Apr 2006

We're short on time again, and in a very sweaty, but very friendly internet cafe above a Burger King in the middle of Toronto. Crazily, we're not too far from being up-to-date! We spent 3 days in Niagara falls after New York, then a further 3 days in Toronto, soaking up the culture (and the beer!). We'll give you a brief insight into what we've been doing in this laid-back and highly interesting country.

New York is a big place. The city is, of course, one of the largest in the US, but New York State is also rather big. Not that we knew this when we got on the train. I'd seen a map or two of the area and guessed it couldn't take that long to travel across to Niagara... three or four hours maybe... so when the conductor informed us we'd be pulling into our destination some 10 hours later, we were shocked to say the least! However, we had our Ipods, and we had Kiefer Sutherland in 24 to keep us occupied, so we were okay.

(Kate takes over typing duties here....apologies for the spellings - it's the dodgy keyboard, I swear!)

It didn't really help matters that we hadn't thought to check where the Canadian border actually was before we got there so when the train pulled in to a desolate building site with the sun going down we were slightly panicked! Thankfully, there was a handily placed cabbie touting for business - ordinarily we would be annoyed at such shameless self-promotion but this time we thanked other people's gods and got in!

A quick $13.10 cab ride and we were at the Whirlpool Bridge, which connects America and Canada. The first Canadians we saw were the two drunken guys staggering ahead of us, singing anti-American songs (from what we could gather they may or may not have been thrown out of an American bar and were returning home)! They thought we were also American so we came in for a small amount of light-hearted abuse before they let us leave! The border guard seemed unphased by our drunken friends telling him we were smuggling drugs and he let us pass without a smile or any words of welcome!

Ok, on to Niagara: yet again I have wasted time rambling (me?! write too much...) I'll let Andrew do the talking for a while...

So, after managing not to get strip searched by the Canadian authorities, we crossed the border and went in search of our hotel. Again, our preparation was suprisingly lax, having only the address in hand and the vague idea that Kate thought it was two roads back from the front or something...maybe.. This added to our lack of desire to ask for help from the locals ensured a fun hike around the town at nightfall. Finally, after twenty or so minutes of walking with our increasingly heavy rucksacks, we caved and asked for help at the Hilton, which we thought had to be close to our Days Inn. As it turns out, there are 6 Days Inn in Niagara and none of them were near the Hilton. They were, however, near the bridge we crossed some thirty minutes previously... how we laughed... then promptly stopped laughing as our straps dug into our shoulders further and made us want to cry. Anyway, after about another thirty minutes of treking around the town, we made it through the haze of neon that makes up most of Niagara, and were greeted by a very friendly receptionist at our hotel. Despite it being nearly 10pm, she was genial and very helpful. We were doubly relieved when we entered our room to find it immaculate and very spacious. For less than 35 quid a night, it far exceeded our expectations!

So as not to bore, and so we still save something for our memoirs, I'll hand back over to Kate who will summerise what we did!

As you'd expect, and we ourselves expected, we did the Maid of the Mist and got very, very, very wet! It was fun and we kept the ponchos for Disneyland!! Then we headed underground and did the Journey Behind the Falls which basically involved standing in a cold cave looking out into some rushing water! Cool but no great photo opportunities!

Apart from those gems, we also did the neon bits! The Skylon Tower which over looks the falls was very pretty at night...we went to a 4D film with Leslie Nielsen in (Canada's best export!) and we had to do the casino since we got the bug in Atlantic City! All of which was exciting and enjoyable!

Thanks to the helpful Robert on the front desk, we booked a Greyhound to take us to Toronto after three days and we were loath to leave the happy little ball of tackiness that is Niagara - especially in a coach but it was cheaper than the train!

