Sayonara!

It may be obvious from the absence of posts, but we've arrived in San Francisco and therefore ended our coast-to-coast tour of America & Australasia. It's been the trip of a lifetime, and we've been assailing our old friends with stories about New Zealand glaciers and the Australian outback, of New Orleans beignets and Austin's funky beer halls. 


And we've been falling in love with San Francisco, and our neighborhood of Mission Dolores, all over again. We've had Philz coffee  and Boogaloo's brunch, grugeres at Tartine and life-altering chicken at Bar Tartine, house noodles at Yamo and Arizmendi pizza. That's just the food. We've hugged dear friends and delighted in running into them in the neighborhood haunts. I've missed this place so much.


I had this simple and obvious thought while pumping my fists and grinning ear to ear as we shot over the Bay Bridge: travel sometimes has the unexpected collateral benefit of telling you where your home is. And for me, home is always going to be right here: zip code 94110, baby.

Thanks everyone for keeping up with our tramp around two continents. We had the trip of a lifetime, and we are looking forward to having you come visit us in SF!

Back in San Francisco, and ain't life grand

We live here!

Dash Across the South: New Orleans, Houston & Austin

After our lovely visit with Meredith's grandmother in Sarasota, we started the long boring drive across the South. We made a quick stop to a BBQ place in the panhandle of Florida, where I unwisely ordered an all-you-can-eat beef plate. It was delicious, but I swore I would never eat again.

The next morning, the bridge into New Orleans was closed due to a major accident, so Meredith did some quick driving the wrong way down the shoulder to reroute us. In the process, I remembered that Halloween weekend in New Orleans might be a little crazy, so I decided to phone up a couple B&Bs to book them for the night. It turns out that the weekend held not only Halloween, but the Voodoo Music Festival and a Saints-Steelers home game; the whole of New Orleans was one gigantic out-of-towners fest. Five B&Bs laughed at me. We found a place at the Mariott, and will have to save the cute-NOLA-mansion hotel experience for our next visit.

Soon we found ourselves at Domilise's Po Boys (recommended to us by Tommye), where they fry your shrimp and oysters up as you order. You have to signify whether you want your sandwich "fully dressed" or not, which we took to mean with ketchup or without. Anthony Bourdain loves this place. Except for a new paint job outside, it doesn't appear to have changed at all inside for at least 40 years, including their staff.

We would never have found it if there wasn't a line out the door.

Next we found Cafe Du Monde, which, though touristy, was well worth the stop for chicory coffee and beignets.

New Orleans is pretty! A steamboat chugged by as we scrambled up to see the river.

Meredith did her undergraduate thesis on Faulkner, so we stopped at the tiny bookstore now occupying his former house in the French Quarter as a kind of pilgrimage.

Nerd!

Next we went down to Frenchmen Street, where there are a series of live music clubs. We poked our heads in on this swing band (swing dancers included).

Ellis Marasalis was playing next door, and I figured I'd kick myself if I didn't go see him while we were there. So I ran over and got tickets and we watched him play a set at Snug Harbor.

At the first club we ran into a couple from New Orleans. They gave us some recommendations on restaurants in the Garden District that might be open late, so we gave one of them a try. At 10pm we were, thankfully, able to get a table without a reservation. There was so much French on the menu we had to ask for translations several times. I had some kind of exceedingly fancy meatloaf and Meredith had duck. The duck was divine. The fancy meatloaf was meatloaf.

It was a good day in New Orleans, and the next morning we got on the road to Houston. On the way we hit 133,333 miles in the car. Given that the car has been to the shop twice and still the check engine light is on, I'd say it is showing its age.

Next we drove into Houston to see my family. Rocket decided to make Meredith his friend. She got to play lots of strange games with him for the next three days. Darius gave us a concert. He suddenly got really good on guitar, improving notably even in the last few months.

For Halloween we went over to my brother's place. My mother put on this outfit supposedly as a fortune teller:

My brother put on his son's alien mask:

We picked up the kids from school on our last day. There was a chihuahua roaming around. Meredith picked it up and it seemed very happy. Eventually some people came by and scooped it up. We also retraced our steps of the road trip on a big map of the U.S. painted on the hallway.

