Ann Arbor: a musical tour

Tonight is our last night in Ann Arbor, Michigan with our amazing hosts Allie and Mike.

Mike is studying at University Of Michigan so on our first night we headed to the university's Hill Auditorium to see the University Symphony Orchestra. Incredible. And free!

Most of the musicians are in their early 20s. Wowsers. On Saturday night we went a little more leftfield.... and experienced MiND (Music in Neural Dimensions). Yes. Exactly as kooky as it sounds. These people had ECG machines on their heads which read their brain waves and translated them into 'music'. Behold.

Wow. Our MiNDs were a little blown by this hour of meditative brain wave weirdness but as we were walking through the uni buildings to stay out of the wind and get back to the car, we came across a little party in a foyer and they let us eat their cupcakes!

The frosting was like whipped marshmallow. Very yummy and musically themed to boot. This would never have happened at Cardiff Uni... We'd had a late night the night before so we decided to go back to Allie and Mike's apartment and chill out. The car had other ideas when it died at an intersection. Luckily the very very nice AAA man came to our rescue (he was pretty buff too, FYI).

To conclude our musical tour of Ann Arbor, we went downtown on Sunday (today) and hit Encore record store. Oh, and it was National Record Store Day over here yesterday so our visit to Encore was double the fun. I bought Dolly Dolly Dolly for $6.

There ends our musical tour of Ann Arbor. Our food tour was even more epic. But that's another blog post.

Hello Chicago...

And we're done in the Windy City. While Chicago didn't earn that title for its weather (that's right, fact fans), it doesn't mean the wind don't blow in Chicago. It blows and it blows cold. So cold, in fact, that you need to go back to your hotel room for more clothes. Not that you'd guess from these pictures.

Yep, we lucked out with the weather. It was freezing on Tuesday, nose-burningly warm on Wednesday, and freezing again on Thursday, but the sun shone for us most of our stay.

On the Tuesday, after getting breakfast in Whole Foods, we shivered our way up to Oak Street Beach where you can look right across Lake Michigan from Lake Shore Drive. A lake by name but it may as well have been the Atlantic Ocean to my eyes - it goes on for miiiiillles. And, as Chicago resident David Schwimmer told us on our multi-media tour of the John Hancock Observatory, Lake Michigan is larger than the states of Delaware and New Jersey combined (well, he didn't say exactly that but I can't quite remember and this is still true). That's big.

Speaking of the John Hancock building, here's the view. 

Pretty special. And my favourite part of our stay in Chicago (apart from the tacos in Lincoln Park, but I'll get to that in a bit). David Schwimmer's audio tour was great. A little Chicago education via headphones. Plus I hadn't watched Friends in approximately three days, so that made up for it...

We also went to Navy Pier (alas the Ferris Wheel was closed, along with a lot of cafe booths, etc, for the season) and Millennium Park to see Cloud Gate aka 'The Bean'.

On Wednesday, we made use of our sporks (yus!) and had a taste of home with Dorset Cereals, rode the El line and saw the station where While You Were Sleeping was filmed (the pic below is a station or two away from Randolph but whatevs), saw the Buckingham Fountain at Grant Park, walked along the lake shore in the sunshine and ate our body weight in tater tots and battered pickles.

On our last full day, Thursday, old man Gasson and old bird Rice had sore hips from all the walking. So we got a Red Line up to Lincoln Park and strolled the zoo and up to Oz Park, which is named after Lyman Park Baum, the writer of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz and a Chicago resident. Lincoln Park was really nice and chilled, the quiet streets lined with red brick houses and weather-boarded buildings. And it was home to the incredible Taco Joint. Mmmm-hmmm. The tacos were $3! Criminally cheap. Best guacamole I've ever had. If the Mexican food in LA lives up to this then we are onto a winner. (The last picture is a beaut to show just how good that corn was.)

After a quick stop to see Wrigley Field and have a car pull over to tell us, "You do know the Cubs suck? White Sox are down south!!" (first-hand experience of the two Chicago baseball teams' rivalry, awesome), we went to the Art Institute Of Chicago (free from 5-8pm) before having a thin crust pizza at Giordano's - not a patch on Lombardi's in New York, btw.

So that was Chicago. And now to Ann Arbor, Michigan on the Amtrak Wolverine. Choo choo!

Footnote: We're actually in Ann Arbor now. Hi!

We're here! Time for pizza pie....

