Ceci n’est pas une pipe

Being back in Sydney feels frighteningly surreal. Everything is the same, but yet subtly different and it’s extremely hard to get a grasp on reality. Everything feels just a bit blurred, hard to get in tight focus.

Seeing family and friends is both wonderful and grounding. But even that can be peculiar as everyone else is deep in their normal lives while we’re still floating about.

After several hectic days we have found a place to live for at least the first six months – although we don’t move in until just before Christmas. We imagine we’ll feel differently once we’re in a place where we can settle for a while and we have our own things around us. Certainly for the boys that should help them settle, as will seeing some of their friends – which has proved difficult at the moment because they are still in school and so on.

Jetlag has not helped. And a combination of fragile sleep from all the various things we now have to think about and a night of false fire alarms (see Cal and Dec‘s posts on this) has not helped with jetlag.

Another couple of days and we move again. Down to a holiday house on the South Coast of New South Wales with some friends. That should be wonderful and much more like our ‘normal’ speed.

Coming home was alway going to be strange but we had persevered with the pipe-dream that it would be easier than it has turned out to be so far.

Has anyone seen our missing night?

Gray Sydney day as we get some fresh air after our flight.

If you find a lost night wandering the streets of some strange country, you might want to point it our way.

Almost exactly a year to the hour after departing Sydney we stepped off the plane; home again. To complete the strange sense of dislocation we’re staying in the apartment next door to the one we rented before leaving last year. Has the last year really happened?

Of course it has, we have the numbers. We’ve visited 26 countries and stayed in 91 different places across those countries. We’ve used 58 different sorts of transport from kayaks to cable cars, from camel to car ferry.

The packs at the end of the road.

We spent the majority of nights (252) in rented apartments or houses, but have a nice range of other places from tents to canalboats and from train to airplanes. In full: Apartment / house 252, Train 5, Bedouin tent 1. Airport 1, Canal boat 4, Ferry 1, Narrow-boat 7, B&B 2, Friends house 1, Hostel 15, Tent 3, Jungle lodge 7, Airplane 2.

The most numerically astute amongst you, dear readers, might find that my list adds up to only 364 nights. Gaining fractions on days as we moved West meant we really managed to lose an entire night along the way from our spreadsheet. Careless I know.

So we’re clear, it is possible to lose a night even as you count them individually going round the world, no matter how silly that sounds. As we moved we had a number of days which we counted as one but which really had more than 24 hours in them thanks to moving timezones. Those incremental additions add up to the missing night. Put another way we had all the hours in the year, just not all the nights. I so hope that makes sense as I’ve now been over 36 hours without sleep and I’m not sure whether my brain is blathering.

Tags: Returning home

We have…

We’ve zip-lined through the Amazon canopy, Segwayed the streets of Madrid, karted through Lisbon. We have cycled around Lucca’s ancient walls, over the Golden Gate Bridge and through the ripening vineyards of France.

We have swum with piranhas and bathed in Icelandic hot-springs. We’ve been buried in water in a Singapore water park and soaked by towering waterfalls in Iceland.

We’ve ridden horses in the Scottish hills, along isolated beaches and through American woods. We have sailed through icebergs and on felucas down the Nile. We have motored down French rivers and strolled through fields of sunflowers.

We’ve flown in a helicopter into the Grand Canyon and skydived in a Montreal wind-tunnel. We’ve canoed down the Ord in France, kayaked in Corsica, cut though the waters on an Amazonian dugout, and paddled with sea lions in San Diego. We have navigated a narrow boat through the English countryside and were lifted up the Falkirk Wheel.

We’ve been inside the Pyramids, marveled at the Forbidden City, walked the ruins of Macchu Pichu. We’ve explored ancient castles from Crusader times, marvelled at Pompeii and climbed the high places above Petra.

We got altitude sickness on the Peruvian alto plano and floated on the low, low salty waters of the Dead Sea. We slid down into the depths of an Austrian salt mine and peered out over the roofs of Brugge from the top of the Cathedral.

We threw snow balls at Christmas and set off fireworks at New Year in Germany. We saw chanting, robed figures walk the dark streets of Southern Italy at Easter. We watched turkeys being bought in flocks for American Thanksgiving.

We have seen hieroglyphics in tombs, prehistoric cave paintings and modern masters. We’ve investigates science in museums all over the world.

We have eaten Belgian chocolate, Italian sorbet, French pastries, Canadian maple syrup, Polish pancakes and pasta, well, everywhere.

We have stayed in a Scottish castle, an Amsterdam canal boat and a Beduoin tent. We’ve camped under the stars in the Andes and slept on trains speeding through the European night.

