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