From Austin.... to Austin

When the time came to leave Austin we headed west on the 290, loosely following a scenic drive recommended in a book we’d been given as a gift before we left, passing through some of the Texas Hill Country. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the biggest inclines and the greatest rises in altitude that we’ve encountered so far on our 3000 mile drive through Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, have all been on bridges crossing the many rivers and lakes we’ve passed by. The coastal areas of the US deep south are beautiful in many ways, but they are no blessed with exciting topography. This quickly changed as we left Austin, as the swamps and beaches of Georgia and Florida, and the river delta of Mississippi and Louisiana make way for the hilly scrub and woodland of the Hill Country.


The scenery changes gradually as you leave Austin, but by the time we had reached our first stop at Pedernales Falls State Park, the hills are gentle but continuous and Jim had probably spent more time out of 6^th gear than in all the miles completed so far. The scenery on the whole is not dramatic in the sense of the Rockies or Appalachians, but is beautiful in the same way that encourages so many Europeans to holiday in Tuscany and Umbria in preference to the Alps and Dolomites. Pedernales Fall are pretty beautiful by any benchmark, and Austinites are blessed to have such a park so close to their city. The waterfalls drop a considerable distance, however they don’t do it in a single dramatic freefall, rather they drop over a series of steps in the tilted layers of hard rock. The falls themselves are the highlight of the park, although there are some decent hikes to be had in the surrounding area.

For $26 we got two days in the park, and an overnight parking spot with water, electric and a waste water dump station, and got to give Boris a proper run around after a few weeks of gentle city walks. The sun came out long enough for us to enjoy dining al fresco after a period of unusually cold weather for this part of Texas.

From Pedernales we continued west to Fredericksburg, a historic town worth a visit for anyone travelling through Texas. It has a large war museum, but for those not terribly interested in the glorification of organised killing, there remains plenty to do. The town has a German heritage, and for a state that is so unwaveringly patriotic, I was surprised at how much the town embraces its Germanic past. There are wineries producing Rieslings and Gewürztraminers, microbreweries making Pilsners and Weis beers, and restaurants selling wiener schnitzels and sauerkraut. We spent a great night in Hondo’s listening to swing and country played by Harry and the Hightones, and drinking a local bourbon. The next morning we made an early start for the Enchanted Rock State Park, a park surrounding a huge lump of granite rising out of the countryside, joined by two smaller siblings.

We visited on a sunny Saturday, and the park’s proximity to Austin and San Antonio meant that by lunchtime the park was at capacity. The car park was full, the adjacent campsites were full, and the short amble from the car parks to the top of the rock had a solid stream of people; however all of the trails longer than a half a mile, and all of the campsites which required a walk from the car park were almost entirely empty. We walked up the biggest of the batholiths at about 8.30am and ate breakfast in complete solitude at the top, if we’d done it a few hours later we would have undoubtedly shared the vista with a throng of wheezing visitors. We spent the rest of the day walking the various trails around and between the rocks, and using the offices’ excellent Wi-Fi connection.

 

We left the park in the afternoon and spent the next 18 miles educating some other visitors to the park on the differences in power and speed between an 18 tonne European truck and the light domestic vehicles they were driving; the lesson became quite frustrating for some as we dropped down to 25mph on some of the bigger hills.

At Fredericksburg we took the 16 south west; the hills slowly fade out, giving way to flatter, fertile farmland in the floodplain on the Guadalupe river. Despite its picturesque location on the banks of the Guadalupe, Kerrville is not a picturesque town, and its historic centre is lost in the sprawl of superstores and strip malls leading away from it in all directions. Thankfully we were not in town for sightseeing, the Sunday was the Superbowl and we were in town to learn something about American football in a traditional sports bar. We struck gold with the eight ball bar on Junction Highway, Sunday is happy hour all day ($1.50 pints!), the draft beer was great (Brooklyn lager, Shiner Bock, Blue Moon, etc), free pizza was available all evening, and we met a friendly local car salesman who insisted on buying us a whiskey. We drank  five pints and two whiskeys, ate half a pizza, played pool for a couple of hours, and met some great locals, spending only $14, if only all nights out were that cheap.

Our winning streak ended as we went to leave Kerrville, we were looking forward to the most dramatic part of the drive we’d planned through the Hill Country when the parking brake problem which had started in Florida, reared its head again.

