Day and Night in the Museums

8th February 2011




...arrived in Washington DC last night. Christ, it's a lot colder here, in fact it's freezing, but our lovely Comfort Inn Hotel room is lovely and cozy, well done Elizabeth.
Today we take to the Metro, via a free shuttle service from Mr Comfort himself. We're dropped at Van Dorn street station and given a number to call when we need picking up later. Pretty good huh? A forty or so minute tube journey via Ronald Reagan Airport, takes us to the lovely Smithsonian, where we are spoilt for choice with places to visit, in fact there are nineteen museums here.
We spend an hour or so at the Air and Space museum, which is very cool indeed, especially the space section, which features film of the first moon landing and bits and pieces the astronauts took up with them; food, shaving gear, sunglasses, the tube they took a pee into...



Hornet mask

Had me a lovely cup of buffalo chilli at The American Indian Museum, where we were also given a performance of some music, just one guy and a single drum. A long time ago, American Indian children, some as young as four, were taken at gunpoint and made to live in institutions. They were stripped of their own clothing and forced to have their long hair cut off. They quite literally had their own language beaten out of them, for if they happened to utter anything in their own tongue, they were physically punished.












We visited the National Gallery of art as part of a quest to spot some of the characters from "Night in the museum". Nastassja and Oskar managed to find 'The Thinker,' a couple of cherubs and a dancer.




Next up, The National History Museum, where a very nice lady showed us all some
very, very old teeth from some prehistoric sharks. Liz asked if she could draw one, so the lady gave her some crayons and paper and sat her at a desk next to the jaws of a huge cousin of the Great White, a very old cousin indeed, who was about three times the size of his modern day version. Liz was happy doing this for an hour or so while we visited the dinosaur section.












And then it was on to Lincoln. Sat in his big chair at The Lincoln Memorial.



We've just about thawed out now. Lovely Comfort Inn...

WE ARE COMING

WE ARE COMING



















Days Inn, Staunton, Virginia...Sunday 6th Feb 2011...lovely lunch in quaint little town, a real old fashioned Sunday, all the shops shut. Christ, get me a beer...

Pardon me boy, is that the Chattanooga choo choo?

Saturday 5th Feb 2011

So, yesterday we drove to Birmingham, Alabama and made for the Institute of Civil Rights, which is probably one of the best museums i'v ever visited. Straight off, you sit and watch a short film on some of the local history, which highlighted a lot of the crap that was going on with black people having to use different drinking fountains to whites, blacks having to sit at the backs of buses, different schools...the inequality of life for blacks and whites under segregation from the 1920's up to the 50's.




As the film draws to a close, the screen rises up into the ceiling, revealing the first part of the museum; sitting there are two drinking fountains, one labelled White, the other Coloured. Various examples of this kind of thing are on display. A typical white classroom next to a black one. Only half the amount of funding for education was being thrown at the schools for the black kids. Most diners were whites only places.

The museum takes you on a journey through the struggles that went on trying to get this kind of shit changed, televisions screening archive footage of demonstrations, interviews with the people of Birmingham, expressing their anger at the New York Times, who'd written a huge article condemning it's white citizens for their treatment of blacks, one guy in particular saying how white man had done so much for black man, but that, as anybody knows, if you have black chickens and white chickens, you keep 'em separate. It's better for the white chickens, it's better for the black ones. Any farmer knows that.
Film of Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech and newspaper articles on the bombing of a local church, 'black' church, which killed four young girls. It took forty years to get the four men who committed this, sent to jail, where I'm very happy to say, at least one died. The rest are either already dead or will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
Ongoing...

We spent a great two and a half hours there, before making off to get some Hot Soul Food. Proper grub! The meat looked a bit too real for my liking, so we all went for their Macaroni and greens with cornbread. Add chilli sauce. Amazing! Liz, the greedy bitch, went and got a portion of sweet potato pie and then left it after a couple of mouthfuls.




We then drove to a small peanut factory, where the guy behind the counter was more than a little jealous of my ear ring. He'd tried everywhere for one that big but it wasn't happening. It was concluded that mine was a ladies ear ring. Bought a huge bag of Cajun flavoured peanuts and some salted for the monkeys. He said if I put the ear ring on the counter we could come to some kind of deal!





