June was completely hectic! We ended up moving house two days before I was flying out to New York City for the TBEX travel bloggers conference. Our new home is a two-bedroom unit in a block of four in one of the towns near Stanford University. It’s not quite as big or charming as our old house but it’s quite spacious and it has a little balcony. There’s a ton of cupboard space, an outdoor clothes line and a car port. We live on a quiet street, but close enough to the shops, and there’s a library and swimming pool nearby as well. We are not fully unpacked yet and we don’t have a phone or the internet at home yet, but we are starting to settle in.
The biggest advantage with the move is that my husband can walk or cycle to work rather than having a mammoth commute from the city. We are also saving a huge amount of money on rent. But there are a few other nice side-benefits as well. Firstly, the weather is so much better than in the city. San Francisco is infamous for being cold and foggy in summer but it’s very much a micro-climate and everywhere else in the Bay Area is warm and sunny at this time of year. Secondly, we are now only 10-20 minutes’ drive from great hikes in the state parks. If you look at the map of the Bay Area below, you can see that the peninsula is rimmed by green. Thirdly I didn’t have a pool near me in the city and since moving here I’ve been swimming a few times a week, which is something I really enjoy. There are tennis courts too but you need a key and I haven’t got myself organised yet, nor do I have a partner to play with.
We have bought a car – a 2007 Prius and we got a great price for it. My husband bought it the day I was coming back from New York and came to pick me up from the airport. It’s amazing to me that we both went 33 years without a car or even a driving licence but within six months of moving to California we had our licences and within a year we had a car. The Prius is not the most exciting car in the world but the fuel efficiency is terrific (we’ve rented a few cars so we have a good basis for comparison) and because they are so common in the Bay Area, there are some good options on the second-hand market. It’s a lot newer than I expected that we would be able to afford, though there are also quite a few miles on the clock already. This area is great for walking or cycling (flat, unlike the city) and there’s a train up to San Francisco that takes 40 minutes to an hour, but it’s really great to have the freedom of a car and be able to get out to do hikes on the weekend.
I had a great time in New York, though it was unpleasantly hot and humid. I stayed with our friends Mike and Jessica in Brooklyn and met their gorgeous one-year-old daughter. I also stayed with a travel writing friend Wendy at her mother’s apartment in Midtown, in order to spread myself around a bit. I caught up with my friends Rema and Sheelagh and Alex and Kachina and their two-year-old son. TBEX itself was hectic with lots of late-night partying going on and it was really great to meet so many people that I’ve known online for so long. I have promised a lot of New York-related blog posts and so far I have this post on gorillas at Bronx Zoo and this video of a cool interactive art project involving street pianos.
Please subscribe to Roaming Tales or join the page on Facebook to keep up with the new posts. Among the upcoming posts, I have Cajun food in Staten Island, a behind-the-scenes tour of restoration efforts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a review of an Afghan restaurant in Manhattan.
San Francisco really turned on the summer sunshine this weekend – I think the city is trying to convince me not to leave! I won’t be fooled – I know the summer fog is hiding somewhere.
It’s been a fantastic weekend, crammed with fun things. Yesterday was especially full. At lunch time we headed to Golden Gate Park for BattleUS, a slalom skating competition. Our friend Natalie was competing in the international women’s tournament and we arrived just in time for her heat. We were well impressed by her mastery of tricks and speed – and so were the judges, as she got through her heat to the semi-finals held today.
I didn’t make it down to the park again today but I was excited to hear that she made it through to the finals and came fourth overall in the women’s comp. Her world ranking was 53 before this weekend and she’s probably shot forward a few places now. Well done, Nat! (It’s not been updated yet but I’m sure they’ll show the results on this page soon!).
Slalom involves skating around cones in all sorts of configurations including on toes or heels and even jumping. It’s pretty cool to watch! As well as the women’s heats, we saw the men’s heats. It was a warm day and I enjoyed sitting on the hillside, chasing the shade as it retreated the hill and tanning my legs. As well as the slalom, I also watched a gopher digging up the hillside and poking his head out from time to time, which was terribly cute!
