We´re off to see a bullfight tonight, since the Spaniards love to do things late at night. It begins at 10:00pm and goes through past midnight apparently. It seems the best bullfighters are in Madrid, so with a bit of luck, we´ll get a real amateur out there in the ring with an angry hunk of meat on hooves who manages to get one of those nasty injuries they show on “Real Life Caught On Camera” shows…*sadistic grin*

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We’ve made it safe and sound out of the USA and all the way to the land of Spain. For the sake of interest, the rain in Spain does not fall mainly on the plain. Or the plane. It´s just bloody hot and it does not rain! Man, it is hot, and we are sweating like piglets under the new-found weight of our backpacks. If only we had a 1990 Ford Econoline van to carry our stuff around in…

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This should be the last time we check email in the USA, and figured we’d do it in New Jersey - our 41st state of the travels.

The last time we sent the mail on what we were sad about leaving behind. This one is the one on what we’re looking forward to leaving behind/seeing once more when we get home. This is not to say we have not enjoyed ourselves here, but let’s face it - there’s no place like home, and nothing like travelling to make one long for the simple pleasures of familiarity.

1. Meat pies and sausage rolls. You’d never think that such a stupid little meal would be craved for, but it is. The closest we were able to find were “pot pies” but the pastry is like rubber, and not a nice flaky puff pastry like we’re used to.
2. Cartoons that allow kids to be kids. It seems the days of kids being entertained by the concept of a coyote chasing a roadrunner are over. We’ve seen cartoons here that had storylines involving a girl and boy on a first date when she suddenly felt sick in the stomach. They thought it was food poisoning, but it turned out to be cramps as a result of her first menstrual period. That was an eye-opener as to what kids are learning today!
3. No more cheese in everything. Cheese in biscuits. Cheese on steak. Cheese in a can. Cheese inside hotdogs. Deep fried cheese curds. Cheese with extra cheese. Yuk! And not even normal looking cheese, but some weird orange coloured stuff - no colour in nature exists the same as American cheese…
4. Speed limits that mean something. Oh sure, I’ll regret putting this one in, since some day in the next couple of years I’ll get a speeding ticket at home, but it does get a little scary out there on the roads. Yesterday, we were on I-80, doing 75mph in a 65mph zone. A truck screamed past us uphill, and I accelerated to know what speed they were doing - turned out to be 89mph (142kph). When a semi-trailer is doing that speed, and you’re in a Hyundai Accent/Excel, it’s a little alarming.
5. Pickup trucks called utes. Gas called petrol. Sidewalks called footpaths. Soda pop called soft drink. Fries called chips. Curbs called gutters. You get the idea - it’s hard to learn English as a foreign language.
6. World news. There is nothing happening in the world outside the US according to the media. Even CNN which has 24 hours of news devotes all the rest of the world into a snippet called the “Global Minute”. We’ve watched this desperately, trying to sneak a glimpse at life outside the continental US, but the definition of “foreign news” is a little dodgy. George W Bush talking about how the Israelis and Palestinians should stop fighting is “foreign news”. Canada is “foreign news”. Mexico is “foreign news”.
7. Stupid people that cannot fall back on the excuse that we are from a foreign country. We stayed at the Wilkes-Barre Travelodge last night due to a torrential downpour. They promised a “continental breakfast”. This turned out to be chocolate frosted mini-donuts, and when we politely asked for the cereal or toast or continental breakfast, the desk clerk got really irate and yelled that “we’ve had that for 3 years and nobody else has complained - you obviously just do it differently where you’re from”. On the plus side, at least we know now what to expect for breakfast in the next leg of our travels - until then, we did not know that the chocolate frosted mini-donut was the only thing eaten in Europe for breakfast. Yeah, right…
8. People who get sarcasm. I know we have met many US and Canadian residents that appreciate droll comments, but there are so many out there that do not. It’s rather irritating having a conversation where I joke that I have no accent and it is the other person with the accent, and then have to endure the other person patiently trying to explain the concept of accents to me.
9. Metric. Need I say more?
10. People who don’t believe:

• Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter, is a bloody idiot.
• Foster’s tastes bad.
• They are called “prawns”, not “shrimp”.
• We don’t barbecue them anyway.
• We do not drive Subaru Outbacks.
• Koalas are not harmless and cute.
• Kangaroos are not a common pest in central Sydney.
• There is more to Australia than Sydney.
• Yes, even more than Sydney and Ayers Rock.
• No, the snakes are not lined up at the airport to kill you when you get off the plane.
• We do not have pet kangaroos.
• Socialised medicine is not a bad thing.
• You do not need a gun to protect your liberty.
• Trigger locks are useless if you keep a loaded gun on the floor behind your chair and you have toddlers.
• Yes, there really is an Australian Dollar.
• Saying “Giddoi” as a farewell is stupid.
• And not just because you cannot pronounce it.
• No, I am not Crocodile Dundee just because I wear a hat.
• Yes, currencies can actually be not on a 1-for-1 basis.
• The Canadians are lucky to be at $US0.65 - we’d love to be that high with our exchange rate.
• Yes, we drive on the other side of the road.
• Yes, The steering wheel in Australian cars is on the opposite side of the car to cars in the USA.
• No, it is not scary to drive on the other side of the road - it’s easy.
• A pastie has vegetables in it.
• New Zealand is not part of Australia.
• Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter, is a bloody idiot, and though we’ve said it before, we’ll say it again because he really is.

And now, onward to the rest of the world…

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I met this fellow in the Mohawk State Forest in northern Massachussetts, and he was one of the more interesting people I’ve had the chance to converse with here in the USA.

We were chatting about the campground and he told me he went there every weekend and holiday time he had, because he liked it so much. I didn’t know there was much there, so asked him what brought him back repeatedly, since there was obviously something there I’d be interested in finding out more about.

It was, he told me, “a connection inside”.

Er, okay…

He went further and explained that since he was part native American (though *I* look more native American than he did!), he was in touch with the environment and he was an “earth person”. This meant that he was able to get energy from trees. He was also “learning to channel energy from rocks”. This was not something I thought one could just learn, so we chatted a little more.

Do you need to touch the trees? What sort of energy? Is it like a shock?

Yes, you need to touch the trees. He apparently placed his hands on the trees and he could feel the energy of the tree coming through him. Sometimes there was nothing. Other times, it was like touching a small battery. One tree though, had given him such a shock one day that he was almost blasted backward onto the ground.

Did anyone else see this?

Yes. It was reliably backed up by the person he worked with, who could see auras.

Oh…

No, really. Auras. She could see them, and it must have been the combination of his “earth energy” and her “spiritual energy” and the tree’s “energy” that formed a big localisation and that is what made the shock so powerful.

By this time, my face had betrayed me and was adopting it’s “you must be my SPOTD” expression, but he mistook this for me thinking he was just pulling my leg.

He was very worried I thought he was tricking me, and went to great lengths to explain that he was deadly serious.

I wondered at this point, what this man did for a living, and here’s where it just got great…

He cuts down trees for a living.

Yes, cuts them down.

I could not help myself and giggled a little. Surely this was a conflict of interest?

Ah, but you see, first he made peace with the trees. Placed his hands upon them. Said prayers for them. Then he performed the task of removal.

Oh, well that’s just fine then. Earn the trust of trees, then lop them off at the base. That’s got to be some form of “lumber entrapment” or something.

Ah, you gotta love the SPOTD’s. They make life just that much more interesting. I’m wondering who we’re going to encounter next - a marine scientist that goes clubbing seals on weekends?

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Yes folks, we are back in Ohio again. Why, you might ask. Because, we might answer.

Actually, it was to sell the van. A friend here allowed us to use their phone number in a newspaper ad. For a few days there was no interest, so we departed, thinking it was a dead loss.

Turned out that three people got interested in it several days later, and since it was hot and humid and rainy on the coast, we went west once more, figuring more people in Ohio were interested than the yuppie population of Boston where the new Beetle is the most common vehicle on the road.

So now we are van-less. Very odd. Have rented a compact Hyundai to get us to New York, and it is compact! No walking through this vehicle in search of food from the storage areas!

Departing the US on 19th August for Barcelona, moving quicker through Europe and Asia than we’ve done the USA.

To all those in Europe and Asia, see you soon.

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NB: This page was added after we returned.