We stayed in Chattanooga, Tennessee where we visited Walnut Street Bridge, the worlds longest pedestrian-only bridge! Walked across a glass walkway that lead to a museum where, in it's gift shop, the lady working there, is a huge fan of Doctor Who! She just sort of came out with it once she'd established we were of Angleterre; "my two most favourite things in the world are from there, ones a tv programme I'm nuts about and one's a comedian."
Doctor Who and Eddie Izzard. She's a David Tennant fangirl but loves Matt Smith in the role too. She too, is unimpressed with the new daleks, "skittle daleks" as she calls them.





Glenn Miller and his Orchestra were awarded the worlds first ever gold record for a song about the Chattanooga choo choo, a nickname given to the train that went out from Chattanooga station. Now a hotel, the station is a museum piece, having closed it's doors when the last train left the platform in August 1970.






"Mummy, it says Vagina!"
"Virginia, it says Virginia, Oskar"
Liz is a little stressed, having had to actually drive for a couple of hours, thru the hometown of Dolly Parton and into Virginia...





...Motel 6, where are you?

I want to break free

3rd Feb 2011...

We are at the not too shabby Days Inn, in the town of Tuscaloosa, just around the corner from a museum dedicated to football coach, Paul 'Bear' Bryant.




We have been driving all day on the A5 D, or we may just as well have been. Driving across Texas was a treat compared with this, at times, like driving through the middle of all the great Western movies, all mountainous, panoramic and just beautiful. Driving here through Mississippi is not. Maybe, like Milton Keynes, all the good stuff is away from the roads.
Still, this place has a small swimming pool which pleases the kids and the biggest book and magazine shop I have ever been in, where, guess what, I find a magazine which features Cardiacs! Oceansize! Amplifier and Genesis, all my favourites in one lump. Quick, must snap this one up and buy it, "daddy, it's you, you're famous," hey, can't wait to get this back to the hotel room, this is a hottie, oh, oh god, oh my...
I can't get back to the room quick enough, hands trembling, breathing heavily. I strip the magazine of it's scanty plastic bag and spread the pages hungrily...oh, what's this? A receipt...fuckinell, this has just cost me eighteen dollars!!




Driving through Louisiana yesterday, lots of swamplands where Gators lurk, though we don't catch a glimpse of any, it's too cold, so they find or dig themselves into holes and wait for the sunshine to return.
We hit New Orleans and park up.




All of the shops and houses are painted up in pretty colours, powder blues, pale reds and yellows, lovely old things. We head down Bourbon street for a stroll and there's music bursting from each doorway, all kinds of different stuff, the air filled with the smells of a hundred kitchens.




That hurricane they unfortunately suffered, back in 2005, is still evident...hundreds of houses we pass during our short stay, are marked with painted on crosses, which we guessed must mark houses that are uninhabitable, "do not enter" is marked across others.




I'm really sorry, but I just can't help but think of Live and Let Die, quite a few of my friends would understand...and there they are! The steamboats on the Mississippi river, just like in all those films! It is absolutely bloody freezing, so we're not about to get on one.
Tomorrow we're heading for Birmingham, Alabama, where we will be visiting The Institute of Civil Rights. Maybe pick up some Hot Soul Food for the journey...

Touching the moon

February 1st, 2011




Today I wake around eight, Liz beside me, staring into her iPad, television on some weather channel...it's getting pretty bad out there apparently, Chicago is at standstill from overnight blizzards, Oklahoma has declared a state of emergency, they've been getting three inches of snow an hour and there's a tornado alert around where we're currently lazing in bed. Liz has been on this since six. So we get a couple of bits of free toast and coffee from the very nice man at this very nice motel and then, dressed for colder weather, load up and leave for Houston.




Space centre Houston, is the official visitors centre of NASA's Johnson Space Centre, it's where the astronauts do their training and home to mission control.
We didn't actually get there till mid day, which was a shame really, because there was quite a lot to get round and we ended up skipping some bits.