In the evening we met up with a friend FeLicia, who I met in writing class. We had a simple Asian dinner at a restaurant called LimeTree in the Inner Sunset. Then we went to see the end-of-year show for the San Francisco Circus Center. It was a really high-quality show for only $20 – my favourite act was the aerial hoop spinning. In the first act, they had a man doing it; they topped this with twin girls in the second act! I also loved the rope climbing, the Chippendale-inspired shirtless hoop diving, the unicycles and several (though not all) of the clown acts.
We’ve found a place to live! As I mentioned previously, we are leaving San Francisco to move closer to work opportunities in Silicon Valley. For me the most stressful part of moving house is the overlapping time between giving notice on the old home and finding a new place to live. Unfortunately that’s pretty much the way it has to happen unless you want to pay double rent.
We spent two consecutive Saturdays hiring a car, driving down to Palo Alto, and spending the day looking at places. We nearly took a place in – I kid you not on the name – Professorville in Palo Alto. This was a quirky craftsman cottage with red windows – but we were gazumped by an eager tenant offering more money and a quicker rental. We thought very seriously about a place in the hills in Portola Valley, backing on to wilderness with miles of hiking trails – but we decided that it would be too isolated and would mean buying not one, but two, cars. Finally, we took a two-bedroom unit in a central location, close to shops and parks and even a pool nearby. We don’t have a long credit history in this country but our current landlord gave us a fantastic reference and that clinched the place for us – yay!
I haven’t actually seen the place myself yet. My husband went to see it in his lunch hour or after work and got the low-down from the current tenants. You might think I’m mad but actually this bodes well – out of the seven homes we have shared, he has chosen three of them sight unseen by me and they have been the best three of the lot! I’m told the place is nice, with a balcony, a parking space and only four units in the complex. Having said that, it sounds a lot more functional than our current home, which is a gorgeous two-bedroom cottage surrounded by flower gardens in a great neighbourhood. That’s okay – we’re going to be saving a lot of money on rent, nearly a grand per month, so we’ll be able to afford other compensations.
We’ll be moving sometime in the second half of June. I know our new address already, so feel free to write to me and ask. We’ll get mail forwarding anyway though so it doesn’t really matter for the time being.
I’m really glad to have this squared away. Once we have a firm move-in date I can start booking removalists and cleaners and so on and try to make it all fit in around my trip to New York.
We are busy playing host in our final days in this house. We had Matt Judd stay with us last weekend, after he finished attending a conference in San Francisco. We had a great time, showing him the Ferry Building, our favourite hang-outs in the Mission, and the California Academy of Sciences. Matt even inspired me to join him for a jog on Sunday morning after a little too much indulgence on Saturday! We’ll have Natalie stay with us on Thursday night before her slalom skating competition this weekend. That’s it for house guests, but hopefully we might have some friends over for dinner soon too.
I had a birthday recently. My mother sent me this photo in a frame as a gift. I thought I had seen all my childhood photos but this is not one I have seen before.
The photo is of my mother and me some time in the late 1970s or 1980 at the latest. All you can see in the background are trees and a rainwater tank, but I am pretty sure we are at our log-cabin home on the NSW South Coast where I lived with both my parents until I was four.
Welcome to another post where I apologise for a lack of blogging and promise to turn over a new leaf. Actually, my dad asked me to update the blog. He’s probably my only remaining reader after all this time, so how can I refuse?
I’ve been in Australia for three weeks and I just got back to San Francisco. I spent a week up in Queensland – Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast and hinterland – to visit family. My mum came up to meet me and we went to see my grandma and did the rounds of aunts and cousins. Then I had week or so in Sydney, interspersed with a long weekend down at my dad’s farm in the Southern Highlands.
The main piece of business was a visit to the US Consulate. My husband is starting a new job tomorrow (exciting!) and since our visa was attached to the job, we had to get new visas. That went through very quickly and smoothly – we had our appointment Wednesday morning and the passports with visas arrived in the post on Thursday morning. Efficient!
