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.
We have been back in San Francisco for a week. My husband has started his new job and is liking it so far, apart from the mammoth commute. I’m discussing an interesting work opportunity myself, but it’s early days.
I’ve also started an advanced fiction writing workshop with Linda Watanabe McFerrin, who I first met at the Book Passage Travel Writing & Photography Conference last August. That’s once a week until the end of June with one-to-one work outside the group meetings as well. I’ve been trying to write a novel for some time and I’m hoping this could get me on track.
Meanwhile, I’m expecting to go to New York at the end of June for TBEX10, the Travel Blog Exchange conference. I’ve raised money through a site called Kickstarter, which is about funding creative projects by raising money from the public. A few face-to-face friends have contributed but mostly it’s been online friends – readers of my food and travel blogRoaming Tales and Twitter followers. I still need to book my airline ticket and arrange a hotel but I’m excited by the trip – it’ll let me meet a lot of fellow bloggers face to face, plus I’ll get to see friends in New York and hang out in the city for a few days.
I’ve updated my travel blog quite a bit lately, so please do check it out or become a fan on Facebook. This week’s posts have mostly been about Hearst Castle on the California Coast.
I’ve been keeping my eye out for jobs but mostly been freelancing since moving to San Francisco. Here are a few of the things I’ve been up to on the work front.
Galavanting | 2 May 2010: Behind the Veil
Travel essay on spending a week living with an Iraqi family in Syria and my experience as a woman in this part of the world.
The Australian | 1 March 2010: Faceless no more – Facebook admits errors
Feature for Media section on Facebook’s response to cyber-vandalism of tribute sites for dead children.
New Statesman | 14 January 2010: Our friends electric
Article on renewable energy – wind, wave and tidal – in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. (I made a trip to Orkney to research this right before leaving Britain, in June 2009).
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.
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.
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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).
It’s really cold here in London right now – we’re apparently getting winds from the Arctic rather than the Gulf Stream. There’s often a dusting of snow on the trees and grass in the mornings, plus we’re getting heavy frosts. Apparently it got down to -12C this week. Today we’re expecting a maximum day temperature of zero celcius (32F) so it’s literally freezing. It’s meant to warm up a little next week though.
Freelance work has slowed right down in the past few months so I’m pitching furiously trying to drum up more work. I’m certainly open to any ideas or offers so please keep me in mind if you know anyone who needs writing or editing work done. I’m still doing regular posts for EcoSalon, which I’m really enjoying. I also had a piece on music copyright published recently in The Observer – it was lead media feature in the Media & Business section – and a piece on podcast fiction in The Bookseller.
The countdown to the wedding is on in earnest – the date is 4 April so it’s less than three months to the day. Yikes! We’ve booked the venues and the caterer and I’ve bought the dress. The dress fits now but I’m focusing really hard on healthy eating and exercise in the hope of shedding a few kilos and toning up so hopefully a few adjustments will be in order closer to the day. We’re hoping to get invitations out really soon.
On that note, we are still madly researching honeymoon destinations. We want to stay close to Australia to cut down on flights because my cousin Rhia’s wedding is 15 days after ours in Queensland. We were looking at New Zealand at one point until we decided we wanted a tropical island. The problem is that April is the tail end of the rainy season in places like the Great Barrier Reef, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. We’re not really sure what that actually means – days of torrential rain and cyclones or just semi-regular showers to cool down an otherwise hot and sunny day?
We went to see Changeling last weekend and I was really impressed. We had resisted seeing it to a large extent because it looked suspiciously like an Angelina Jolie Oscar vehicle. I guess it is to an extent but it’s also a really good movie. I’m a fan of Clint Eastwood as a director and he does a really good job with this movie. It’s tightly plotted, emotional but not contrived, and it’s a real testament to his directing talent that there are so many strong performances particularly from the child actors. It’s based on a true story and was quite a pivotal point in the development and reform of the Los Angeles police force so that was interesting too. Plus, there are some fab hats – not only the Jolie character’s 1920s cloches and 1930s wide-brimmed hats but also for the men and the journalists (can I have a hat with a ticket that says ‘press’ for the next press event I attend, please?).
My blogs are in the running for a couple of awards and I would really love your help. Please consider nominating my travel site Roaming Tales for Best Travel Weblog in the 2009 Bloggies and the travelogue category of the Lonely Planet Travel Blogger Awards. Please also consider nominating The Gooseberry Fool for Best Food Weblog in the Bloggies. I would also be delighted if you would nominate either or both blogs for Best European Weblog or Best-Kept Secret Weblog or any other category that you think is appropriate. I think my chances are best with Roaming Tales so if you want to focus your fire on just one blog, that’s the one I would ask you to go for. It would mean a lot to me to have your support and if I have any degree of success, it could really boost my readership and help pay off my blogging efforts.
I haven’t actually nominated myself so I’m relying on friends, family and readers to do it for me – and apparently the more times I am nominated, the higher my chance of making the finals (it’s not based exclusively on votes – there is a panel of voters as well). The Bloggies have been running nine years and they’re quite well respected and prestigious but this is the first time they’ve had a travel category, so that’s quite exciting.
Please note, you can nominate as many times as you like in the Lonely Planet awards and you have until early February. However, you can only nominate once for the Bloggies and you only have until the end of Monday 12 January. Also with the Bloggies, you need to put at least three blogs in total forward so you can’t just nominate me.
Only two more days of NaBloPoMo after today. I hope you’ve enjoyed the extra blog posts!
I’m not writing a full-length post on The Niltiac Files today but instead want to direct you to my Photo Friday contribution on Roaming Tales – pictures of Goree Island, off the coast of Dakar, Senegal.