As we rapidly ran out of time in the USA, I realised I’d not taken any images of some of the more amusing items in Walmart, so at 4:30am in Fishkill, New York, I went for a wander through the Walmart Supercenter.
The items that amused me most were the range of cereals, (none of which appeared to be healthy), other foods of convenience, and of course, the guns and ammo section (see related articles).

Coming from a completely different world, where guns and ammunition are not sold in department stores, it always seemed a little alarming to come around the corner and find someone carrying a shot-gun. Even though not anyone can buy one - I doubt we could have, given our residency status - the presence of guns, crossbows, pistols and other hunting paraphenalia in front of us all the time was unsettling.

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NB: This page was added after we returned.

As we rapidly ran out of time in the USA, I realised I’d not taken any images of some of the more amusing items in Walmart, so at 4:30am in Fishkill, New York, I went for a wander through the Walmart Supercenter.

The items that amused me most were the range of cereals, (none of which appeared to be healthy), other foods of convenience, and of course, the guns and ammo section (see related articles).

The foods of convenience were not all bad - it was cheaper to buy frozen mixed vegetables for a stir-fry than it was to buy them individually and try to keep them in a van, even with a fridge. However, for the most part, they were some truly horrifying things to eat, all of which would enlarge the waistline…

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NB: This page was added after we returned.

As we rapidly ran out of time in the USA, I realised I’d not taken any images of some of the more amusing items in Walmart, so at 4:30am in Fishkill, New York, I went for a wander through the Walmart Supercenter.
The items that amused me most were the range of cereals, (none of which appeared to be healthy), other foods of convenience, and of course, the guns and ammo section (see related articles).

If you take a look at the larger versions of all these cereals (in order to read the packets more clearly), you’ll note that they are all contain either chocolate flavouring, or extra cinnamon. Not what you’d consider to be a healthy option for children, and while there are a lot of cereals similar to these on Australian markets, the proportion of unhealthy / healthy was definitely unusual.

While Corn Flakes and Rice Bubbles (aka Rice Krispies) were represented in the aisle, for the most part, every cereal was designed to appeal to the sweet tooth.

The Cinnamon Toast Crunch was the worst cereal we tried in the US. Not long after we arrived, we decided to buy a small collection of cereals in multi-pack form. Typically used for people on the go or campers, they were a handy size to try before we decided which cereal we’d end up eating while travelling. The sugar and cinnamon in the Cinnamon Toast Crunch was actually so plentiful, it refused to dissolve, leaving crunchy granules of sugar all over my teeth and gums.

Cheerio’s were less sweet, but perhaps too bland for regular consumption, but there was no in-between range that we could find. In the end, of course, we began our day with two chocolate donuts every morning, so we are hardly excluding ourselves from the collection of sweet-tooths in the population…*wry grin*

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In 1692, it was all happening in the township of Salem, where 19 people were hanged and one was crushed to death with stones - all because they were reputedly witches. How did the good folk of the town know this? Because some young girls got a healthy dose of dementia and began firing off accusations and backing it all up with “spectral evidence”.

Today, over 400 years later, people are still suffering dementia, but it’s mainly due to the heat. Right now, we’re escaping the sun inside the lovely cool air-conditioned library, but outside, it’s a mere 98F/37C. We’re really looking forward to the stint in London where the average temperature in summer is only half of what we’re in right now…

The downside to that is that we have to lug backpacks across the countryside of Spain and Italy first, and that’s just not a pleasant thought…

It’s a weird feeling as we run down the last few days of our stay in North America - strange to think so much time has passed already, and that we’re technically on the fast-track home now.

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For those of you who know us well, this will not come as a great surprise, but we’ve just made a bit of a detour for the PhD. No doubt some of you have read one of the other travelogues on the website for a trip to Sydney in 2000, but for the benefit of those that have not, here’s a quick summary.

To pay the inter-library loan fees for photocopied journal articles was going to be a higher expense than personally flying to Sydney with Diana and collecting them ourselves, so we did the latter and had a holiday as well.

This time, we’ve gone to Wooster, Ohio specifically to collect some journal articles from a pretty obscure (at least in Australia) journal. Sure, it’s not like we flew here directly to get them, but it probably does fall into the “only Trav and Di are weird enough to do that” file…

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