In Toronto we didn't really know what to do...we had 3 days to fill and only the CN tower in mind but we've done quite a lot! We went to the harbour and saw out onto Lake Ontario which was gorgeous! Went to the Steam Whistle brewery for free beer samples! We went round little harbour-front art galleries and went up the CN tower which was scary

Today we went to the Distillery District which is a whole yuppy area salvaged from old buildings ad filled with expensive shops and hundreds of little art studios (most of which were filled with stuff that my sister could do better but was priced in the tens of thousands of dollars!) It was briliant and made us want a yuppie flat to fill with yuppie things! There was also another brewery with more free samples so now we like Mill Street beer too!! (It's becoming a habit) But this beer is only avaiable in Toronto so we'll have to have it imported when we get back!!

Then we went on to the Royal Ontario Art Gallery, which was nothing special! And finally on to an English pub lunch!! Yummy!

And that is Toronto in a nutshell!!

We have to get going soon...the cafe is getting sweatier by the second and I am dying for a glass of water! Plus Family Guy series 4 is on the telly at 9pm and we want to get back for it!!!

Whole day of travelling tomorrow and then we get to Chicago the next day so hopefully we'll update again soon...the next stop after that is almost 3 weeks in Florida!! YAY

Hope you're all jealous & you're having fun where ever you are!

K & A

Internet access isn't as easy to get as you might think in the States. Or if it is there - usually in a hotel lobby - it is stupidly expensive. $9.95 for 15 minutes was the going rate in one hotel! But, thanks to everyone's favourite Greek and his line of practical, affordable, gaudily-coloured ventures, we are currently sat in an Easy Internet Cafe by Time Square in New York. At $5 for 4 straight hours, you really can't go wrong!

Anyway, we do have a crazy backlog of blogging to catch up on. We'll try and add more detailed descriptions of each of the places we've been to over the last week and a half, but just in case we don't get the chance, I'll sum up our activities as briefly as possible...given this will probably turn into a 5000 word epic, but I'll try my best!

We left a dull and rainy Heathrow at approximately 4.15pm on April 11th on Virgin Atlantic. The flight was fantastic! The in-flight entertainment was incredible. We had the choice of about 50 movies, 20 or 30 TV shows, a load of full CD albums, plus network gaming! You could start the movies when you wanted, pause, fast-forward or whatever you wanted. Same with the TV and the audio. We watched Good Night, and Good Luck which was great, and Derailed, which was turd. Kate didn't vomit once during the flight, even during the worse bits of dialogue by Jennifer Aniston.

When we landed, our first encounter with any US lifeforms was with the customs sniffer-dog thrusting its nose toward my crotch. The American authorities shouted at us with all the aplome you would expect and we were ever so slightly worried that we had arrived in some kind of boot camp but that was quickly over with and we set off to see if our bags had been lost in trasit or some such thing. (Bear in mind we have spent the whole of the last two years watching American Airline religiously in ITV2 and it seemed fair to assume that something went wrong on everybody's flight!) In fact we only waited about twenty minutes or so for our bags after which we had to make the dreaded walk to customs to see if they would actually let us stay...

Kate was a little paranoid having, through no fault of her own, watched the end of the Terminal the previos week (thanks Mum!) and was panicing that perhaps England had been bombed into little pieces during our flight and we would have to make a life in the airport with Mr Hanks - this was not a pleasing prospect as Kate rather hates him! This said, customs was stupidly easy to walk through and we needn't have wasted sweat over it, the nice man at the counter just scanned our fingers (it seemed odd to me too) and we were on our way into the USA!

We eventually managed to find out from a Mexican sounding voice who answered our hotels phone, that we could get a free shuttle out to the HoJo (that's street for Howard Johnson) we were staying at so we waited, watching all the people with more money than us getting into Hilton and Marriott hotel shuttles until eventually we boarded a semi-working minivan which would take us out to New Jersey.

Newark was uneventful - we only stayed the night as our flight was a late night and our journey into Pennsylvania was a slightly long one to be attempting at 9pm! The next day we tried to collect our Amtrak passes, which were rather essential to the whole "travelling" thing and which we had been assured we could get at any manned station, only it turns out that wasn't entirely true...instead we ended up getting a bus to the airport, a monorail to the station (where they didn't have the right paper to give us our tickets or something), thn the monorail back to the station, then a bus to New Jersey , then Penn Station where they did have paper (hooray!)and we had to get the train through where we were intially! All without getting lost too!