Next stop, Austin.

Austin is always hard for me to show people around. I'm not sure why, but I think it is just because Austin has always been about hanging out and doing things slowly. There aren't really that many big sites to see. It's more of a feel than anything. We took a pilgrimage to the Texas Chili Parlor to have Mad Dog Margaritas (it's a line in a Guy Clarke song).

After getting liquored up, we felt prepared to visit the state capitol. Here I catch Meredith with Dubya and Ann Richards.

Austin is full of funky consignment stores and boot stores and junk shops. Meredith showed incredible restraint amongst these boots:

I only saw one pair I wanted, but they were $550. That will have to wait for another day. We did, however, come home with a pirate ship in a bottle (purchased at Uncommon Objects). It will christen the new apartment in San Francisco, which we hope to move into on Monday.

Justin

Sarasota, FL: It's Baba Time!

Many of you know that I have an impossibly cool grandmother living in Florida. What you don't know is that she has a cabana:

She is showing us the whirlpool of fish schooling in the ocean.  Or a pelican.

Obligatory relaxation shot.

And lives next to one of the best beaches in the United States:

Siesta Beach, wide and full of volleyball nets, where the silica sand stays cool all day.

Today we swam in the Gulf of Mexico, hugged Baba and her adorable dachschund Emma, fixed the Volvo, and signed a lease on an apartment in SF on Liberty Hill in the Mission. Not bad for a day's work, huh?

Oh: and I absolutely adore my grandma.

Contentedly,

Meredith

Things We Have Eaten, New York to Florida

(1) Irvington, NY: Brunch with the family, including Mom's maple sausage apple quiche.

(2) Over the George Washington Bridge: Mom's famous sandwiches, remembered from my childhood, except made with TJ's tzatziki and leftover salad without dressing, and thus delicious.

(3) Richmond, VA: Spanish-style tapas and a cucumber martini at Europa with the delightful Cort Kenny, to whom I extend a virtual bear hug. This meal, of course, was all about the company, but the food was delicious too.

(4) Somewhere on the road just south of Lumberton, North Carolina: HOT Krispy Kreme donuts (four!) and coffee. Yes. Hot. The sign was on. We are powerless in the face of the sign.

(5) Savannah, GA: This menu. At a place called The Olde Pink House, which dates back to before the Revolutionary War.

We ordered the first two things, plus six oysters on the half shell. Justin had to tell me what country ham is. Let me just say this: In my rookie opinion, one cannot make collard greens properly without a deadly amount of bacon.

(6) Tampa, FL: Six (!) tacos of various meat flavors from kooky Mema's Alaskan Tacos. Apparently Mema knew they were a southwestern thing but "perfected" the art in Alaska. I'd say her grandkids probably perfected it in Florida. One of our tacos was made of gator. Seriously. I ate an alligator taco!

Shouldn't it be eating me?

We washed these down with a Ybor Gold from the Florida Beer Company.

We're going to get a continental breakfast tomorrow and our next meal is going to be with my grandma Baba in Sarasota!

New York

We're in Irvington, NY, about to sit down to eat a pile of quiche and waffles with Matthew, Tommye, Mom, Dad, Aunt Cindy and Uncle Des. We're close to wrapping up our recovery time in New York and heading back out on the road, but boy has it been a lovely few days -- particularly after the loooong travel back from New Zealand.

We knew it was going to be bad, but 33 hours of traveling on five flights to get to NYC from Christchurch was . . . much like sitting on a plane or in an airport for 33 hours. Next time you're thinking that your cross-country flight is nasty, think about this saga:

