Floridays

Attention, readers! It appears that by the end of this entry, we will actually be up to date! We spent a month without internet, which, predictably, took its toll on the blog, chronologically speaking. Here do we document our last month in North America.

We arrived safely at Nancy's Dominican family's home in Ft. Lauderdale in mid-November. We had been driving since March of this year. We had successfully driven up the West Coast, across Canada, and down the East Coast, as was our plan from the start. We put approximately 12, 000mi on the odometer. Of course, after all this, Willie got tired...very tired. So tired, in fact, that she stopped, without warning, in the middle of an intersection several days after our arrival in Ft. Lauderdale--and she wouldn't restart. We coasted through the intersection to what happened to be a highway, just shy of a freeway onramp.  The irony of the fact that our "For Sale" sign describes the van as "reliable" was not lost on us. In fact, it is possible that Willie's stopping was, as Nancy's family suggested, Willie's way of expressing her displeasure at being put up for sale.

As a result, there was very little vacationing to be had whilst in Florida. For the first two weeks, Willie was at the mechanic, receiving some extremely expensive repairs. For the last two weeks, we feverishly cleaned Willie and made her presentable, so that we weren't leaving Florida with a semi-functional, geriatric van in our names. First attempts at cleaning were repeatedly interrupted by Nancy's aunt's next-door neighbour, who appeared to be a compulsive liar. Either that, or he was a concert cellist; an ex-marine; a deep-sea diver; a registered architect (in twenty-seven states!); and collector of rare and exotic animals, including two Great Danes, two bobcats, a Black Mamba, and the "New Zealand Green Mamba". We thought this last one must be extremely rare, as New Zealand doesn't have snakes...

We did eventually get the van cleaned. Finally, one day, we got in the van and realised that it was completely empty of clothes, of food, of our various magnets and bumper stickers, empty of our artwork, empty of postcards we'd collected along the way...empty of us. She wasn't our Willie anymore, and suddenly, it truly felt like our trip, this "vacation" was coming to an end.


Cleaning, day one.



Lucky the cat pays Steff's empty cupboard a visit.



Shiny and clean!

We did manage to escape the incredibly oppressive stress of trying to sell our home/vehicle/traveling companion with weeks, then days to spare by going to the beach one day.



We also celebrated Thanksgiving with Nancy's extended family. Or some of it, anyway. A little background: Nancy's mother has forty-one brothers and sisters. Nancy literally has hundreds of cousins. Thanksgiving was loud and raucous and gluttonous, and lots of fun. The dinner featured a pork roast, a ham, a turkey, several loaves of homemade challah (we made that), yuca, beans, cranberry sauce, various salads, and general merriment.



Some of the dinner spread. Nancy's uncle William volunteered to say a prayer for Thanksgiving,
but promptly forgot that he had made this offer. In this photo, everyone, including William,
is waiting for the prayer (or, in our case, the eating, which doesn't happen until the prayer is said)
to start.


We made friends with Nancy's cousin's daughter, who is as mischievous and daring as a toddler could possibly be. Here she has been caught setting up a ladder of sorts to access the leftover bread.

And of course, we found some great old family photos, including several of Nancy's mum, in her 20s. Surprise, Angela!

Steff befriended the neighbour's kittens. Everyday, William offered them to us (although they were not his), forgetting that we were leaving the country in the beginning of December.

Yin and Yang

Mother Cat, or Sinatra (ol' blue eyes).

Just as we were beginning to panic at being unable to sell the van, with six days left before our departure, an eccentric and tremendously verbose Greek family bought it. Granted, they paid us next to nothing for our beloved VW. On the other hand, however, living in Willie Westfalia meant that we never had to pay for a hotel room, or an interstate bus or train ticket, and we only ate in restaurants when we chose to do so. And despite everyone's doubts (including, to an extent, our own), she never really broke down. That is, at least, until it was convenient for everyone--relatively speaking. If she had broken down anywhere else on the trip, we'd have been in considerable trouble. Extra special thanks to Willie, for making this entire trip possible.

Nancy prepares for our final trip in Willie--to the Department of Motor Vehicles,
to change the title and hand over the keys. I took this photo with the intention
of making a sad face, but seeing it on a screen later on, we realised that
I looked far sadder than I had intended.

The farewell was bittersweet, but also an incredible relief, especially as she stalled on the way to the DMV (our fault) and took five or six tries to restart.

After Willie was sold, we felt free. We had tied up all of our loose ends, and all that was left to do was to pack, and donate all of what we couldn't pack or send home in the mail to Goodwill. We did this, bid our goodbyes to Nancy's grandmother, two aunts, two uncles, five cousins, their five children, along with their respective partners, jumped on a plane, and flew to Palmdale, California.

