Dallas Fort Worth Airport

Well, I send this from Dallas Fort Worth Airport where I am experiencing delays but have been able to rent a laptop for $6.95 an hour! Bargain! So, I left you in Chicago saying how nice the weather had turned out. Boy did I speak too soon! That afternoon it started raining and then it stopped for a while and so I decided to go out for a coffee. Oh my, did I time it wrong or what. Got my coffee and then afterwards decided to go for a mooch round the shops as I hadn't been round by the hostel and then the heavens opened! I'm not normally scared of storms but the thunder was so loud that it frightened the life out of me! Waited underneath a shop overhang for half an hour for it to die down but of course it didn't and so I got extremely wet walking back to the hostel!! Never mind. Dried off and then the next day headed off to Minneapolis. I ended up having to get a bus. Disastrous! They told me to get there by noon as they would be sending an express bus to Minneapolis at midday, 1pm etc but although I got on a bus round about midday, it didn't leave until 2.15pm and by the time we got to Minneapolis it was 10.15pm!! Fortunately got chatting to a nice guy called Rick who was sitting behind me so we had a really fun chat and whilst I wouldn't say time flew, it definitely felt a lot faster than it was!
In Minneapolis I stayed with my friend Sue and had a really lovely time. On the Saturday we went to the Minnesota State Fair and ate lots of things that are bad for you such as cheese curds, snow cones and sweet Martha's cookies. Then I became famous! I got interviewed on live TV because I was the person they could find who had travelled the farthest to go to State Fair so I was live on the news!! On the Sunday Sue and I went to Church and then just mooched for the day. On the Monday we went to Sue's parent's farm in Wisconsin and we had a great visit with her parents. Made all the more exciting for my influence on the weather! There was due to be a storm in the region but it should have split and gone north and south of us and so because I was there when Sue's folks severe weather alert system in their house went off in the middle of the night we ended up having to go down to the basement at 2am to avoid the storm!! Fortunately no major damage was done although Sue's car now has lots of little dents in it from the hail! Tuesday we came back to the Twin Cities and then Tuesday went out with my friend Karen to Caribou coffee and then to Famous Dave's BBQ! Delish!!
Today I've had a great flight down to Dallas but unfortunately there is a problem with the flight up to Vancouver and so I should have left at 4.40pm but it's currently 6.40pm and they say we won't be leaving til at least 7.17pm. Something to do with holding patterns and our plane having to land somewhere else. Hey ho! Hopefully get there today at some point!

Boston and Chicago

I send this post whilst doing the wonderful job of laundry! Am having a fairly lazy day today which after being so immersed in the world of discovering new places is quite nice! Today is my last day in Chicago, since I last wrote I've also been to Boston. I found Boston a little disappointing. Don't think it's entirely Boston's fault, just that I'd heard so many fantastic things about the place it couldn't possibly have lived up to its reputation! That said, it was a nice city and described very well as a walking city because everything is fairly close. My trip on Greyhound was an experience. It turns out that it doesn't matter what time your ticket is for, if you rock up when a bus is due then you get let on anyway. Not realising this and even though I had my ticket quite a while in advance as I'd had to check out the hostel, I almost didn't make it onto the bus I had booked for as all the other people who had later tickets than me were already on it! Fortunately I was the last person on the bus!! Whilst in Boston I went to a free night out at a comedy club - organised by the hostel then did lots of the touristy stuff - Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, walked the Freedom Trial which takes you round all the important historic places, USS Constitution, Cheers Bar (which is of course nothing like the TV bar!) and visited Harvard and MIT (which was actually quite dull!). On my last day there I went to Salem as having studied The Crucible at school I couldn't really not go, so got the ferry up there and it was such a disappointment. It was just like a Disney Witchland. There was one memorial which really gave you a feel for how traumatic the witch hunt era must have been but other than that it was full of touristy witch and wizard shops and you got hassled to do ghost walks all the time. Seriously would not recommend going there. Anyway, last Saturday I flew to Chicago and what a difference. I love this city! It has such a great feel to it. You're definitely in a big city and yet being on the banks of Lake Michigan (which being a great lake really is huge!) you almost feel like you're at the seaside as well. It even has beaches! Didn't do too much when I first got here as I was staying just one night in a hostel on the outskirts of town as I couldn't get into the central hostel the first night but since then have been out and about. The weather was appalling when I first got here. I left a balmy 28-30 degrees Celsius in Boston and got a not quite so balmy rainy 16 degrees in Chicago. So on came the bottoms of the trousers (they're the zip off ones) and out came the fleece and umbrella! Having been told that this weather was due to be with us all week I bought a City Pass which gives you access to multiple places of interest for cheaper than buying separately and I headed off to the Museum of Science and Industry which was good and huge. Went and had my traditional Chicago Pizza that day from the original place and it was delicious (Shalini - I have a picture of it!). The next day the weather changed and we've had bright sunshine since! Typical! Anyway, the next day I went to the Field Museum which is a natural history museum and it was great! What made it even better was that there were virtually no kids there so I got to play on all the interactive stuff which you usually can't get access to!! From there went to the aquarium, which was just full of fish really - until I turned up at the dolphin pool just in time to see a dolphin display which was excellent and showed you how they use the playtimes to keep a check on the dolphin's health as well. Then went to the penguin area where a few days earlier a baby penguin had hatched which was very cute! That night as I was walking back it turned out to be one of the nights for the Chicago 8th Film Festival to have one of its free movie in the parks nights so I hired a chair and sat and watched "Sweet Smell of Success" and old Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis movie. Had I been here a week later it would have been the Sound of Music! But seeing as the last time I spent a long time from home and I watched that I spent the whole movie crying my eyes out (Mum's favourite film!) I figured it was probably best I was here this week! Yesterday I went to the Adler Planetarium and watched a show on the stars at night so in theory I should be able to point some constellations out now. I blame the light pollution in Chicago for stopping me doing that last night!! From there I went to the Hancock observatory - 94 floors up! It has taken over here from the Sears tower as having the best views in Chicago so will leave the Sears tower for another time I think. In the evening I went to a jazz bar on the pier that had great jazz and did great barbeque. Had 24 hour brisket (marinaded with spices for 12 hours, cooked for 12 hours - yum!!) and then there was a free fireworks display over the harbour.
So today, I'm having a lazy day!! Tomorrow I head up to Minneapolis although at the moment I'm not sure how I'm getting there! I have a train ticket booked but there were floods in South Minnesota a few days ago which washed some of the tracks away! I went to ask at the station what was happening and of course forgot that I wasn't in the UK where it would take at least 6 weeks to put this sort of thing right as the guy said they already had one track running again but I might be being bussed up there. I think the bad weather must be following me - floods in England, floods in New York and now floods in Minnesota. I think I should get sent to drought areas!!