1. Christchurch --> Melbourne. We have to collect our bags in the Melbourne airport and clear Australian customs. We are carrying, by the way, a case of wine. 
2. Melbourne --> Sydney. We have to collect our bags and switch terminals, which also involves me sweet-talking a Virgin Blue employee into giving us vouchers for the cross-terminal train, because we have no Australian cash and Sydney Airport is intent on robbing its patrons by charging them AUS $5 for a six-minute ride on the cross-terminal train.
3. Sydney --> LAX. We have to collect our bags in LAX and clear American customs. We discover that one of the bottles of wine we are bringing home has shattered and spend a long time with plastic bags, large Fragile stickers, a tannin-soaked cardboard box, and an angry airport employee. In the process of reconstituting the case of wine, we miss our flight and have to wait an extra hour.
4. LAX --> Denver. We are starting to become punchy and strange. We say "Fra-gee-lay. Must be Italian" several times.
5. Denver --> LaGuardia. We collect our bags for the third time and put the sad case in a cab, hoping another bottle has not broken. It is midnight. 
6. Taxi from LaGuardia to my parents' house in Irvington. The cab driver cannot figure out how much to charge us for the ride up the Hudson river. We spend 20 minutes at the side of the road figuring this out. We are tired. I only have New Zealand dollars. The broken, plastic-swathed, wet wine case smells like a homeless person.

We cannot express how good it felt to get into bed after all of this. Thankfully, my parents are possibly the best and most relaxed parents in the world, and let us recover from jetlag and make no decisions at their house for two days. Mom also bought us yoga passes for a week. How good is she?

A stop in the NY area for more than a couple days cannot be all relaxation, however, so we managed to pull together an amazing day in Manhattan to see friends and family.

Woo, Manhattan!

Let me just say this: New York is awesome. It is the place you go to be the most yourself version of yourself. It is the place you go to figure out what we humans are as a species. Plus, a lot of our friends live there. We stupidly forgot to take the camera with us into NYC, so we have very few photos to show you of our trip, but I'll cobble some things together.

First, we went to go see the Big Bambú, an installation on the roof of the Met, with Justin's Aunt Carolyn.

The installation is being built a little more every day: more bamboo poles are being lashed together to form this structure, which you can also walk through if you get there early enough to get tickets, which we did not do. But it was pretty cool just to walk around, and extra awesome to see Aunt Carolyn.

Second, Aunt Carolyn took us to Nectar, the diner made famous by Kramer vs. Kramer, and we ate huge pastrami sandwiches. Inevitably, due to both the huge amount of meat on the sandwich and my deep reverence for Mitch Hedberg, I also asked for a loaf of bread and some other people. After lunch, the three of us walked around Manhattan to purchase Justin the perfect pea coat, stopped in a lot of little used/new bookstores, and had a glass of wine at the top of the Time Warner building. 

Third, after saying goodbye to Aunt Carolyn, we traveled down to Union Square to eat a delicious and fantastically cheap dinner with the delightful Annie Olinick (ANNIE COME HOME!) and afterwards walked over to Matthew and Tommye's place in Alphabet City.

Fourth, we traveled over to Williamsburg to hang out with a mob of friends from law school. Kim, Rebecca, Lorna, and especially Jaime, it was so good to see you all and travel round the Brooklyn bars until 3 a.m. I still want to go to that cupcake place that Jaime insists is like biting into an angel. And Jaime, I'm not going to stop thanking you for housing us and taking us to that perfect brunch place in the morning. We stopped by Artists and Fleas, a flea market of handmade goods by Brooklyn artists, and bought Matthew a magnet depicting an orca eating a businessman for closing his first deal.  And then we headed back into Manhattan to start the long journey down to New Jersey.

I call this composition "Statue of Liberty." The statue is somewhere behind the strut, I think.
Sue me, we were on the train, it was hard to take a photo with my phone, OK?

We were very pleased with our jam-packed 24 hours in New York City, even though it took us three hours to figure out how to leave it (another long, frustrating transportation story involving two cab rides, a subway trip, and a train from Penn Station). We all made it down to Princeton in time to have a nice, peaceful family dinner with my little brother Ben.

OK, he's not so little, and it wasn't so peaceful (my family generally registers eight on the Richter), but it was fabulous. My mom even got to eat paella without rice.

And Matthew made his famous photo face. Several times.

