and met up with the lovely Kat.  After watching some truly terrible spectacular television for an hour or so, we headed out for dinner. We had quite possibly the vaguest waiter of all time. It wasn't quite Nikki's waitress who forgot to bring the food, but he was pretty "Ohhhhh, so you want to know the specials? Huh." 

The following day, we headed down to the National Air and Space Museum. While the capsules from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were pretty awesome, they were also almost impossible to take photos of, courtesy of being encased in very reflective perspex. Sad face. I think my favourite thing in the whole place was this delightful collection of stewardess uniforms:

Check out the leggings/tights on the left!

Well, those and this rather special trophy:

There's only so long you can spend staring at planes and rockets before you get bored, so we went to the most expensive McDonalds in the world (it's actually IN the museum) for lunch, and then headed further down the Mall. There we came across the National Museum of the American Indian. Pretty sure it shouldn't be allowed to have the name 'museum'. I understand the fact that the Indigenous community has had a say in what's displayed and what's been written about. To some extent, this is an excellent thing. But displaying objects completely out of context and with no explanation of what they're for makes the whole experience pointless to the visitor. (#museumnerd)

Kat: [points at object] What is it?

Me: [searches for explanatory text label, without success] A mysterious thingy...

Kat: I DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND!!!!!!

Me: I don't understand either. This place makes my head hurt.

[Repeat 500 times]

Me: We need to leave now. I can't take it any more.

Kat: YES PLEASE.

Needless to say, we didn't stay there for very long. Instead, we walked up to the Capitol Building (but not inside it because apparently we needed to write to our non-existent members of Congress six months in advance of our visit to do that), and across to the Natural History Museum. The walk over there was more than a little warm and I was dripping in sweat glowing by the time we got there. 

Security guard: Hi, how are you today?

Me: Quite hot, actually. 

Security guard: Yeah, you are. HIGH FIVE!! 

Me: Well, if you insist...

The Natural History Museum was filled with shiny shiny jewellery...

and the obligatory dinosaurs...

and entertaining taxidermied specimens:

Craziest fennec fox EVER

Once we'd exhausted ourselves there, we walked back to the subway and headed out to U Street in search of dinner. We wound up at a Mexican restaurant where we ordered much needed drinks.

Me: Could I get a strawberry daiquiri, please?

Waitress: And would you like alcohol in that?

Me: Um. YES.

Seriously, what is a daiquiri without the rum? "Ooooh, strawberry flavoured ice. Where do I sign up?!" Lame. Luckily, the food was good, which redeemed the place somewhat! Oh, and a nearby table was occupied by police officers on Segways, which made for much amusement. 

Up next, America changes history for its own purposes, and the most disturbingly excited man EVER.

K xx

Chicago, the "this is the last one, I promise" edition

So after I left Sweeney, Lor and Penny at Navy Pier on Monday afternoon, I realised that I had about 36 hours left in Chicago, and way too much still on my list of things to do. I had high hopes for going up to the zoo seeing as how it's free and all, but sadly there was insufficient time :(

On Monday night, I headed up to the John Hancock Observatory to watch the sun set over the city. That was pretty awesome. The audio tour was narrated by David Schwimmer, which was a little disconcerting because I kept expecting the information about Chicago's landmarks to include the line "We were on a BREAK!!" at regular intervals...

Anyway, the view from the top is incredible. And being up there for sunset was pretty cool. I think I may have elbowed a small child out of the way to get a decent spot at the window to take photos. #whoops

The something-or-other building. I have no idea. Anyone know?

Sunset over the Chicago River. And, you know, Chicago...

I then went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory at the base of the John Hancock Building, and ordered a weight management salad (cos I'm ALL about the dieting. What?) and a side of macaroni and cheese in an attempt to get over the trauma of the mac and bonfire that we'd had at lunchtime. The waiter may have laughed at me when I ordered. Clearly, he's never needed to get the taste of mac and bonfire out of his mouth... *jealous*

The next day, I got up to find it tipping with rain. After unsuccessfully trying to wait it out at my hotel, I was forced to make a mad dash across the street to 7-11 to buy an umbrella. By the time I'd done that, it was thundering. It made walking a mile down Michigan Avenue rather interesting, that's for sure!

I finally made it to the Art Institute in one (slightly squelchy) piece. And I had an awesome time there. Do you guys ever play a game at museums and art galleries where you pretend that you're insanely rich and can take home one thing from each room?

I have no idea when I started playing it. I have half a suspicion that it's something my mum the teacher would have invented to make sure that we were paying attention to the objects and reading the text labels and generally learning stuff rather than aimlessly wandering around. If it *was* my mum (HI MUM!!!), at least it paid off - she got a museum curator out of it!