The rest of the time was spent catching up with friends and family. The final week was especially hectic with lunch and dinner dates every day. We were also trying to go through the storage boxes in my in-laws’ attic and we managed to reduce it considerably. We had extra suitcases to cart wedding presents etc home and we also gave a lot of old clothes and kitchenware to Vinnies and books to my mother’s online book store. I didn’t quite finish the job though – next time! We are selling our beautiful four-poster bed on eBay and it’s currently going for a steal so if you’re in Sydney, please feel free to make a bid! The bed is dismantled and pick-up is from Balmain.
Life is moving on – friends and family are buying houses and having babies. It seems crazy to me that my sister is turning eight in a few days and my brother is four – she was two when I left Australia and he wasn’t born! I’ve been back and forth quite a bit and the family came to visit me in 2006 but it’s still hard to be away. When I arrived, my brother and sister ran up to me and hugged me, crying “Caitlin!!!”. Then they said “we didn’t think you could come because of the volcano in Iceland.” Where did that come from?!!! I guess it shows they pay attention to the world around them. Emma also asked me why I had to live so far away. “Why can’t you live in Queensland? That would be better,” she said. Pause. “Except Queensland has floods,” she added. (Noosa is probably her favourite place in the world and there have indeed been floods in Queensland recently).
My husband and I flew home together on Friday, on a direct Qantas flight from Sydney to San Francisco. It was fine, though we didn’t get much sleep and as we left in the day and arrived in the day it threw our sleeping patterns out of whack. I watched a few movies – a documentary called Christian the Lion, and three features The Invention of Lying, The Lovely Bones and Precious. Going over, I left at night and arrived in the morning and had three seats to myself so I got quite a lot of sleep and didn’t really get jetlag. Right now I’m still quite jetlagged. I managed to stay awake on Friday until 9pm but then I slept solidly until after midday on Saturday and didn’t go to bed until 2am. My husband seems to be doing better than I am, which is good since he starts work on Monday. I guess I can ease into it a little more.
Last week we had the first proper rain we’ve had since I moved to San Francisco in July. The lack of rain was notable – the closest we had got was fog so heavy that it was verging on drizzle. Then last Tuesday the skies opened and we had several months all in one go – record-breaking rain, apparently.
Fortunately, the Indian summer has returned and the past few days have been filled with blue skies and glorious sunshine. Since most of July and August were cold and foggy, I’m quite keen that the sunshine sticks around for at least the rest of the month.
My in-laws are back from their trip to the East Coast and last night we went to the San Francisco Symphony at the Davies Symphony Hall. The theme was music from Disney, to celebrate the opening of the Walt Disney Family Museum, which I mentioned last post. It was a lot of fun to dress up and the music was wonderful. There were quite a few squirming children in the audience – I can see the temptation because it’s Disney but how many kids like symphonies, really? Fortunately only the well-behaved ones remained behind after the intermission.
The instrumental music included the William Tell overture, classical music from Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty and Grieg’s “March of the Dwarfs” from Snow White. We also had a soprano sing “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from Cinderella, “Some Day my Prince will Come” from Snow White, “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio. I enjoyed the orchestral music more than the singing, especially the “March of the Dwarfs” and the “Sorceror’s Apprentice” from Fantasia. I did really love “Feed the Birds” though – it made me feel like I was back in London. (Although if you tried feeding pigeons at St Paul’s these days, you would be moved on by the City of London police pretty quickly).
My in-laws are visiting from Australia for a few weeks. They’ve spent the past week in San Francisco with us and they are off to New York tomorrow. When they return, we may do some travelling with them on the West Coast but that is yet to be decided. My father-in-law is spending his 70th birthday here and we have booked to have dinner at a fancy restaurant in San Francisco, which should be fun.
Having guests from out of town was the perfect excuse to do some tourist stuff that we hadn’t got around to yet. Alcatraz was high on the agenda. For me, it was just a matter of ticking it off the list and I didn’t have great hopes for it being particularly interesting. Who cared which cell was Al Capone’s? I was pleasantly surprised!