We have done all this and so much more over this year. And we’ve done it all together. And really it is that which is priceless; we have spent an entire year together as a family.

Tags: Coming home

The final full day

Wow! A year has passed in the blink of an eye and today was our final full day of our trip. Tomorrow we spend on a plane riding time zones and losing all that artificial time we gained heading Westward over the last year.

I can’t honestly say we approach returning home with mixed feelings: Our feelings are actually unequivocal. We’re looking forward to seeing friends and family, but none of us are happy to be stopping traveling. For the boys in particular they’ve now spent a significant proportion of their cognisant lives on the road – it is ‘normal’. For Jennifer and me, we’re only to aware that going home means returning to normality. We’ve been making resolutions about living with fewer things and going on lots of holidays – only time will tell if we manage to keep them in focus amidst the quotidian whirl.

Already we’ve started dealing with the reality of finding a place to live, resurrecting credit cards and phone accounts and all the other minutiae of the place you permanently live. The whole travelling thing which means that nothing matters too much because you’re always moving on, comes to a crashing halt as we contemplate moving home. We’re not renting for a week, we’re renting for six months or a year; a bit too far out on public transport will mean a lot of days of early starts and late finishes; and all that stuff we have sitting in storage takes up more room than the four backpacks we’ve lived out of for a year.

So we’ve all been a little on edge today. We decided on a calming approach to the day and returned to the Children’s Creativity Museum. We all had an absolutely brilliant time, which was honestly made even cooler because the staff had seen our posts on our earlier visit and knew who we were. That made the visit lovely, but also made our final day even more poignant as we realised we were about to leave the coolness of being world-travellers behind us.

We had a great time anyway. Declan made a great Angry Birds stop-motion video and Callum made a movie based on Plants vs Zombies.

Tomorrow we fly.

Tags: Childrens Creativity Museum, Round the world last days, San Francisco

A cablecar named quintessential

San Francisco cable car.

What could be more San Francisco that a ride on a cable car? In my view nothing – and it is just such unalloyed fun.

Cable cars were introduced in San Francisco in the late 1800s as a novel way of dealing with the hills which were confounding horse-drawn trams. They are like the cable cars of the Swiss Alps in the sense they work by grabbing hold of a moving cable; the difference is that in San Francisco the cable runs underground.

With a maximum speed of 9.55 miles-an-hour, the cars do not reach death-defying speeds and that means that you can sit facing outwards or even stand upon the running-board. Thanks to the hills, it’s an exhilarating experience and the fact it’s so manual makes it… quaint. The driver or ‘gripman’, manually controls the car by pulling on a lever that grips the moving cable. Driving is more about feel and judgement than any defined buttons or positions. Our first driver knew perfectly well that he was driving as many tourists as locals and made the whole experience totally entertaining.

Riding the footplate.

We caught the cable car from the centre of the city down to the waterfront. At the end of the line the car is turned around on a turntable. We couldn’t work out how the whole thing functioned until we realised it was all done by hand. The driver and conductor push the car onto the turntable, stomp round to make it turn and then push it back off until the car engages with the moving cable. It’s just a lovely system.

On the way back up the hills we stopped at the, free, powerhouse where you can see some fascinating history of the cable cars and the City. More significantly you can watch the motors turn and push the cables round the whole system. While, at one level, it’s just some huge wheels turning several miles of metal cable, it’s entirely engaging and mesmerising. We thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience in every way.

Tags: Cable car, San Francisco

Alcatraz, rule number 5 and making a Chinese fortune

Alcatraz in the fog.

Just a mile out in San Francisco Bay the waters part around the substantial lump of rock that is Alcatraz Island. The Island itself, of course, is surmounted by what is probably the most famous prison in the world – Alcatraz.

Usually the views of The Rock, and the views from it, are supposed to be fantastic. Today the entire Bay was shrouded in thick, dense white fog and you couldn’t see more than 50 feet in any direction. While it was a shame to miss the views, the fog certainly made our visit out to Alcatraz all the more atmospheric.

Cell with escape hole on the back wall.

There are some interesting aspects to Alcatraz’s history, but really they pale beside the 30 years that it served as the country’s maximum security prison and home to Al Capone, Alvin Creepy Karpis, Machine Gun Kelly, and the Birdman. Seeing the prison is a fascinating and sobering insight to life in a tough place. The experience was brought to life by the absolutely excellent audio tour and the enthusiasm of the volunteers. We each spent a sobering minute inside the pitch darkness of the metal-lined ‘hole’, a place troublesome prisoners could be held in for up to 19 madness inducing days. We saw where what may be the only successful escape attempt originated (which thanks to Mythbusters, the boys were fully up to speed on). We saw the shrapnel marks where the Marines were called in the quell the Battle of Alcatraz. It was all completely fascinating.