Anyway, I played said game at the Art Institute the other week. And thank God I'm *not* filthy rich, or my house would need to be much bigger than it is, because i would now be the proud owner of the following:

• a Mayan stelae,
• several Monet paintings,
• a couple of grandfather clocks,
• Grant Wood's American Gothic,
• a medieval necklace in the shape of a dragon,
• a half suit of armour from sixteenth century Italy,
• a Van Gogh self portrait, 
• a frieze of donkeys from the wall of an ancient Egyptian tomb,
• some Chinese bronze water vessels,
• a painting of an orange grove in Spain,
• a truly awesome library ladder (though sadly not of the slide-y variety), and
• this painting, solely because of the completely ridiculous hat that (male) baby is wearing:

Awesome... I hope he gave his parents hell for this painting when he grew up. 

Of course, it stopped raining during the four hours I spent in the Art Institute, and started again the minute I left... And the rain was even harder than it had been on the way down there. When the rain started coming THROUGH my umbrella, I decided it was time to take shelter under the portico of a nearby office building. Still, by the time I got back to the hotel, my shoes made squelchy noises and my socks were so wet that I had to wring them out in the bath #funtimes #ew

But despite the thunderstorms, my last few days in Chicago were awesome. Well...except for the part where I dragged my suitcase three blocks in the wrong direction on my way to the airport because I threw out my map of Chicago at the hotel. And the part where I asked someone where the train station was and he gave me a weird look and then pointed about two metres to his left #FAIL But, ya know, other than that, it was great!! ;)

Seriously though, does anyone else play that game? Or am I a crazy person?? :S

K xx

Further B-A-N-A-N-A-S

Okay, so that storm we had the other night? The one that trapped me in my house meaning I couldn't go to the gym? (Yeah, and I was ALL kinds of broken up about THAT!) It gave us a whopping 87.0mm of rain. EIGHTY SEVEN MILLIMETRES IN ONE DAY... And 86.6mm of that was after 5.30pm... The creek down the street from me was a couple of millimetres away from bursting its banks, which would have been interesting.

We're nowhere near as badly off as Wagga Wagga, where the Murrumbidgee River is at 9.6 METRES and rising, but it's been a pretty intense start to summer, that's for sure. Here's hoping the rain clears up soon, or I really WILL be investing in a pair of gumboots!

K xx

This shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S

Yes, I quoted Gwen Stefani for the title of this post... Deal with it. It's been raining since Sunday morning, pretty much non-stop. Today, the sun came out for pretty much the first time. And then? The Bureau of Meteorology issued a severe thunderstorm warning at 4.30. Awesome... It started raining just as I got home at 5.10 (and thanks to R for the lift home, otherwise I would have looked like a drowned rat!), and it's still going, nearly four hours later.

And we're not talking a little bit of drizzle. We're talking about this:

I was meant to go to a Zumba class at the gym tonight. Yeah, that didn't happen... And the Bureau says the rain is due to continue at least every day for the next week. And this summer has a 60% chance of being rainier than average. Awesome... I'm so glad I spent money on summer dresses.....................................

I'm also glad I spent money on these when I was home in Melbourne last:

*sigh* Damn that whole La Niña effect...

Oh, and my biggest problem with the rain? My hair ends up looking something like this:

(Source)

Awesome. I just love humidity.

Off to build an ark,

K xx

Central Australia Part 1 - Kings Canyon

The start of the trip wasn't all that enthralling, so I'll skip through that quickly - we caught the bus to Sydney, spent the afternoon at The Rocks, ate dinner in a food court at Darling Harbour because the idea of paying $30 for a plate of pasta was ridiculous, flew to Alice Springs the next morning, and spent the afternoon melting into sweaty disgusting puddles at the Botanic Gardens.

We were being picked up the following morning at 4.45am, which meant getting up at 3.30. Which was bad enough on its own, but at about 1.00, a MASSIVE thunderstorm came through. And we were staying in a bungalow with a tin roof. So there went a couple of precious hours of sleep. I was convinced that it would have stopped by 4.45 (surely there couldn't have been any water left in the sky after that long??), but when we finally got up and turned the TV on, SBS Weatherwatch (the only thing on at that hour!) showed us a dirty great blue raincloud smack over the middle of Central Australia. Awesome...