As we type this from Palmdale, we are repacking our bags, because tonight...we fly! From 10:15pm tonight, we will spend fourteen hours on a plane to Syndey, then three hours to Auckland. Home.

We are in a daze now, as the spheres of the many lives we have put together since our university graduation last year begin to fuse, and it reminds us forcibly of a movie we used to watch when we were little. In Peter Pan, Wendy agonises about her last night in the nursery. That is, until she takes a sabbatical in Neverland, learns a great deal about herself, and returns, ready to take that developmental leap out of the nursery. We are post-Neverland Wendys. We're ready to come home and plunge back into a life of responsibilities, and we feel better equipped to do it than we did last year. Don't exepect us to grow up, though!

You'll be hearing from us once we've soared through the skies to the other side of the planet, and caught up on sleep. We will update you with some parting thoughts.

Lots of love, and thanks for following our travels for all these months.
-Nancy and Steff


The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.

Singing Songs About the Southland

After New York, we headed South, relatively quickly. We'd have loved to have stayed longer in some places, but, as we mentioned in a postcard, "we have tickets home now, so we gotta scoot". As such, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia passed by in a flash. [Cue movie-style montage, indicating passage of time]:

New Jersey
We visited with some old friends from New Zealand while in New Jersey. We also the visited the Jersey Shore, but alas, we saw not one guido. We did, however, find some mildly carnivorous seagulls.



Nancy's pseudo-grandparents.


Our friends very kindly took us to Philadelphia for the day. There, we saw an assortment of incredible street murals, Benjamin Franklin's loo, and various placards outlining fundamentals of American law. We thought some of them were especially pertinent, given the police brutality and brute force being used against peaceful protesters across the country.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom
of speech, or the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Ben Franklin's commode.

Before we post the next photo, here's little background information. In Canada, there is a book series (and now, a morning cartoon spinoff) about a child-turtle named Franklin. He looks like this:

Each book title involves some activity of Franklin's (for example, Franklin Goes to School). The series is sickly wholesome. We thought the following sign was hilarious, because we couldn't get the image of this righteous little turtle out of our heads as we read it:

Damn Franklin's heirs!



The bottom comment translates to something like
"I always imagined paradise to be some kind of library."





Will meets Willie (Westfalia).

North Carolina
From there, we continued on to North Carolina, stealth camping for the first time in a Walmart parking lot along the way. We don't recommend it. There are some truly weird people going into Walmarts at 4am.



The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel-Bridge-Tunnel



A real cotton field!

 In North Carolina, we spent a week with Steff's family. They took us to the mountain towns surrounding Mooresville, which were beautiful. Certain mountain towns, such as Asheville, were interesting in that they were extremely liberal pockets almost completely enshrouded by the rest of the typically conservative state.

This photo certainly doesn't capture the variety and depth of autumnal colour in
these mountainous areas.

Steff makes friends.

Our next stop was Charleston, South Carolina. It was quite the experience driving into the urban centre. As we approached the city from the northwest, we saw row after row of chain-link fences, and houses with broken-down cars parked out front. We were planning on stealth-camping in the city, so we were feeling apprehensive; we reassured ourselves with the knowledge that the outskirts of a city often appear slightly more dangerous than the downtown area. However, as we continued, these "outskirts" stretched on. We exited the freeway and drove into the downtown, and still, we were surrounded by ramshackle buildings, buildings that were once beautiful but which now would probably not pass building inspection. Suddenly, we popped into what seemed to be a completely different city: the architecture was beautifully maintained, crisply painted. From Goodwill shops, gospel churches, and NAILZ TO GO, we had stumbled unexpectedly into the Grand Historic Downtown. There, we found hordes of tourists on walking tours, huddled into the tight city blocks and taking photographs. And for some reason, everyone was blonde-haired and blue-eyed. What happened to all of the African-Americans from two blocks back? What did they think of this version of Charleston, where everyone's accents were from out of state? That said, it was beautiful in downtown Charleston, but in the same way that a mask can be pretty or alluring. We liked this mask, definitely--old, verandah-ed homes, trees lining the streets, Spanish moss, the waterfront...but it felt a little ingenuine. We were not disappointed however: it was all part of the experience. Photo time!

This is where we ended up sleeping.



Nancy at the entrance to the old slave market. This market is now a huge area filled with tourist
merchandise--an interesting shift. The sign at the entrance reads
"Daughters of Confederacy".

 

 



Apparently most of these houses were originally
owned by plantation owners, as vacation homes.

  

 

Halloween is huge in America.



If Nancy ever made a rap album, this would be the cover.