From Nawlins to Austin

Not knowing New Orleans, we booked a few nights in a KOA campground about 12 miles out of the centre. The site provides a free shuttle bus into town and is just across the road from the Mississippi levee and the cycle path along it that runs from the centre of the city many miles out into the Louisiana countryside. The site is not far from the portion of the levee where the final scene of Easy Rider is shot, thankfully the locals have changed somewhat. As it turned out we needn’t have bothered with a paid-for site in New Orleans. A lot of people told us that the city can be dangerous, and that we shouldn’t stray far from the French Quarter, but our experience was the opposite.

We spent a few days walking as far as we could be bothered in most directions from the French Quarter, and found nothing but interesting neighbourhoods, great food, great art, and fantastic music. At no point did we feel threatened, and all neighbourhoods, rich and poor, felt welcoming. After our reservation at the KOA site was over, we moved to the east side of the Lower Garden District on Camp Street. Where we parked, we had a park on our doorstep, were a pleasant 2.5 mile walk to the French Quarter, had a choice of free wifi, and were in an area interesting in its own right for the antiques shops, cafes, and restaurants. It’s not always as easy as this to free park in a sizable city, but I’d recommend that anyone travelling as we are, drive around the garden district a little before paying $40 a night to park a $30 taxi fare from the town centre.

New Orleans is an easy city to enjoy; the central areas (The Warehouse District, The French Quarter, and Maringny) are all walking distance from each other, and all retain enough of their historic buildings to make them interesting and different. The French Quarter looks very much as it has since being rebuilt after a fire by the Spanish colonialists in the 19th century. The buildings are a mixture of grand brick two and three storey unit’s with ornate iron railings, balconies and verandas, and classic timber shotgun shacks, in various states of decoration.

We saw some great Art in New Orleans (in the Contemporary Art Centre, and in the small galleries on Royal Street), and ate some good food, but as you would expect, what make the city fantastic is the music. It is difficult to understand how much live music characterizes the city until you visit. There are wide areas, where every bar and restaurant has a live band, but what really surprised me was the awesome quality of the music, and the huge variation in musical styles. I had expected to hear (and did) washboard jazz, trad jazz, and swing, but hadn’t expected to hear bluegrass, rock’n’roll, thrash metal and even karaoke. The city lives and breathes music and makes me feel ashamed of London, where live music requires a license, venues invariably charge patrons for the experience, and musicians find it impossible to make a decent living from their skill. It’s impossible to spend an evening in New Orleans and not hear good music, but my recommendations would be for The Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street, for the traditional local jazz which takes precedence over everything else in the bar, and also for Siberia on St Claude, for the great Russian/American food (Kapusta in a burger!), and the massively varied music programme (we saw a good hardcore band).

Farewell Florida

It takes some dedication to drive more than 100 miles onto a narrow chain of islands, with nowhere to go once you get to the end but back the way you came. Whilst we were driving down Route 1 watching the milemarkers count down, there were several occasions on the way where I kept thinking ‘why don’t we stop here? One tropical island is like any other?’, but thankfully we persevered and got to Key West. The beaches are nice, the bars and restaurants are great, there are a few nice parks, and some interesting museums, but what makes it really great are the people that live there.

We are always prepared for a knock on the door and a polite ‘f*ck off’ when we park somewhere that we probably shouldn’t; and so it started on Key West. Having been asked for $100 a night for a spot in an RV park, we spent an afternoon wandering some quiet residential streets looking for free places to park near the town centre. We found a shady spot outside a municipal building on a narrow residential street and settled down, waiting for the knock on the door. After the second night, nobody had complained but on our third day we came back to a note on the door. Almost anywhere in England, the note would have variously made threats of violence or police action, but in Key West, the note was an invite to wine at a house a few doors down. I’m sure Jack and Sydney, who invited us over, felt that the gesture was normal, but to a couple of Londoners, it was a first. I’m not sure if either are reading this blog, but a heartfelt thanks from Naomi and me for making us feel so welcome in your awesome house!

As it turns out though, this hospitality is not limited to Key West, since arriving in the states, we've had beers bought for us at a bar in the Keys, we've been taken out for dinner (thanks to William and Mary in Sanibel!), we've been given a lift home at the end of a night out (Thanks to Nick and his Yolo trike in Captiva Island!), and have had several offers of a place to stay all over the US. America is a great place in many ways, but this is one aspect I'd not anticipated when I arrived a month ago.

