Day 10 - partial

Up early to wait behind with some large eastern europeans who were trying to launch a pastry oligopoly based on the breakfast buffet at the Victorian inn. Walked down Cannery Row for a whole; another Starbucks then into the Monterey aquarium for 2.5 hours of oohing and ahhing at a fantastic display of otters, penguins, jellies, turtles, and seahorses. 

more to follow...

Day 9 Rob/Eleanor

Another really early start, too early for Texas waffles, and dropped the car off at National @ Austin airport. Played strip jack naked for the TSA and onto a small jet (size of a pea) for a four hour flight to San Francisco. 

San Francisco, warm with open blue skies (best weather ever of our few SF visits) catching the air train round to the rental centre and picked up a Honda civic for a 12 day rental. Heading off south on 101, into Silicon Valley. decided not to inflict the Computer History Museum onto Ellie again! We drove south for a gawk at Steve Job's house and Facebook HQ instead. 

On a whim, we drove north to Petaluma to see Marin & Sonoma County and have lunch (and more importantly see if we could get access to the live broadcast of This Week in Tech at Leo Laporte's studio). 

Crossed the golden Gate bridge STILL  shrouded in fog on a beautiful clear day (lol) and a great freeway drive past Sausalito and up into Sonoma county. Petaluma was quiet and homely, but bigger than expected. We had a great lunch at Zazzle, a Wagamama meets little cafe kinda vibe. Went round to the TWIT studio where we were warmly welcomed as part of a small audience to twit live stream and recording episode 325. John Dvorak and Jodie Dell were there as Leo and a Skype video in from Ed Bott who was singing the praises of living in new Mexico. We nodded in agreement!

Unfortunately we had to leave early, so we snuck off set and back in the car for a great drive back to SFO. arriving in time to park and meet Chelsea, also punctual, with zero faff and exactly as planned. Quick frappucino festival @ airport Bucks and then a drive into the night down 101 with a brief stop at apple headquarters and lots of miles through very fast moving freeway traffic across the peninsula to Monterey. Arrived at 9:30 so we had a McDonalds dinner and crashed out at the Victoria Inn, two streets back from Cannery Row. 

Day 8 - Rob/Eleanor

Woke up super early and drove two hours west into the Hill Country to a town called Frederiksburg. birth place of THE LEGEND that is WW2 CINCPAC Chester Nimitz a big museum complex where Ellie broke a new record by tolerating THREE hours of fatherly wandering through the IKEA-like maze of Pacific War history. Then over to Tooties pies for a coffee and a slice of Texas pecan pie! Back into the thick of it at the Nimitz family hotel for Chester's own story, the inevitable gift shop tour and back to the car.

Drove east for an hour & some to a backwater town called Driftwood and a buzzy popular shed-restaurant called Salt Lick BBQ, for an over fill of sweetened BBQ meat (eleanor note: two bites of the stuff gave me cardiac arrest) and token side serves of beans and potato. We drove back to UT where cheapskate father found a cheaper park, only half a mile's walk from the football stadium! Dressed in token burnt orange, we mixed with the vast gathering heard of orange dressed Longhorns fans (UT college football team) and entered a huge stadium to watch a match with almost 100,000 others. The vast majority wore bright orange caps tee shirts and jackets, a collection of songs and arm and hand gestures to show their longhorn fan credibility. The match went from just before sunset for three hours, to finish under floodlights with lots of brass band and yeehaw entertainment and ads on the big video screen. UT won 43-0 against Kansas, so it

looked more like a training match than a big event! 

Long walk back to the car (thanks dad) and a good sleep back at the motel. 

Day 7 - Rob/Eleanor

Back west on I10, through miles and miles of oil refineries south of Houston, across the town in early peak traffic and three hours north back to Austin. 

Went to Spincycle Washeteria to catch up on a weeks washing for a few hours; luckily there was a Starbucks around the corner. Clean clothes folded up, we made our way to the University of Texas to the LBJ presidential museum and library, I thought it would be OK - It turned out to be the surprise hits of the whole trip so far! For eleanor too! There was a fantastic 1960s rebellion display (left and right wing) and a very impressive white house/oval office mock up on the 10th floor. Chucked out at closing time, we came away big fans of LBJ and lady bird. 

Went downtown and hung out at South Congress bridge to see the bats flying around as the sun set. back up Red River street for a Mexican dinner near the famous (but too long dinner wait!) Stubbs BBQ. 

Hit the pillow, at an airport hotel, before another big brilliant day. 

Day 6 - Rob/Eleanor

Woke up early, cooked some misshapen waffles which Eleanor protested to be Texas for the whole day (and later by photographic evidence found Dad guilty of disbelief and excusing me of also potentially believing in Jesus apparition toast!) 