Florida
...And from Charleston we drove to St. Augustine, Florida. Here we are at the Castillo de San Marcos fort.

Nancy takes in the Spanish moss as the Kiwi Moss takes her photo.



Stained glass windows from the St. Augustine Cathedal. The
building was rebuilt years ago, but it allegedly provided
a spiritual home for North America's oldest Catholic
congregation.





Occupy St. Augustine. He may be the only one
there, but he's occuping hard.

The wild epiphyte Tillandsia, also known as
air plants. They gather nutrients from the air,
and they're all the rage in Berkeley. The difference
 is that the Berkeley varieties are $5 a pop,
whereas these were everywhere in St. Augustine.

Following a few days in St. Augustine, we headed to our final stop for the trip: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Coming up next (click on the picture for full-size image):

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.

Start Spreading the News...

You're on a train. You've been on this train for nearly two hours, and your ability to sit still and be quiet is diminishing. That is, until you see the Chrysler Building. And suddenly, it is as though you've stepped into a bizarre energy field, and the air around you seems to tingle strangely, and the atmosphere takes on an ethereal, effervescent quality.

"The next stop is: Penn Station," a robot announces with a monotony that could never reflect the excitement that wells up inside you. In 120 minutes you've been transported from sprawling suburbia into one of the world's greatest metropolitan playgrounds. You've just arrived in New York City!

Nancy: This probably better describes how I felt, this being my first nibble of the Big Apple. Steff had visited several times prior.

This was how we first came into NYC, from Stony Brook via the Long Island Railroad. Given the distance and the cost of visiting the city from Suffolk County, Long Island ($47 for both of us, round trip), we only saw the city on three separate occasions: as a visitor on the train, as described above, as passengers in a car, and as temporary residents.

Some guerrilla street-art

The car ride into the city was perhaps the single most terrifying and nerve-wracking experience of the last ten months. We would never recommend that a New Zealander attempt to drive on Manhattan Island, because he or she would never get anywhere. We can see our hypothetical Kiwi motorist now, indicating (or signalling, depending on your country of origin) and wondering why nobody will let him/her in. This driver might die waiting for a gap. When we rode into the city, our driver was a competent, experienced New York driver, but that didn't save us from dozens of near misses as we crossed the Queensboro Bridge, to a chorus of honks and curses. It wasn't that we were driving recklessly--New Yorkers live their daily lives to an unending serenade of car horns (hypothetical New Zealand motorist: "That's rude!").

On our third foray into the city, some friends very kindly allowed us to stay in a recently vacated apartment of theirs, which overlooks Central Park. This allowed us to play at being locals for almost a full week. Of course, there was no way we could ever pass as real New Yorkers--they're far too well-dressed.

The view of the park from the apartment

And here are our findings, from our three urban excursions, dutifully reported back to you, readers:

New York is dirty, smelly, loud, busy, and tremendously exciting. As to what is exciting about the city, we, like thousands before us, couldn't quite pinpoint it, although we did try. It is an inexpressible energy that surrounds the city's landmarks and residents. The intense murmur of a rich and scandalous history lies in every street, in every sight, in every old building, in every neigbourhood. It is a city of so many people, with so many stories to tell, so many pulses beating simultaneously, so much life. We don't want to say "you had to be there", but, well...you have to be there. The city is separated into several different areas, although every list we've found defines these neighbourhoods differently. We'll look specifically at the ones we went to.

Greenwich Village:

And how could we not go, given its incredible literary and musical history? "The Village" is central to the writings of (among others) Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Capote, and Dylan Thomas. Some of the biggest names in jazz (from Ella to Coltrane) played in Greenwich Village, and many major artists started out or got their big break here (artists like Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, Joan Baez, Stephen Stills, and Bob Dylan, to name a few). We found that the area is nowadays mainly populated by hipsters ("indie kids", to our New Zealand readership). Ironic moustaches abound in this tidy, arty neighbourhood.

This particular hipster is unable to grow his own facial hair. How marvelously ironic!

While in Greenwich, we visited the Stonewall Inn. Again, how could we not visit what is arguably the birthplace of the gay liberation movement?

Astor Place and St. Marks Place:

We visited Astor Place primarily to see the Blue Man Group perform, but we took our time and explored the area while we waited for our 8 p.m. show. What we found was a great big cube perched on one of its corners, in the middle of the street. It is an art instalment. We had been told that it can spin on its perch, but we suspect that this is just a dirty trick played on tourists to make them look stupid. We saw several such tourists from Japan, heaving, shoving, and pushing with all their might, and snapping photos in between, but alas, the cube did not budge. Readers, answer us this: does it actually move, or is it a huge practical joke on tourists?