Thankfully, the rain had eased by the time we had to go and stand outside waiting for the bus. But of course, by the time we had to get OUT again to sort out final payments etc at the tour company office, it was pouring again. And it continued to pour for at least an hour after we left Alice Springs. We had the grand plan of sleeping in the bus, but our tour guide decided what we needed to listen to at 5am was the radio. So there went the sleeping plan *sigh*

Breakfast was a cold toasted cheese sandwich from a truck stop two hours into the five hour drive to Kings Canyon. Mmm, delicious... The drive was long and painful, except for the part where we had to cross one of several creeks that had flooded the road, and our tour guide had to get out and wade through to check how deep it was because she couldn't see the bottom. It was only about 20cm, but she decided we should stop for lunch and hope the level dropped in that time. So we drove about 15 minutes back to a station, and had lunch in the company of this dog:

I couldn't work out if it was permanent marker or quite how they'd managed to get the dog to hold still long enough to write 'Dont [sic] feed me' on its back...

Aaaaaanyway, after lunch, we forded the creek without any problems and made it to Kings Canyon - FINALLY!! After a bit of a briefing, we set out on the clifftop walk, which is meant to take 3.5 hours. Our schedule allowed two hours... The walk started out with wading through a creek (thank God for Goretex boots!) and then this:

Four hundred steep, uneven stone steps. Awesome... Apparently the locals call it Heart Attack Hill. Nice. There were at least two stopping points along the way. But we were still going pretty damned fast, unfortunately for me. Fortunately, the view was worth it, as was the occasional piece of wildlife.

This little guy was pretty well camouflaged, but someone in our group managed to spot him.

And here's the view from the top. Not too shabby, huh?

From there, we started the walk around the canyon top, and got a spiel on the difference between canyons and gorges. Apparently canyons are created by wind erosion and gorges are caused by water erosion. Or something like that, anyway. The moral of the story is that the Grand Canyon is a gorge. Doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?

From the start of the rimtop walk, we could see up the gorge to the waterfall:

The walk itself was a heck of a lot easier once the 400 dreaded steps were over. And it was pretty spectacular:

Our tour guide made all kinds of obligatory Priscilla, Queen of the Desert jokes, which went over pretty much everyone's heads. Sad, really. It's one of about five Australian films in existence that doesn't make me run screaming for the door... About half way through the walk, you descend into what's called The Garden of Eden:

And then it's back up some stupidly steep wooden stairs to the other side of the canyon. Once there, the scenery changed a bit, and there were some cool, if slightly random, features like this one that looked like a chimney:

There was also a lot of water around, which meant (as my friend Fem pointed out when I put the photos on Facebook) if we'd gotten stuck up there, we wouldn't have had to drink our own pee to survive. Always a good thing... :S No one but Bear Grylls needs to do that if they can avoid it!

It looks rather like the Bungle Bungles on the second half of the walk. Not that I'd really know, I've not been to the Bungle Bungles. But that's totally not the point!

Finally, we got around to the best spot for photographing the waterfall and the canyon. And it was totally worth the hauling butt to get there:


After we'd spent a decent chunk of time looking at the view, our tour guide checked the horizon and went "Oh crap..." Because this is what we saw:

Yes, that's right. A dirty great thunderstorm moving in towards us. And that creek we'd crossed on the way into the canyon? If it rose by even 20cm, it was going to be impassable and we'd be stuck and miss Uluru and Kata Tjuta. So we hauled butt even faster back towards the car park, despite it requiring us to rush past some gorgeous scenery:

Once we got back to the point where you could see down to the car park, we could hear the thunder rolling in, and the temperature started to drop pretty quickly.

And when we got back down to the bottom, the creek we'd had to wade through to reach the steps? Yeah, it wasn't 5cm deep any more. It was about 20cm deep. I don't think even Goretex could have helped there. So there was a lot of foot pain getting across the rocky bottom of the creek in bare feet...

Our total time for doing the 3.5 hour clifftop walk? 1.5 hours. We made it back through the creeks that were covering the road, but about 15 minutes after we forded one that was 15cm deep, our tour guide got a call on the radio telling her that it had now hit a METRE deep and wasn't looking at slowing down. It's crazy how fast the water level can rise out there.

From there, it was another three or four hours of driving before we got to Uluru. We didn't make it to Uluru in time for sunset, but we got to take photos of sunset from the top of a sand dune by the side of the road, which was much cooler somehow. Plus, it meant we got Kata Tjuta in the pictures too! But I think those can wait for another thesis...I mean, blog post.

K xx

PS. This was my 100th post. I *was* planning something special (a giveaway) for my 100th post, but I don't really have the time to do what I had planned. So I'll keep it on the back burner for a less busy time of year...