We even photographed the elusive Tommye in her natural environment! However, the picture came out blurry because we had to go so fast to catch her, so I cannot share it with you. Tommye, you're safe for now. However, I will show everyone this photo, because you're awesome: hey everyone, this is my brother's rad girlfriend.

We're headed out of town tomorrow, and will post more along the road. I'll just close by saying that we love my crazy family and we'll be back to New York soon, we promise.

XOX

Meredith and Justin

New Zealand!

We're in Queenstown, New Zealand, and we're coming home to the U.S. of A. in just two days. Holy cow, have I got a lot to tell you. I'm on a bit of a time crunch, and we have way more photos than will fit in a blog post, so this one will probably be more of a summary than a narrative.

From Punakaiki, we checked out the Pancake Rocks:

And then headed down to Franz Josef and Fox glaciers. These beauties are unusual in that they extend almost all the way down to sea level, which is really rare in the 40 degree latitude range; it'd be like having glaciers near the coast in northern Spain. Moreover, like everything else on the South Island's West Coast, they are smack dab in the middle of a temperate rainforest; the improbability of that combination (as our guide said, what happens when you put an ice cube in your garden? What happens if you put a plant in your freezer?) makes them unique worldwide.

And we happened to catch them on a glorious day. We took a full day stroll up onto Franz Josef, hiking up past the visible moraine in this photo and around the crevasses, seracs and blue ice.

Franz Josef

One of the regular traffic jams. There were a few of us.

Justin in Conqueror Position

It was a really memorable day. We actually have a hilarious video that I will upload to YouTube as soon as I've got the time and wherewithal to figure out how to do that (yeah, yeah, Little Ben, laugh it up) -- the guide led us through these crazy tiny thin crevasses and under these caves, in a glacier that moves up to several meters per DAY. We also met some hysterically funny Britons on a round-the-world ticket and a delightful UCLA Law grad named Mike who is on his bar trip. Wherever you are, Mike, you'll pass!

From the glaciers we headed down to Wanaka on the lake of the same name, and did a spectacular day hike called Rob Roy. It was a highlight of our trip. First, the hour-long drive over gravel roads and across several creek fords to get there made it seem memorably off the beaten track. The drive there was classically New Zealand -- sheep farms in front of gigantic peaks -- and we got to pass a lot of adorable little lambs in what has to be the most scenic sheep country on earth.

Once we got to the Mt. Aspiring National Park, we actually forded rivers (and beat up our rental car) to get to the trailhead. And once on the trail, we barely saw five other people on the difficult 330 m climb straight up the heart of a glacial valley. And holy moly. Having this whole place to ourselves was pretty much Justin and my idea of heaven:

This was the walk up:

This was our first glimpse of the Roy glacier:

And we hung out with the alpine parrots at the end of the trail, in front of absolutely marvelous waterfalls and the most scenic outhouse ever constructed.

We ate a delicious dinner in Wanaka -- and yes, we tried pavlova, but gourmet kiwifruit pavlova, and it was absolutely divine -- before heading down on our way to Milford Sound. We got slammed with a mighty storm on our way to Fiordland, and so ducked into quirky Gunn's Camp in the Hollyford Valley about 40k before Milford to avoid the raging winds. We were treated with old historic public works cabins, a mad little pioneering museum, and we actually heated our sleeping quarters with wood and coal as the storm pounded the tin roof.

And then we drove through Fiordland, some of the most mythically beautiful country on earth, as waterfalls from the previous night's rain cascaded down all around us, and the mountains rose higher and higher into the misty clouds: (I know, I know, it sounds unbelievably cheesy, but this place was almost more mindblowing in crappy weather, and that has to tell you something):

... and the sun broke through the clouds right as we boarded the boat to head into Milford Sound, which is one of the youngest fjords in the national park. It looks like a glacier carved it yesterday. What can I really say about this place? Photos do not do it justice.

We're in for a long drive back to Christchurch tomorrow from our stopover in Queenstown, and then we're in for an insanely long "day" of flying: Christchurch to Sydney to LAX to Denver to La Guardia. Wish us luck for a good sleep on the flights, and we'll see you back in the States!

Meredith & Justin