Sadly after nearly a week of living on cocktails and ice cream it was time for us face the music and leave the Florida Keys. We stopped overnight near to Sombrero Beach on Marathon Island, before heading for the everglades along the Tamiami trail; we parked in the Midway Campground in the middle of Big Cyprus Swamp. The everglades is a great place to visit, but for the love of god, if you are sleeping in a truck, either have fly-screens on the windows or a working air-conditioner. Not having made a cable to adapt our new 30a American mains cable to the 32a ceeform type incoming socket on Jim, we had no means to run our air conditioner, and not being sensibly prepared in many ways, we also have no flyscreens on the windows. Not wishing to die of dehydration, we were forced to open the skylights overnight; we were still hot, but had the added discomfort of being bitten to pieces by a plague of mosquitos. I have now made up a cable to get 120v (via a 30a socket) or 240v (via a 50a socket) into the truck, and I hope that we won’t spend another night fattening up the local mosquito population.

America has done a great job of eradicating most animals at the top of the food chain during the last two hundred years, but there are still a few great predators left in the vast wildernesses. People spend a lifetime hiking in the wildernesses without seeing a bear, a puma or a wolf, but you literally can't spend 30 minutes driving through the everglades without seeing an alligator.

As well as being the home to the first alligator sighting of our trip, the everglades were also home to our first mechanical problem of the trip. With 485,000 km on the clock, I was expecting problems, but was hoping to get a little further than we had.

Track us live

Since my last post, we've driven a fair way north and west, leaving Florida, passing through Alabama and Mississippi and settling in New Orleans. It's a great city and we've had our fair share of fun and drama on the way here, but I'll post more about that in the next day or so.

For anyone interested in tracking out progress, I've added a hyperlink under the title banner that lets you see our current position (provided the Spot tracker is on and has battery) and where we've been over the last week.

In the meantime, here's a photo of Jim getting dirty on the loop road off of the Tamiami Trail running East to West through the Big Cyprus Swamp part of the Everglades.

It's a Tough Old Life

Life is has just been too miserable recently for me to arouse the motivation to write a decent blog post. We are in Key West where it never stops raining, every face wears a frown, and the scenery is too depressing to discuss. I knew from the moment the road left the mainland that this would be an awful place

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOJTf1cMvUE

Without being too harsh to Brunswick, it’s fair to say that we were glad to leave, and that life has improved for us since heading south. Georgia certainly has some great places to visit, but spending so long living next to the interstate left us feeling the need to start moving as soon as possible.

The Eagle has Landed!

After spending a week longer than we would have liked on the I95 intersection in the arse end of Brunswick, we have finally picked Jim up from the docks and are living on the road. Jim arrived intact, with no damage, and sufficient battery power to drive off the ship without assistance. To prove that this whole blog isn't a sham to make me look adventurous, here's a picture of Jim in front of some palm trees.

The whole process of shipping was fairly straightforward but it can be a little daunting for the uninitiated like myself. The following is a little about my experience to help anyone else attempting something similar. It will be fairly boring to anyone not interested in shipping a vehicle overseas, but the process was a fairly steep learning curve for me, and their may be some people who will find the little I learnt useful now, or in the future.

Merry Christmas!

To ease the boredom of being stuck for another few days at an interstate intersection, we hired a car for a couple of days.

Yesterday was spent visiting Savannah, about 70 miles north of Brunswick up the I-95. We only spent the day there but it seems to have more to offer than you can see in a day. It's a grand colonial city that obviously generated a lot of income for the empire in the 18th century. The squares and parks are reminiscent of central London squares like Grosvenor and Russell square, and there is a large area which looks largely as it must have done 200 years ago. The city feels distinctly cosmopolitan compared to the other parts of Georgia that we've seen so far, it's difficult to imagine sushi restaurants and fixie bikes in Brunswick. There's a lot to see, but if all you do in Savannah is go to Leopold's Ice Cream, you won't be disappointed.

Christmas day was spent visiting St Simons Island and Blythe Island Regional Park, mostly walking on the beach and in the sub tropical forest prevalent here. Sadly the temperature has dropped from about 26C last week, to about 10C this week, still warm enough to spend time outside, but certainly not warm enough to be sunbathing on the beach.

I hope everyone else had a great Christmas, with any luck my next blog post will be from the comfort of Jim.