Hit the road for a long stretch down I10 and then 45 in and through the big downtown of Houston, and into NASAs Manned Spaceflight HQ- the Johnson Space Centre. We had time for a coffee in a fairly Disneyfied kid-friendly space exhibit and then left with 10 others on a 'behind the scenes' tour of JSC. 

Had lunch at the staff cafeteria. Nice big buffet salad, Then plenty of time watching the space station control room and a pretty cool Q and A with a fairly young guy who as the altitude controller effectively flies the space station. Then some time in the Apollo era control room which is a national monument now and the SPECTACTULAR Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory which is a very deep and wide swimming pool with great big sections of full scale space station assemblies. There astronauts float and scuba divers assist in training for weightless space walking and maintaining the space station. There were two astronauts in the pool while we visited, and we could operate high res pan tilt zoom underwater cameras to watch them.

Then back to the tourist attraction and a blast through the gift shop and out. 

We took a drive round El Lago and Taylor Lake which were leafy housing developments next to JSC where the Gemini & Apollo wives and kids waited and grew up while father astronauts were at work training and sometimes in space. 

Then we found the motel du jour at Seabrook and went out to dinner at Kemah Boardwalk. a lovely dinner at seafood restaurant Landry's and a tame stroll past all the fairground rides. 

Day 5 - Eleanor/Rob

Finally left the bus a few miles north of downtown Austin, found a cab that was waiting right there. 

Went back, past downtown, to the car rentals at the airport. We picked up a Dodge from National, from a very very very nice man called Martin and headed back into downtown Austin. Parked up in South Congress and wondered around a tres cool shipping strip. Went into the famous Allens Boots store and had a good old laugh at row upon row of rack upon rack of super decorated cowboy boots, managed to avoid the temptation and settled for a Wrangler checked shirt. tried and failed to get Ellie to buy a cowgirl Stetson hat and then we went and got some lunch at Wahoos fish tacos. Staff in all the shops were very welcoming & chatty and Austin was pleasantly hot. A lovely conjunction of San Francisco hipness and Melbourne's space and summer heat - hot enough that we went to Zilker park and had a swim in Barton Springs which is a natural spring fed pool with a mossy weedy bottom with concrete edges and ladders etc. Ellie passed on the swim, and had a dozey lie down in the shade. I dried off, and we went into downtown to Waterloo records which was awesome - country music was mixed in with rock and indie just the way God intended. We found a few back catalogue items and brand new releases from Vince Gill and Shelby Lynne for our driving entertainment. We stocked up at a vast Whole Foods store (the original) and headed into the sunset south towards interstate 10. 

2 hours drive to Schulenburg, to a pleasant but unremarkable motel, halfway to Houston from Austin

Day 4 - by Rob

Day 4

Breakfast at the Super-8-Alamogordo featuring make-it-yerself waffles in an electric contraption, and then off across the 50 miles of Tularosa basin. Mountains on each side and a few about 30 miles south and just flat plain to the north. A beautiful desert morning, went past the huge Holloman air force base, and then about half later, south off the highway for a few miles to the still fully operational White Sands Missile Range base. It was first a test site for the captured and rebuilt German V2 missiles in 1945 and has flown about every US developed and many foreign missies since. The range is about 40 miles wide and extends over a hundred north from the range base. There is a great museum with many detailed exhibits and relics from the whole history, including Trinity site on the northern end and the space shuttle landing strip, used for much training and once for a reentry landing in 1982. There were a few exhibits of late 50s technology which would have been co-incident with Jim's work visit here in 1959. 

Then a two thousand foot long straight climb up off the basin floor on highway 70, up and over San Augustin pass and a spectacular climb down into Las Cruces in the Rio Grande vally oither side. We had a lunch and a gawk at New Mexico State Uni campus and then dropped off the car and waited for the 4:30pm Greyhound on a hot & duty strip mall stop.

The bus was comfortable enough, and the fellow passengers mainly fully accredited graduates of Hard Times College. We change buses after a one hour wait at El Paso and the overnight leg was quite full.
Ellie and I had to sit separately, which was OK and consequently we mixed a bit more with out seat co-shares. I got to speak a bit to a young guy trying to find better job hopes in Houston after no luck in Modesto. I did not share my "Wall Street" job description! We were passport checked by Border Police at El Paso, and then were late night stop-&-searched on a roadblock on Interstate 10 by much more gunned up Border troops. Off the bus, form three lines with guards at front & rear. Dogs having a good old sniff about the baggage and police all over the bus interior. Once guy was led away in handcuffs and then on throught the night east on I-10. The Greyhound routes are carefully chosen to join up the hard luck parts of many American towns! Several stops at services through the night, then a 2 hour wait at dawn for a swap at a much nicer San Antonio office and finally into beautiful Austin.

