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

Whitsundays, and holy moly, New Zealand

We are in an adorable hostel in Punakaiki, South Island, New Zealand, and giddy. How have we not discovered this place before now!?

But before I launch into our awesome day, and how we are more or less prepared to move to New Zealand, I'll dutifully record our trip to the Whitsunday Islands, off the shores of Queensland.

I have to be honest. The Whitsundays were a bit of a dud for us. A dud in the fireworks sense: it is probably primed to explode with gusto for most visitors, but for a variety of reasons it just didn't really go off for us.

To begin with, I'm still dealing with the ear infection / periodic colds, so I was instructed to stay out of the ocean. As anyone who knows me well -- or who might have heard the story from my mother about the time in Hawaii that I happily followed a sea turtle well beyond a rip tide -- this was aggravating news. I love to swim, and it would have made all the difference to have been able to cannonball off the ship, or dive, or snorkel, but it was not to be. For another thing, the weather sucked. We had moderate amounts of sunshine for one day we were out on the islands, but the rest of the time it rained. For thirds, Airlie Beach (our launching pad for the journey, where we were stuck for two nights) is, shall we say, not someplace that Justin nor I particularly wants to spend any time, being as we are not enamored of disco balls, top-forty pop radio, or twentysomething drunk co-eds. It does, however, have a very nice Austrian doctor.

So it wasn't really our favorite stop. But here's the thing: even the lowlight has had some highlights. To wit:

We "sailed" on a tall ship. It was a bit of an accident -- our cheaper, more traditional sailing ship got cancelled, and they placed us on this more luxurious boat. It's true that the staff chose to motor more than sail, but how can you argue with three masts? Or, for that matter, sun deck chairs below three masts?

Also, the Whitsundays are really beautiful, no matter how you slice it. We went for a hike while others snorkeled, and we found a redback spider, and we survived.

Also, Whitehaven beach -- reportedly one of the best beaches in the world -- is pretty nifty, even if it's threatening rain. The sand, at over 98% pure silica (pure enough to be used for the Hubble space telescope, actually), is absolutely pure white, and feels like flour on the toes.

Hill Inlet, of the postcard vistas, was shown to us -- rather inexplicably -- at high tide, so the swirly sand was not visible, and I have nothing of the caliber of, say, this to show you. Thankfully, however, I have this:

EVEN BETTER! This is Paola, and she is almost one year old, and she (along with her absolutely delightful parents) was the highlight of our Whitsundays trip. I practically tripped over myself to babysit her while her mum and dad, Francisca and Frank, went for a dive. She has little dinner roll feet! In addition to being possibly the best and most adorable baby ever, Justin and I were quite inspired by Francisca and Frank, who were traveling on a round-the-world ticket with the little munchkin; they demonstrate that it is absolutely possible to be a great parent and a great traveler at the same time. We're looking forward to seeing them in San Francisco on their way back to Munich this fall.

We left the Whitsundays missing our new friends but chomping at the bit for some self-catering road trip. And boy. Have we found it. We rolled into Christchurch at 1am last night, and managed to procure a car and a hotel room after quite a bit of ... adventure. (To the amazing, amazing old lady who was up at 3 in the morning to manage your hotel reception: words cannot express my love and gratitude to you.) We woke up this morning and found a city that appears to be absolutely none the worse for wear after the 7.4 magnitude earthquake that struck just over a month ago. We found a divine breakfast, and headed out on the highway in our little Corrola hatchback, and were immediately confronted with spectacular snow-covered mountains:



The Southern Alps

That we drove through (at Arthur's Pass), and dutifully hiked around:

And then on to the beach on the other side, with spectacular limestone formations and one of the most gorgeous coast drives (outside of CA's Highway 1, of course) that I have ever seen:

And onto here, where we are staying in the best hostel we have stayed in so far, snuggled next to a coal fire in the middle of a rainforest within 8 minutes walk to the beach and to limestone caves.

We had a spectacular day of driving through truly unbelievably beautiful countryside, hiking through glacial-mill valleys studded with waterfalls and utterly devoid of tourists, seeing one million sheep grazing peaceably in front of enormous thousand-meter peaks, playing on insanely beautiful beaches with stones worn smooth from the tides, and drinking local beer on tap at the cozy pub. This is not only one of the most beautiful places I have ever been -- it's also the quaintest, with a wood fire puffing out of every chimney. We are going to explore the west coast of the South Island a bit more tomorrow, and are really looking forward to more: we only wish we'd gotten here sooner!