We got to practice landing a space shuttle on some landing strip with a flight simulator, got to see a film covering the history of the American space project, which included some of the tragedy along the way, the 1986 Shuttle disaster in particular.




We got to touch a real slice of moon rock, brought back from one of the moon landings. There have been seven actual manned moon landings to date, the first in July '69 and the last in December '72. Since then, we've been setting our sights a bit further away.




Amazing to think that these men were sent to the bloody moon, back in the days when the Space station computer filled an entire room and had only two megabites of memory.




We got shown around the space vehicle mock up facility and saw one of the old Mission control centres, complete with red telephone, wired straight to The White House. The current Mission control is below this.



It was bloody freezing outside and we kept having to get into an open shuttle bus that took us to each of the sections on the site. The poor girl who was our tour guide, actually crouched under a bench at the back of the trailer, hoping no one saw her, she was so cold.




Liz got really excited when, on our last drop, we got to see the Apollo 11 rocket that
got those first men jumping around on the moon. She was ecstatic, dancing round and wiggling her bum, hugging the tour guide and asking her all sorts of stupid questions, like, "what happens to all the poo?"

Current location, Winnie Inn Suites. Very civilised, run by a guy who used to live up the road from me in Wellingborough.

John Barry

Jan 31st 2011, 12.20pm, somewhere in Texas...

Oh bollocks!! Just pulled over at a gas station for a toilet stop, turned my mobile on for the first time today and had three messages, my sister Jack, Anthony and Yvette, all bearers of the sad news that John Barry has just died of a heart attack. This is just terrible, this is awful...yea, bullshit.






Continuing our long drive through Texas, an American radio station is paying
tribute to the great man, playing whole suites from Octopussy, A view to a kill and many, many other amazing pieces from a very long career as a musical dramatist. No one else can make the hairs on the back of my neck stick up like he could. Gutted.

Texas

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING NEW MEXICO, LAND OF ENCHANTMENT




So, we are now leaving New Mexico, land of Enchantment; other than stop at a Taco Bell/Burger King, all we've done is drive through it, desperately trying to get as far away as we can from imminent snow storms which are promising to cover most of America in a blanket of white. Originally on course to Memphis, we flee towards Houston and New Orleans, which puts us on very large, endless roads. Right now it's Liz at the wheel, 90's music playing as she points out huge stars in the sky, which may well be of dalek origin. Aah! Crash Test Dummies, "Mmm, Mmmm, Mmmm, Mmmm", remember that?



Dalek Thay is still here with us, very much a part of our little trip, he currently holds position on the dashboard of this sexy, white Hyundai.
Tucson was a cute little town. We stopped off there yesterday and had the pleasure of visiting many stalls selling precious stones, African art and plaster of Paris replicas of Prehistoric bits; claws of Velociraptors, tooth of a Tyrannosaurus, a molar that once belonged to a Mammoth(real, not copy),skulls from a couple of early humans, Australopithecus and Homo Erectus and other body parts. Oskar bought a small treasure chest and some gems, which he loves.
We drove into the main part of the town, where there be a University and a very Bohemian vibe. I had a good rummage in a shop called Toxic records, which specialised in punk vinyl and c.d.s, t shirts, fanzines and badges. They even had a Rudimentary Peni button!




The real reason for stopping at Tucson, was to visit Saguaro National Park, as recommended by the lovely lady Ranger we met at a talk she was giving on Wildlife, when we visited The Grand Canyon. You know all those huge cacti you see in the cowboy films and stuff? They're all here, thousands of them, huge, great, beautiful things, some thirty, maybe forty feet tall, which makes most of them pretty old. They don't grow their first arm till they reach fifty and most here are well over two hundred years old.



We drove around an eight mile loop, surrounded by these fine specimens, the mountains in the distance, wildlife such as Roadrunners and ground squirrels crossing our paths and the bluest sky you've ever seen.
Stash and Oskar earned themselves another badge and certificate from Mister Ranger who quizzed them on what they'd seen and made them do that promise thing with their hands again.



Then began seven hours of driving...it's very dark now, time for a Motel 6 i
think, what say you Thay?