Day 3 - by Eleanor

Day 3

We woke up early, and sat down for the second breakfast buffet of the trip. This was a 7/10 with stronger coffee and another chatty staff member telling us all about the history of the motel and her appreciation for British politeness. We said thankyou very much, politely, and headed back onto the road.

Driving through surreal little spanish villages and cowboy towns felt like a drive through a Western film set.
A hippy new-age regentrification of a shamble town called Madrid was cool.
Rob got pulled over for speeding by the Sherrif of Soccorro and did a world class humility performance to be awarded the Oscar (verbal warning) Then we almost missed the only 'point of interest' on the northern part of the huge Tularosa Basin. We got out for a photo opportunity at the Trinity Site - where the first atomic bomb was tested.

We de-toured to Lincoln. A small, perfectly-preserved late 1800s town. It was here that the infamous Billy the Kid was imprisoned and later escaped, not before shooting two of the most important men in Lincoln. Bullet holes, prison bars and stones to mark the mens' places of death can all be found in a short walk around Lincoln. The town was like a eery, quiet, time-warp back into the wild wild west.

Arriving to Alamogordo ahead of schedule, we found a coffee place and I caught up on trashy celebrity gossip with the help of People magazine. By sunset we had thoroughly explored Alamogordo and arrived at White Sands National Monument. We climbed to the top of a huge pure-white sand dune and admired the other-worldly view of the sun setting of the never-ending white plains.

In true dad style, we did not leave before a good look round the gift shop for a teeshirt and a few fridge magnets. From there, it was dinner at Chili's and another early night ahead of another fantastic day.

Day 2 by Eleanor

Day 2

Alberquerque was a brilliant American town. With a 'Fuddruckers' dinner next door and an advertising sign for the "BEST AIRPORT PARKING ON PLANET EARTH" next to what-can-only-be-described as some concrete.

Our first breakfast buffet (of which I am a fan girl) was 6/10, with an array of mini-sized breakfast foods and some orange apple juice. We headed off in the early morning, past the University of New Mexico 'Occupy Wall Street' camp-out, to Bandelier National Monument in Santa Fe. The drive to Santa Fe encouraged me to be over-zealous in taking photos of the mountains and beautiful wide-open landscapes of New Mexico.

At Bandelier we stretched our legs and went for a circle-trail walk round the ancient settlements. Carvings in the walls, and ladders into the once-occupied caves provided a few jokes and a really interesting stop.

Next up was Bradbury Science Museum, but not before a 'Ruby K's Bagel's' lunch. We had a look around the Bradbury Science exhibitions, and watched a film on the history of the Manhattan Project. Further exploring, into the legacy of Los Alamos, led us to a small Los Alamos history centre and a really interesting conversation with one of the locals. We saw 'Bathtub Row' where all the important scientists and managers of the project stayed.

Conversations with locals didn't end there. Once reaching the 'Silver Saddle' motel in Sante Fe, the man at the desk recommended a visit to the Plaza in town and gave us some more information about Sante Fe. In the evening, we walked round the Plaza of Native jewellery etc and had a lovely dinner on the balcony of a second-floor Southwestern restaurant.

Day 1 - by Eleanor

Day 1
Arriving at Heathrow at midday, after a final Cafe Nero pit stop before entering a land saturated in Starbucks, we boarded a plane to Washington DC. To our pleasant surprise, lunch and dinner was provided - despite our tickets pre-warning us of 'meals: none'. We landed in Washington 7 hours later and began our two hour wait in the CUSTOMS QUEUE OF HELL. The deceiving zig-zag queue line didn't work this time. Germans, Russians and several others simply pushed through, most Britains settled to complaining loudly. Eventually, we got through customs and baggage re-claim and hurried to gate D23 (ie. the other end of the entire airport) for our flight to Alberquerque NM.

The plane ride to Alberquerque NM was insane. There was a HUGE lightning storm to the left of us, and with a left-facing window seat I was able to watch the flashes of light illuminating the clouds.

We landed safely in Alberquerque - at 8pm local time and 2am head time - and made our way to La Quinta Inn. 2 massive double beds were exactly what we needed after a days travel and we tucked in for an early night.

The song remembers when

Well. It is finally time for my Don Draper get-lost-&-then-found trip to California. Backwards and forwards.

A two week road trip with the gals and then an all-teams family union for the wedding of Merrielle, Pete's younger daughter.

The iPod is loaded with old & new tunes, the bags are packed...

LHR @ 1200 today for Ellie & me: A Boeing 777 to Washington for a swap to an A320 to Albuquerque by 2000. New Mexico north to south first, then over to the Texas Hill Country & NASA Houston, then up & over to SFO next Sunday for a road cruise down the coast to Los Angeles with Chelsea. There the scattered family will all gather.

Here we go.... roll tape.