Really does deserve naming twice!!

Hi from New York! Have one day left here now and it's been a jam-packed few days since I got here! Arrived on Tuesday afternoon having braved the Chinatown Express and have been staying in the International Student Centre whilst I've been here which really has felt like being back at University. Not surprisingly with and age limit on guests being 35, at 33 I'm probably the oldest one here! At least I look as if I am anyway!
As I said though, it's been a busy few days and I've managed to get to see the places I wanted to but didn't have time to my last visit here. Have been the the Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, mooched round Greenwich village, Soho, Lower Manhattan went to Brooklyn, to the botanical gardens there and walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge, spent time in Central Park - watched softball games there and met an old guy called Kevin and chatted to him for a couple of hours yesterday. I have to say I've walked absolutely miles since I've been here! Fortunately the weather got a little bit cooler (even had one day where I had to reattach the bottom of my zip-off trousers and wear a fleece it was actually cold!) and so it's made doing the touristy things far more pleasant than in Philadelphia. My first day here I almost thought I was back in the UK as having had so much rain here the night before the subway system had major delays or "train traffic" because of signal failure! Nice to see it's not just in London they can't cope with a bit of rain! Fortunately though it was all back up and running to get me home from a free concert I went to In Madison Square Park, a couple of guys called the Woods Brothers - a bluegrass group that were excellent.
Tomorrow I'm going to take it easy as having walked all the way from Lower Manhattan to 86th street today I'm feeling a little tired now and then it's off to Boston on Tuesday. Will have my only greyhound experience then and apparently my hostel in Boston is fabulous so hope to have great things to tell you about it in the next post!

First post!

Well, I'm hoping that this works OK because I don't think the computer I'm on has the most up to date drivers as just about every instruction is a series of little boxes on the screen! Anyway, on my last evening in a hotel with free internet access I thought I'd send my first blog from my trip. Have been in Phila (that's how they abbreviate it here) for 2 days now and have to say I really like this city. It has a great feel to it. In some areas it doesn't really feel like I'm in America (although that's not the reason it feels good!!) and the thing that struck me first was that almost all the buildings are brick, which may sound crazy, but when I lived in Minneapolis, my friend Molly lived in the only brick house on her street, and if you knew how long some streets were over here...! As it's the 2nd day as well, I don't have an awful lot to tell you about where I've been and what I've been doing although that is partly to do with the fact that there is a heatwave going on here where temps have been in the mid 90s and there's been the humidity to go with it - almost feel I'm back in Mumbai! As such Starbucks with its wonderful AC and iced drinks is a bit of a fave hangout at the moment! One thing that I love about the city is that you can be ambling along on an area which doesn't have much going on when suddenly you happen upon something unexpected. There was a most amazing Italian market today (which is in the guidebooks but from one street before and one after you wouldn't know it was there) and a lovely organic supermarket which would rival the one that's just opened in Chelsea I should imagine. Yesterday I found a beautiful shop called Spirit of the Artist (www.sotagifts.com) which sold the most beautiful art items. The people here are really friendly too. As for general touristy stuff, I have of course gone to see Liberty Bell and went to the Museum of Liberty yesterday along with Betsy Ross's house and Bejamin Franklin's grave. Unfortunately they don't have the London system of free entry to museums here so on my budget it's a case of picking and choosing. Another thing that almost makes this city feel like London in a way is that there are quite a few small green spaces and it makes it seem like the small squares like Paddington Street Gardens. Anyway, tomorrow I leave my life of relative luxury in this lovely hotel that is the Alexander Inn (Jim and Rachel - it's lovely, you'll like it here) and head for my first hostel. Fortunately I walked past it yesterday and discovered it only opens in the morning for a couple of hours and then from 4.30pm 'til midnight or that could have been a long day walking round with the rucksack! 'Til the next time!