We had a gloriously sunny day, with temperatures in the mid to high 20s (celcius). Hubby and I took the trails around the island, while his parents rode the courtesy train up the hill to the prison block.
I found the extent of the decay fascinating. The prison was abandoned in 1962 and, although the cell block itself is in good condition, virtually every other building on the island was a ruin. Everything seemed to have concrete cancer and many of the buildings were shells with no rooves or windows. Past the parade ground, which is now a nesting site for gulls, there were piles of demolished concrete and steel that was rapidly being buried with plant growth.
Hubby and I took a quick detour along the Agave Trail from the parade ground down to the waterfront. Agave is the plant that they make tequila from – it’s commonly described as a cactus but apparently it’s actually related to lily and amaryllis. We had stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge and back to San Francisco.
After we had finished exploring the island, hubby and I returned to the cell block for the audio tour. We started downstairs with the shower block and then started the tour upstairs where the cells were. Audio tours are often mediocre but this was awesome – the thing that really marked it apart was that it used extracts from interviews with real prison guards and former prisoners. I actually cried when I heard a prisoner and his sister describing how she had been told as a child that her brother was dead, found out as an adult that this wasn’t true, and came to visit him.
The cells were tiny, consisting of a narrow bed, a toilet and sink. Some of them had personal effects in them, like musical instruments, paintings or library books. We also saw the isolation cells where the most recalcitrant prisoners were held in solitary confinement. And yes, we saw Al Capone’s cell – interesting not because the cell was distinctive but because he was held in the ‘hard core’ area, not the general cells. The tour told us all about the various escape attempts and the near riot in the dining hall when spaghetti was served again.
Alcatraz started life as a military fortification, then became a prison. It’s been empty since 1962 but was “reclaimed” by native American land rights campaigners several times. It’s currently a national park.
Many people who live in San Francisco have never been to Alcatraz, dismissing it as a tourist trap. I think they are missing out.
Now that autumn is officially here, San Francisco is finally having its summer. The infamous San Francisco fog rolls in and keeps the city cool and overcast for most of June, July and August, even while the rest of the Bay Area is roasting. Apparently an Indian summer in September and October is quite typical and that is what we are enjoying now.
San Franciscans love to talk about the weather or, more accurately, the climate. I’ve found it only takes a passing pleasantry about the weather on my part to elicit a detailed description of the micro-climate of the San Francisco peninsula and the meteorological phenomenon that causes the fog. And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard the Mark Twain quote about how the warmest winter he ever spent was the summer in San Francisco. Apparently he didn’t even say it!
I have found people in San Francisco extremely friendly. There is a real neighbourliness here that we never felt in London or even Sydney. I’ve been here just over two months and I know half a dozen of the neighbours already. We’ve had dinner with the couple next door and plan to have them around to our place soon. And we’re having a “block party” at the end of October where our section of street gets closed to traffic and everyone brings a potluck dish.
We have had a few visitors already. Our friend Jules (originally a Sydneysider but we know him from London) was in town for a couple of nights on his crazy world trip – he passed through San Francisco en route from Seattle to Las Vegas but is soon heading south to Mexico and Central and South America. Now we have Jack’s parents staying with us for a few weeks. They arrived on Saturday and they are staying in the spare room for now, though they are going to New York next week and plan to do a bit of travel in the US and maybe Canada. Jack’s father will be celebrating his 70th birthday here in San Francisco with us and we have booked to go to a nice restaurant.
In other news, I finally got my employment authorisation card so I can now look for jobs or freelance work. Woo hoo!
In the month before I left the UK for San Francisco, I went up to Scotland for work followed by some pleasure travel through the Highlands. I spent a few days visiting my uncle Jeff and aunt Judith and my cousin Jenny came down from Glasgow.
Jeff and Judith are now living in a mobile home next to their cottage up the glen (valley) from Inveraray, while they get building works done on the cottage. The work was three-quarters complete when I was there and it’s going to be very nice, with a lovely big kitchen and more bedrooms, but still keeping the charm of the old cottage.