One thing Jennifer and I have decided to introduce to our family is Rule Number 5 of Alcatraz’s rule book for prisoners: “You are entitled to food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention. Anything else that you get is a privilege.” Strangely, the boys’ tell us they fail to see the point.

After we made our way through the persistent fog back to the mainland we had lunch at the organic farmers market and then wandered up to Chinatown.  Chinatown is a great place, full of little unusual shops and interesting smells – it almost felt more Chinese than Beijing did. The boys played in a playground surrounded by tons of old Chinese gentlemen playing go, chequers and cards.

Making fortune cookies.

We were aiming for a tiny shop down a small alleyway; we’d been warned it would be hard to find and that proved to be the case. Eventually, we followed our noses and found a tiny space filled with the lovely smell of baking biscuits. Near the front a man filled wicker baskets with fortune cookies and further back two women sat chatting loudly in Cantonese and deftly creating fortune cookies using a machine that looked older than they did. The man smiled and offered us samples of the biscuit and we bought a bag of completed cookies. The fortunate thing though was getting to see the cookies being handmade in such a lovely little factory.

Tags: Alcatraz, China Town, Fortune cookies, San Francisco

Boys’ final writing for the year

The boys have just posted their latest, and probably final for the year, writing efforts on their bogs.

Cal’s is here.

Dec’s is here.

Pirate barter: bookshops for reading

826 Valencia product.

Sometimes the coolest things are not the big icons like the bridges and the buildings, but the efforts of people to do good and to do right. And we saw some of that today.

San Francisco is one of those places that’s on the very cutting edge of the world. Google and countless startups orbit the city. It’s the sort of place where there are billboards on the highways advertising for jobs in cool high-tech companies. It’s the sort of place where start-ups strut their stuff and trends take shape. And it is a town without big bookshops.

We have a 15-hour flight looming and so had been planning to buy some real books here in San Francisco. We generally buy books on Kindle or iBooks these days but we all had a small list of books not available electronically that we’d been saving up. So we rocked into town looking for a bookshop, and found that there were… none to be found.

Notice board at 826 Valencia.

Well that’s not, quite, true. There’s a bookshop sub-culture, but nothing mainstream. There are no big bookshops, simply none. We can only assume that online bookstores have completely out-competed them. There are a few small independent bookstores, hanging on and making a point of supporting each other; but clearly the book market here has shifted significantly over the last few years. We went to a speciality science fiction shop and listening to the conversations at the counter felt a little like becoming involved in a subversive movement. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing as I love small bookshops; but if you’re an international traveller of no fixed abode there’s also a place for big bookshops that’s sorely missed in San Francisco.

But cutting edges are always double-edges. There may be a lack of big bookshops but there is the Pirate Supply Store at 826 Valencia. Ever since we saw Dave Eggers amazing TED talk (which everyone really should watch; really, if I could persuade you to do anything, it would be to watch this talk), Jennifer and I’ve been keen to visit his flagship store. Today, as we searched for a bookshop, we got a chance to do so. The cool thing is that it’s a shop filled with amazing pirate gear; it is what every shop should be, an absolute adventure in its subject matter. The walls are filled with drawers of pirate-themed items, from cutlasses to manacles, and covered with witty posters. The goods are specifically created and range from peg-legs to eye-patches to “Blackbeard’s Beard Dye”.

Pirate essentials.

We walked in and our attention was captured by a display of small skulls behind magnifying glasses, as we peered at them a hidden trapdoor opened above our heads and a pile of mop-heads poured down upon us – we had been mopped. Upon closer examination, the display included rules about when the mops would and wouldn’t drop.

The boys dug for treasure in a huge vat filled with sand but could only keep their finds by bartering a joke, song or drawing with the pirate behind the counter (luckily they’d come prepared with pirate jokes). The front of house is just a complete and utter joy. There was a shelf of previously bartered drawings stretching back for years.

While the shop is cool, with capital letters all over it, the hidden agenda of behind-the-scenes courses to help kids with literacy surround the whole place with a golden glow. The entire idea from concept to execution is simply and totally stunning. It is really what all places should be – a brilliant combination of something that is individual, innovative, enchanting and in a thoroughly good cause.

I have no idea if the dynamics are even connected, let alone if they make the two things mutually exclusive, but if the trade-off is between huge bookshops and little themed stores with an agenda of teaching kids to read then there’s no question that that’s a good bit of barter.

