The second instalment of my retirement blog about America of yesteryear. I thought I‘d do a coast to coast re-visitation this time with a little bit in the middle. Perversely the first photo, the one above of our daughter in Kansas, is the last reference in this retirement blog.
Of course coast to coast, inevitably for us, that means starting in New York. Our first exchange was supposed to be to Port Washington just outside New York but having geared up for New York, New York, that didn’t happen. So next year it was Rockville, just outside Washington DC. It would have been a very different exchange in a number of ways had the first one gone ahead.
As we didn’t make New York the first time, it was high on our list of places to visit when we did make it. Very hard to choose a ‘best of’ from the times we did visit the place over the years. I could have included the first sight of the Empire State building coming in on the train from Long Island. I could go even further back to our first trip up the legendary New Jersey Turnpike (Paul Simon, counting the cars on … ) and a brief touch of the city driving past (I think) the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge on our way out to Long Island.
I’ve gone for something a little more idiosyncratic. Starting with the Circle Line tour of Manhattan. The best view of New York being from the water. Not my photo unfortunately they seem to be lost in the mists of our terrible organisation system but easy to get a view from the internet. That’s it above. Of course if you want a great view of the sky line for free there’s always the Bronx ferry.
And then for really idiosyncratic the next stop is John’s pizza in Greenwich Village. As recommended by our coach driver on another one of our tours. This was on Bleecker Street and for those of us of a certain age, this area and this street, have a special resonance. The pizza place did not disappoint. It was a somewhat shabby interior covered in graffiti, don’t know whether it still is and the pizza itself was divine, as they say. It was one of those we really are here kind of moments. We’re eating just like a local. And here we are eating that very pizza.
A quick road trip and we’re in San Francisco. Actually our first, and so far only, road trip at the end of our exchange year was anything but quick. It was about 7,000 miles in total (across, up, back to this up part in a moment, and back again) and took about 6 weeks if I remember correctly. San Fran was another of those places that had long lingered in my dreams. The music, Haight Ashbury, hippies scene just added to it, but for me it had started back in the Jack Kerouac days. Then there was Bullitt of course (see below for our streets)
Out of many SF choices I’m going for Sausalito, not in the city at all. You take the ferry from the city and head towards Alcatraz. Our daughter got locked in the toilet there as the last ferry boat of the day was waiting to leave. Irony or what? When you get to Sausalito, you get off the boat and turn left along the dock for one of our favourite restaurants in the world, name of The Trident (see below). Crab cakes and Chardonnay and a view across the water of SF. Perfect. And that’s not even to mention the boats and houseboats. For a long time I tried to work out how we could live here. Never made it of course. Not even an ambition now but the memory lingers on.
And while we’re on the West Coast, it wouldn’t be a road trip if we didn’t mention Highway 1. We drove up it from Los Angeles (which I have never cared for) and it was every bit as legendary as we had imagined. I’m just putting one picture (not mine) of the road at Big Sur. The very name is magic. We stayed the night half way between LA and SF in San Simeon. We were camping.
I say I don’t care for LA and this is true, but of course there are exceptions. Staying with Marie and Hal in Palos Verdes was one. We met them in the Rocky Mountains National Park on a campsite on the drive over . Lovely people, they invited us to stay with them when we got to LA. Big mistake. Never invite us to stay unless you really mean it. We were poor, tired of camping and so we turned up. They had a hot tub, unusual even in America in 1979. We sat in it overlooking the ocean and the retired Queen Mary liner, permanently moored there at Long Beach. We had another one of those ‘this is it, this is America’ moments.
I can’t describe our road trip (the essence of iconic America) without referring again to another – the Pontiac, Firebird Transam. Our British friends who lived near us on the same exchange bought a VW Beetle. As I said to the salesman who sold me the Transam, I haven’t come all this way to buy a European car much as I might have wanted a Beetle at home. I wanted a proper American car. It was a toss up between a Mustang or the Transam. I would have liked a Corvette but that really was impractical for the three of us and a lot more expensive. So Transam it was.
Even Americans used to joke about my choice. Yep, Peter, it will pass anything on the road except a gas station. With a 400 cubic inch engine block it’s petrol (gas) consumption was a bit eye-watering, about 12 to the gallon. As this was the year of the ‘gas crisis’ not a smart choice. Unlike the Beetle, but the silver lining was nobody in America drove anywhere that summer. We had no choice, it was now or probably never for this trip. So the roads and the campsites were nicely empty, and that was a real silver lining.
And just to finish this blog on a slightly less glamorous note. A photo of the Transam below (ours is the one on the left) and then our daughter at the start of this retirement blog, somewhere in Kansas waiting for the Transam to be repaired with a new oil pump of something. Not all magic moments of course.