Jenny (left) and I went for a hill walk directly behind the cottage on the first full day I was there. We didn’t go to the mountain peak a bit to our left, but went to the highest point in a straight line behind the cottage. We saw a family of red deer (sadly, I didn’t have my zoom lens with me so the photograph fails to do it justice), which was very exciting. It was pretty steep going and a lot of it was really scrambling or climbing rather than hiking but it was lots of fun. We called Judith when we reached the top so she could see our silhouettes waving from the ridge line. At the top the ground was flat and boggy – the treacherous peat bog sucked Jenny down to her knees at one point! It was pretty though, scattered with fluffy white bog cotton flowers and patches of red moss and 100 metres or so in from the ridge line, there’s a beautiful little freshwater tarn (lake).
Red deer
The tarn
While I was at the cottage, I also found time to go chanterelle-hunting with Judith (slim pickings though as we were a few weeks early and it had been quite dry) and hang out with my uncle Jeff and talk about the meaning of life. We had my other uncle Steven and Jenny’s cousin (and my friend) Andrew come to dinner on the Saturday night and Jenny and I drove back to Glasgow with Andrew. I stayed at Andrew’s place that night, then it was back to London by train on Sunday, and into the US Embassy for my visa appointment the following day.
I’m in a weird limbo right now. The wedding and honeymoon is behind me and the move to San Francisco is ahead of me. My husband has already moved Stateside but I am stuck in London waiting for an appointment at the US Embassy to get my visa. We had already given notice on our flat in Whitechapel and I moved out at the end of May. I am now staying with friends in north London and I also plan to travel.
The last couple of weeks I have been hanging out with my friend Emme, her partner Jon and their lovely French sheepdog (Briard) Ivy. I celebrated my birthday by going walking in a nearby park with Emme and Ivy and taking photographs of all the lovely buttercups and puddle ducks. England is beautiful in summer! In the afternoon I made a orange and poppyseed birthday cake (which turned out a little soft in the middle but was still scrumptious). Then in the evening I did a fish cookery workshop at Food at 52 with my friend Dominique.
Otherwise, I have been doing a bit of freelance work and trying to reduce my belongings down to a sensible amount for the trans-Atlantic flight. (We shipped most of the household stuff and gave a bunch to charity but I still seem to have quite a lot left over). It’s been quite a chilled time for me, not entirely without its stresses, but I haven’t ventured into London or socialised overly much. I did go to an event on China 20 years after the Tiananmen massacre at the Frontline Club on 1 June with a couple of journalist friends. I also caught up with my friends Ben and Lyndsay who have been visiting from Australia last weekend – we had dinner at The Narrow Boat, a lovely pub on the canal in Angel-Islington. Last night Emme’s friend Jen came over for a games night, which was also lots of fun!
I’ve always lived in central London – Clapham, West Hampstead and Whitechapel. Three very different areas but all in zone 2. My friends live on the outskirts in a pretty little cottage, with rolling countryside out the back door. This definitely has its advantages – you can go for lovely walks or runs and the other day I saw a hedgehog on the footpath on the way home from the station. It’s not as easy to get out and about though and this week my own laziness has been compounded by a Tube strike.
I’m about to get moving again though. Next Monday, I am getting the sleeper train to Aberdeen and then the ferry to Orkney. It’s for a story – I can’t tell you much more than that right now but obviously I’ll share once I can. When I’m done in Orkney, I’m going to travel down the west coast of Scotland to see my relatives in Inveraray and Glasgow. I come back to London just in time for my visa appointment.
Before I leave the country, I also want to go to see my aunt Michele and her family in Cardiff, my friend Misty in Dublin and my friend Jann in Amsterdam. I’m also REALLY, REALLY looking forward to the San Francisco adventure and seeing my lovely husband again.
***
I know that I have been neglecting this blog. I am not sure that my friends and family are still reading it, except for those of you with RSS readers. But you can always follow me at my travel and food blog Roaming Tales, on Twitter or Facebook or Friend Feed (which you can customise if you don’t want to see all my tweets, for example).