Greetings from Chicago! We are here. It was a long old journey: left the house in Bristol at 8am and arrived at our hotel at 2am local time. Yawn.... But we didn't hit the sack before getting ourselves some genu-wine Chicago pizza pie. Oh look, Gino's East is right next door to our hotel.

The walls of this place are covered in writing. Check out the board.

The boy was very excited...

And ruddy hungry. So he ordered some garlic bread sticks to start. We thought they'd be like the bread sticks you can buy in Sainsbury's.

WRONG! These babies are least the size of a jumbo weenie from the chippie.

And then came the main event (soundtracked by Bennie & The Jets, awesome). Deep dish cheese and spinach pizza pie. This is a small.

"Phenomenal!" according to a guy outside the place. I'd agree if I'd been able to manage more than about three mouthfuls. It was about 4am UK time at this point...

I'll have another free refill, though.

Gifted

So today was my last day at work for nine weeks. Very strange... in a very good way! The weather was feeling my holiday vibe: the sun had its shiniest hat on, it was a balmy 18 degrees and we left for office at 4pm. Hello, shandy o'clock.

What made the day even nicer was an unexpected gift from my good friend Ed.

Yus! Road Trip USA: Cross-Country Adventures On America's Two-Lane Highways. Most excellent present and a book I've had on my Amazon Wish List for an age but never got around to ordering. So many (full colour!) pages of road trip awesomeness...

So, thanks Edster!

Previous mini(er) American adventures

We've been to the States a few times, both separately and together....

In 2005, I flew solo via Fort Lauderdale, Florida en route to the Bahamas for a week of hippy healing from wild dolphins with Wildquest: one of the best things I've ever done (thanks Hols!). Here's the view from my room at the Sheraton Yankee Trader hotel in Fort Lauderdale.

Excuse the blueness; I had white balance issues. What I should've done was take a picture of the bed which was approximately EIGHT FOOT SQUARE.

Ad was sent to Disney World in Orlando for a week in December 2008 with work to photograph the possibly-last holiday of a brave little girl called Hannah Jones. A place where dreams come true... and all the food comes covered in cheese.

Then we hit New York for four nights in October 2009. Frickin' love that place, rain or shine.

 

Just two weeks to go and it's 'hello again, America'. Alllriiight.

Flag me up

Meet our map.

It's been with me through a couple of house moves, quietly waiting to be un-rolled and admired on the wall. When we last moved in September, the trip was becoming more of a reality (my three-month sabbatical form was inches away from my Editor's signature and Adam was getting ready to give his notice) and we now had wall space big enough to do the map justice.

After a couple of trips to Hobby Craft for some card/foam backing, duct tape and straws later, the map was erected and ready to be flagged. So many flags. Flags in New York, Boston, Niagra Falls (ooh, maybe a couple in Canada); flags in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Allie!), Chicago; one for Nashville, Tennessee (hello Dollywood); flags in Austin and Houston, Texas, and while I'm there why not a flag or two near Dallas; flags all over California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and aaalll the way up to Portland, Oregon.

I love the flags. But turns out each flag represented a vast amount of our savings. Ouch. Bad flags. So as the calculator came out, so did the flags. Out comes Boston, out comes New York, out comes Niagra. Ann Arbor? Chicago? Staying. California: them flags ain't moving. Utah, Nevada, Arizona: no movement there. Tennessee had to give, as did Texas (the country music lover in me cried a little). Portland? Perhaps... but we'll take it out for now; we need another to cram into California. And we're now down from three months to six weeks.

So, with the mean old budget calculated, the flags remained in Chicago, Ann Arbor, California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. Not too shabby. And a six-week holiday is not to be sniffed at. That's one and a half magazine cycles for me, and approximately 256 hours of agency photographing for the boy. That's a lot of holiday.

We love you, flags. Bring it on.

The sporks

This is where it all started.

If you go travelling, or away for any stretch of time, then you're going to need a spork. Right? Apparently, they "bring a bit of civilisation to the wild and a bit of wild to civilsation".

I'm pretty sure I bought them for the latter reason.

Nevertheless, these sporks were the first thing I got for our trip. Before we'd decided that we could actually do this trip (get time off work, afford it... the usual trip-threatening obstacles).

These sporks brought hope to our pipe dream.

Fork and spoon (and a knife - sporkife?). All in one. The trip's on.

Footnote: the packaging says "comes in civilised colours". I think we'll probably look like overgrown babies eating from our orange (mine) and green (his) plastic sporks, but eat from them we will.