We need to rush along a little now as Kate is rambling too much and I can't keep writing this much so we are going to have summerise from days 2 - 14 and fill in the gaps when we can! I'm going to stick a load of bullet points of things we've seen and done, and maybe elaborate when we get the time...

PENNSYLVANIA
- Imposed ourselves on my over generous aunt and uncle (Lynne and Michael) in Collegeville, PA...about 45mins out of Phildelphia.
- Visited Boulder Field in a National Park... was amazing!
- Saw a real US college campus at Bloomsberg University, and even saw an authentic frat-house!
- Lynne drove us out into the sticks to see lots of geniune Amish people in a place called Intercourse (where the film Witness with Harrison Ford was filmed!) We chased them with cameras...it was fun!
- Did midnight bowling with my cousins Emma and Greg plus the crazy locals, and got ID'd buying beer (they even sent a spy out to watch us drink because we had minors with us!)
- Went to Philadelphia and had a Phili-Cheese Steak (Well I hate cheese, so Kate did...I just had it without the cheese)
- Saw Valley Forge, which is basically a place where the yanks were trained to kill British in some war we had a while back, when we decided we didn't want their country afterall..
- Visited the King of Prussia Mall (Yeah, we thought the name was silly too!) Apparently its the second largest mall in the States.
- To Lynne & Michael: Thanks again for having us... you are far too generous! We had a wonderful time and a great introduction to the American way of life!

WASHINGTON DC
- Ate pizza and drank beer on our first night. Getting ID'd was already getting tiresome. And Kate wasn't too impressed by the Mexican who served her Guiness in the 'Irish' 'pub' round the corner from our hotel.
- Saw all of the awesome monuments and constantly amused ourselves by renaming the Washington Monument (that big pointy one) the Clinton Monument out of respect for Futurama.
- Saw the FBI Building as featured in many X-files cuts.
- Went in the Ford Theater (sic) where Lincoln got shot.
- Attempted the walk around the outside of the Pentagon, but got accosted by armed guards half way around side 4, who forced us to retrace our steps in the burning heat (around 30C!)
- Got sunburnt!

BOSTON
- Spent 8 hours on a train getting there...longer than our trans-Atlantic flight!
- Got screwed around at the hotel...our booking didn't exist. Luckily the nice guys at the Midtown Hotel let us stay the night while they investigated - turns out you should never use Unpackaged Holidays (.com) unless you like companys who change your bookings to other hotels without telling you! A small amount of almost-shouting sorted it out, and we moved ourselves to another hotel round the corner.
- Walked the Freedom Trail, ending at Bunker Hill - a nice monument to killing the British...except we actually won the battle...but they Americans claimed a 'moral victory'. Yeah right.
- Saw Scary Movie 4 - our first US movie-theater experience! Was fun.
- Circled the outside of Fenway Park and visited their over-priced and over-merchandised gift shop. You can get Boston Redsox golf balls, lamps, piggy banks and ornate rugs to name a few silly articles.
- Did the Sam Adams brewery tour. Everyone must try this beer as it rocks! Its an American beer that doesn't taste like wee, and should be tried purely for this novelty value. We got free samples but had to 'continue our sampling' at an Irish pub down the road...this one even had a real drunken Irishman in it who even said the word
'bejesus'. Fab.