The cube in question

St. Marks was a colourful neighbourhood, an excellent place to get a tattoo, or a beer, or a piercing, or a bong, or vegetarian food, or to marvel at washed-out hippies. It is not, it turns out, a great place to get a spontaneous haircut, as the waiting time on a hair appointment is often in excess of five weeks.

Cable-tie art on Lafayette

Chinatown and Little Italy:
Chinatown is the most population-dense area we've ever failed at walking in in all our lives. There are simply so many people that one must drop one's head and charge aggressively into the madding crown. We had the best Chinese food ever at Wo Hop, and were very discreetly approached by elderly Chinese women selling "real Louis Vuitton" purses.

Little Italy lies just north of Chinatown. It is an odd experience walking from Little Italy into Chinatown, because very little divides the two neighbourhoods. One minute you're in Europe, the next you're in Asia. Go figure.

West Side:
On the West Side of Central Park is the Museum of Natural History. Nancy had never been, and it didn't take long for her to see the appeal. For one thing, it's filled with ex-animals! We also visited the Dakota Apartments, the site at which Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon. It was exciting, in the way that historical landmarks are exciting.

Upper East:
One Sunday morning, we woke up in "our" apartment and walked down Park Avenue to find a place to have breakfast. We only ordered bagels and coffee, but we lingered for almost an hour in the cafe, watching the poeple meander past, which we found to be an excellent way to spend a morning. They were immaculately dressed and accompanied by every breed of dog known to man. All the stores were extremely expensive, so this was one of the only forms of entertainment that we could afford on the Upper East Side.



Nancy outside the Guggenheim



Steff on Park Avenue



Times Square/Broadway:

Times Square, despite being one of the most populous areas of the city, was almost completely devoid of New Yorkers. We checked it out briefly before we stopped in at FAO Schwartz, spent far too much on over-priced candy, and sugar-highed our way down Madison Avenue in childishly high spirits.

CANDY!



And of course, Steve Jobs had just died. New Yorkers paid tribute at the Apple Store.

Financial District:

We had set out looking for the Occupy Wall Street protest the morning after oggling at wealthy people on Park Avenue. Unable to find OWS, we gave up and went in search of the WTC site instead. On the way, we quite unwittingly found ourselves standing in front of Zuccotti Park. We spent a good part of the day there, chatting with protesters. OWS was a peaceful protest attended by a huge number of people, and the protesters we spoke to were intelligent, well-spoken, and very clear in what they were standing for. The vast majority were "normal" people: elderly people, middle-aged people, nurses, construction workers, teachers, (ex)businessmen, families, and so on. They were not the violent, hippie, vagrant, criminal, or brain-dead protesters that the mainstream media were (and still are) portraying. A friend working for a major news network in New York noted to us that footage of the more ignorant protesters is deliberately picked out of hours worth of filmed interviews from OWS.



These entrepreneurial protesters would spray paint messages
on anything you brought them. It turned out to be an especially
 lucrative arrangement for the "I [heart] NY" t-shirt vendors
 in the square.





This woman was knitting for peace.

 


The People's Kitchen




A sing-along



Protesters embellished this statue.
The sticker on the briefcase reads "don't tell me the skies [sic]
the limit when there's footprints on the moon. #OWS"

Afterwards, we visited, or tried to visit Ground Zero. It turns out that we needed to book in advance online. The line to get in was three or four hundred strong, with guards manning every entrance. Further, a 20-ft. high fence completely blocked the area from sight.

The new "Freedom Towers". A work-in-progress.

Never mind, we thought, we'll check out the visitors' centre...Or not. There was a line of people outside the centre waiting to join another line of people inside. And with an armed guard at the door letting people in two at a time, we decided to spend our time elsewhere...

Like at Battery Park, to see the Statue of Liberty. Here it is.

Keep looking, it's there.


What left more of an impression, perhaps, than the famed Statue, was the fact that we lost each other. To date, we had spent eight months together on the trip and had managed not to get separated. And where did we break this trend, with one phone between us? New York City. We like to aim high. A panic-stricken hour ensued before we were reunited, again accidentally.

New York City was, undoubtedly, an incredible city. There are myriad activities to partake in there--in spite of this, our favourite activities were walking, people-watching, and singing. Singing, you ask? There's almost a song for every street in New York. And, being the tremendous music nerd that Nancy is, she has made a Google Map showing the songs we sang, and where we sang them during our stay in the city that never sleeps. We are completely aware of how geeky this is, but we're going to post it anyway, because that's just how we roll. Here it is, in all its nerdalicious splendour: Nerdy New York Music Map

Until next time, readers. And now that we have Internet access, "next time" should be sometime within the next 24 hours.


The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.