New Zealand, we love you already! Miss everyone back home -- hopefully we'll be able to hop online periodically, but the South Island is generally pretty remote, so we may not be able to update as regularly as we might like. I promise many photos and commentary soon.

XO,

Meredith & Justin

Cape Tribulation photos -- and Diving the Great Barrier Reef

We're in Airlie Beach, cheesy tourist capital of Australia, and almost none the worse for wear from our adventures in far north Queensland!

Queensland looks a little bit different from the Red Center. er, Centre.

 I promised some photos from Cape Tribulation, so here you are. I mentioned some of its history in the last post, but didn't show you the rainforest mountains plunging right down to the white sand beaches:

Once the hordes of tourists left on their afternoon buses, we had the beautiful beach to ourselves.

Well, ourselves and the little crabs that make Rorschach tests with the tiny little balls of sand they chuck out to make their homes. Crazy, huh?

Yep. And we finally pitched our tent!

(We had been lugging tent, sleeping bags, and sleeping pads all around Australia. In WA, the campervan made them unnecessary, and we'd been in cities otherwise -- so we were beginning to wonder if all that schlepping had been for naught.)

We found Justin's favorite beach on our drive back to Cairns:

Ellis Beach, north of Cairns.

I also forgot to mention that we were shown absolutely lovely hospitality by Margo and Homa's friend Gai and her family before departing for Cape Trib. She (rightly) insisted on us procuring photos from our liveaboard trip and served us lasagna even though she hadn't been properly expecting us, and she and Rich told us awesome stories about the area's native crocs.

And then it was onto the liveaboard dive boat. After some thought, we opted for a boat that would take us out for five days and four nights to explore the northern reef, and try to get out to Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea -- reputably one of the most pristine dive sites left near Australia. We had no idea what to expect, but we received an absolutely unforgettable trip.

We were immediately impressed with the crew's professionalism from the moment we hopped on board. They had the entire business of housing, feeding, and guiding a bunch of divers down to a precise and perfectly executed science. As they said on the first day, all we were to expect over the next five days was to "eat, sleep, and dive." But the eating was pretty well consistently the best we'd had since we arrived in Australia, and we consumed it in a lovely dry common area:

And the sleeping wasn't bad, considering it was on a boat:

And the DIVING! We didn't make it out to Osprey reef -- the weather was too rough to make it across the long stretch of open sea we would have had to cross to get there -- but we were offered 14 different dives at 12 dive sites all along the Great Barrier Reef. At places that looked like this:

With water this color:

Diving takes a lot of gear, but we were excited to get in the water just about every time.

In this photo, Justin had just seen an Australian cuttlefish. (I had to sit out this dive, for reasons I'll explain in a second.)

Here he is about to see the cuttlefish:

The wildlife was just amazing, and that much diving made us really comfortable in the water. We were able to get kitted up and descend in a few minutes flat by the time our tenth dive rolled around, and were comfortable enough with our air consumption and establishing buoyancy and whatnot that we were really able to concentrate on seeing what the reef had to offer. We saw clown anemonefish in the thousands bobbing around the anemones, reef sharks, parrotfish, giant cod, cuttlefish, and sea snakes, and that's just the beginning. Fortunately, there was a really talented photo/videographer on board who shot every dive and edited it down to a watchable 53 minute video, and provided us with over 200 photos. They're currently packed away, but I'll share them with whomever wants to look.

The only drawback (minor, really) is that all that diving gave me an egregious ear infection in both ears. I'm pretty well deaf right now, and I couldn't do the last three dives because I was too sick, but I think the worst is over. As this post is getting a bit lengthy, I won't delve into the raving compliments I have for the Australian medical care system, which got me diagnosed and properly set up with antibiotics and ear drugs in under an hour and for less than $120.

Today we took a 10-hour bus ride from Cairns down to Airlie Beach; we're leaving on a sailing trip for the Whitsunday Islands on Friday. In case you want to know what ten hours on a bus with two raging ear infections feels like:

I'm fine! Really.

We have a day to kill tomorrow, and then we'll be on a boat again until Sunday evening. Ahoy, mateys!

Meredith and Justin