NEW YORK

(Kate is taking over the writing for a second as Andrew's fingers are dropping off! And before you think it....not from leprosy)

- Took us 4hrs on the train to get to New York from Boston and it rained from the moment we got off the train until our second day here! And not piddly little April showers...full on drenching rain!
- Walked around Time Square at night, finding our mecca (a huge Virgin Megastore!) and eating Japanese fast food (odd, I know)!
- We visited the UN and had a guided tour. Thought about making amusing terrorist related comments but realised we'd probably be deported which might not be a good start.
- Saw the Chrysler building (tall) & Grand Central station (pretty)
- Met up with Andrew's friend Mark who lives in New York and went out for drinks in Greenwich Village (where the ponces live) - Mark knew a cheap bar there...$7.50 for 3 pints! that's less than 5 quid..IN NEW YORK!
-Wanted to go up Empire State building but crappy weather meant zero visability so we decided to do it next time (!)
- Took a boat to Liberty and Ellis Islands...saw the Statue of Liberty and where they vetted immigrants until 1934 or some such time. Weather cleared up in time for about 5 good pics and then got cloudy again!
- Saw Wall Street and the financial district
- Visited Ground Zero which was surprisingly moving (even for me!)
- Met Andrew's uncle Michael who took us out for a Mexican meal in Brooklyn and showed us the amazing view of Manhattan from over the river! It was truly breathtaking.
- Wrote this weblog.

Sorry for the lack of pictures but we've not managed to find somewhere to upload them! Hopefully they'll follow soon!

Bye for now,

K&A

Its late so I'll keep this one short...ish! Certainly no time to look up those big, clever-looking words in the thesaurus tonight, no Sir. I just wanted to say it has been a mad week or so. As avid readers of my two previous posts may gather, the trip upon which Kate and I are about to embark has been literally years in the planning. The thought of finally stepping aboard that aeroplane had seemed just too far away to comprehend. Every extra shift worked, every time I stayed a few more hours at work to clean up somebody's overpriced and under-eaten Nacho Combo(tm), it was with that moment in mind, as distant as it was. Yep, that extra two hours equates to maybe £7 after tax, which amounts to perhaps $11US, which could in turn pay for two overpriced Nacho Combos deals at a friendly hyperplex in the States. That was what I told myself anyway.
But now that moment is fast approaching and our last goodbyes are imminent. Sorry, that sounded dreadfully sombre...perhaps recapping briefly the 'mad week or so' would help lighten the mood and move this narrative in the right direction...

So, we left Bradford a day after my 23rd birthday. My mum and brother came to Leeds to say their goodbyes and wave us off in our GNER First Class carriage. Crazy as it sounds, the first class tickets to Norwich we bought a few days in advance were almost exactly half the cost of standard class, had we bought them at the station on that day. With our complimentary newspapers and cups of tea, we motored down to the city where we had met, studied, and grown to love. We had planned to meet and say goodbye again to a bunch of old friends from both university and the UCI where we had worked for over two years. It was fantastic to see all the old faces again, and quite remarkable to note that almost everybody was sporting a radically different haircut from when we left less than five months earlier! I met two old uni friends, Jack and Pete, who I'd not really spoken to for about two years. It was fab to note they'd not changed a bit, and had a great laugh catching up with them. For the outsider, sorry for the in-references, but I have to say cheers to Vic, Jude, Desi, James, Owen and everyone else who came out too! [Damn, while on the subject, cheers to the Odeon posse who made it out for my leaving do too!]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnyway, after staying just one night at a friend's house, (thanks again Desi!) we headed back down on the train to Kate's parent's place in Kent to spend our last few days in the UK furiously packing and saying bye-bye to even more family and friends! There's not been any tears shed yet by either of us, but I suppose there is still time outside the airport! Hopefully from the next post on, this weblog should start to get interesting as our journey will have properly begun! Either that or it'll become a word-desert, maybe the odd tumbleweed of a sentence - such as "We're having loads of fun!" - blowing past every few months or so. As I keep saying to everyone, I'll try my hardest to keep it updated, but I just can't promise anything! Also, I'm not entirely certain they have the Internet in the USA, so you might not hear anything for a while!

Andy.

Oh and for the record, the aforementioned Nacho Combo (tm) was of course competitively priced for the cinema environment - Odeon Leeds/Bradford and UCI Norwich would never seek to overcharge for their quality retail goods. Never. Fact. Yes. Never.