Tags: 826 Valencia, Bookshops, Dave Eggers, Pirate Supply Store, San Francisco

Over the Bridge, but not over the hill

Riding up to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Today we reprised last week’s ride over the Bridge to Sausalito, although it felt somewhat different. The biggest difference was the incredible headwind over the bridge that had us crawling along even in lowest gear while riders coming the other way were moving at wind-assisted warp speeds. The high winds had also weeded out the casual locals, leaving only the lycra-clad serious riders and a bunch of tourists.

Even with the wind it was a glorious ride. A significant portion of the ride is on the flat or downhill and over half is on bike paths, so it is a fun ride with the kids. And of course the views are great. Both times we’ve made the ride the sun has seemed to shine right down on Alcatraz, making even its grim walls shine golden. The Golden Gate Bridge itself is so iconic that riding across it is a treat only improved by the fantastic views out to sea.

Musee Mechanique.

We had lunch in Sausalito – clam chowder for Jennifer and a meatball sub for me both of which felt appropriately local (the boys had pizza, of course). Then on to the ferry back to the Fisherman’s Wharf area. After dropping our bikes off we visited the Musee Mechanique which is the sort of place that cannot help raise a chuckle.

Musee Mechanique.

The Musee Mechanique is a warehouse filled with ancient slot machines. Some of these are only from the 1980s – Pacman and Galaga always bring a smile to my face – but most go much further back than that. Back to a time when you put a nickel into a machine and turned a handle to watch a silent movie or further back still to your penny activating a clever mechanical diorama.

It’s these last I particularly love; both because I like contemplating a time when something that seems so simple in today’s terms was worth spending a coin on, and because of the sheer mechanical brilliance involved in making a complex diorama work. There’s something truly special in knowing that under the table-top there are gears and belts and levers making it all go and that if you had access you could trace the paths and understand how it comes together. And the truly great thing is that all the machines still work.

Of course, the sobering thought is those Galaga and Pacman machines. Those machines – which were at the glorious cutting-edge of my teenage years and consumed so much of my hard-earned pocket-money – in a museum? Surely not! Ah well, I don’t care if it ages me, I can’t pass a Galaga tabletop without my fingers itching to get the high score; and I have a feeling that will always be the case.

Tags: Bike ride, Bike ride over Golden Gate Bridge, Golden Gate, Musee Mechanique, San Francisco, Sausalito

Making the monochromatic mad scientist

Kaleidoscope.

They say you can’t teach creativity, but if anywhere can even come close it has to be the Children’s Creativity Museum here in San Francisco.

The Museum’s stated aim is to “nurture the 3C’s of 21^st-century skills – Creativity, Collaboration and Communication – in all youth and families. We believe that the ability to think critically, collaborate broadly, communicate effectively and generate and prototype multiple solutions, is the core of a 21st-century education.” I just couldn’t agree more; and what’s more we loved the way they go about doing it.

Music video.

We spent several thoroughly satisfying hours creating figures with wire and modelling clay and then taking them through their paces in a stop-motion video production. Declan made a snow leopard, Callum a monochromatic mad scientist and Jennifer made a penguin. My own contribution was a snakey-thing with big eyes and an inverted carroty cyclops. The results wont win any Oscars but it was just such fun to make something like this with quality materials and environments. The end result was saved and emailed to us by Museum staff later in the afternoon and is now available here.

We moved on to create a film against a green screen. Both boys chose to make an advertisement for an anti-zombie protection thing – Zom-b-gone. The production was entertaining and they had an opportunity to have a great time experimenting with the green screen. These movies were burned to CD for some reason rather than emailed so will take longer to share with the world.

Kaleidoscope.

Then to the Innovation Lab where they pulled a task out of a hat and were handed a box of materials to create something with. Callum got “Make a device to allow animals to communicate with each other”, Declan had “Make a ladder for a fish”. Their contraptions were entertaining to say the least. Declan went on to build a second thing: an animal capable of going on land and water and he now wont be parted from his rather nifty-looking creation.

Finally the boys played with two more green screen areas. A sort of kaleidoscope area where they got to experiment with effects and then the sound area where they made a music video. The music video was hysterical and really I’m going to keep it in a and treasure it and pull it out for their 21st birthday parties. To save their blushes it wont be seen before then though.

San Francisco is so lucky to have places like the Exploratorium and the Children’s Creativity Museum and our kids are so lucky to be able to visit them. We all had an absolutely fabulous time today; and who knows, maybe some creativity rubbed off on us too.

Click here to see the Mad scientist video of a mad wheelchair-bound scientist about to press a button to blow up the world until stopped by an unusual group of heroes.

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Tags: Childrens Creativity Museum, San Francisco