Grounded

Every now and then I just have to make a trip back home to the UK for a reality check.  I need to come back down to earth.

The trouble with living in LA is that after a while the surreal becomes the real.  I see a poodle in a pet stroller and rather than thinking that's so ridiculous I now tell myself that’s such a good idea, it is a bit of a long walk from the parking lot to the doggie boutique....

That’s not good.

So when the opportunity presents itself to check up on daughter No 1 and catch up with a few old friends I grab it. How refreshing it is to talk to people who sweep up their own leaves and wash their own cars.

I’m very lucky with my friends in the UK, they are happy to meet up at the drop of a hat as I breeze in and out of their lives every six months or so.   It’s a treat to go out for a meal and still be in the restaurant at 11 at night and a positive joy to be able to round up the bill to the nearest big number rather than have to worry that I’ve insulted the waiter by not leaving the correct tip.

Everyone always wants to know what I like best about living in America - well the most obvious and  easy answer is the Californian weather, and having the opportunity to travel of course.  The more difficult question is what don't I like about living in America, to which I normally respond how long have you got?  The traffic is a justifiable dislike, not just the gridlock and total congestion but the twelve lane freeways that are total deathtraps.  I can also have a good moan about the constant bombardment of commercialism and the crassness of American TV, where every programme appears to be aimed at an audience with a brain the size of a pea. 

What is more difficult is trying to explain my own personal incompatibility with all things American without sounding like an ungrateful misery, but as a logical and intelligent woman it is becoming increasingly hard to reconcile myself to living in a society that is so devoid of common sense.

Just this week US Congress announced that a slice of pizza can be officially classed as a vegetable because it contains more than two tablespoonfuls of tomato paste.  As such, of course, it can now safely remain on school dinner menus and presumably be considered as one of our five a day. Apart from the fact that I always thought a tomato was a fruit, if this isn’t a case of protecting the interests of the food production industry at the expense  the nation's health I don’t know what is.  And Americans wonder why the rest of the world thinks they're all stupid.

Of course the other issue which always intrigues my friends back in the UK is what exactly do I do all day and this is a question I constantly ask myself too.  How they envy my lazy luxurious lifestyle of relaxing by the pool, the coffee mornings, those long lunches and pottering around a rose garden once a week.  And yet how I envy them with their busy active lives, juggling jobs, running homes and organising their kids. Yes that too used to be me. 

Now I’m just this desperate housewife whose intellectual highlight of the week is penning a rather sarky blog. 

So to all my friends and family back home I’d just like to say thank you so much the welcome dose of humour, the regular supply of sanity pills, and for keeping my feet quite firmly on the ground.

Thank you too for reminding me how lucky am I to have the opportunity to experience life on another planet.  Beam me back up Scottie - I've got some of those new-fangled vegetable seeds to sow.  Does anyone know how long a pizza plant takes to grow?

A Good Read

Alongside the compulsory gifts of tea-bags, Cadbury’s dairy milk and packets of paracetamol, the one thing I always ask people to bring me when they visit from the UK is a generous supply of British magazines.  

 I’ve given up on glossy US mags.  If I have to spend $5 or $6 on a big read then I actually want something to read – rather than a catalogue of adverts.

I had a wry smile at the letters page in a recent copy of Sainsbury’s magazine which had fallen into my hands. A reader had complained that she disliked the layout of the magazine because there were too many advertising features.  Sainsbury’s Magazine is a monthly publication by a supermarket chain – of course it’s going to carry adverts – it’s sole aim is to promote its own products, but at least it doesn’t disguise itself as a journalistic enterprise.

This reader needs to try picking her way through a US magazine – it really is a case of spot the genuine article.

US mags fall into roughly the same categories as back in the UK; there’s the pure work of fiction – the gossip and chat mags (I can’t wait for the arrival of Kate Middleton’s twins); then there are the glossy fashion mags – the last one of these I bought had 36 pages of adverts before I’d even reached the Contents list; and then there are of course the magazines aimed at the more mature woman like me,  which are sadly little more than a promotional vehicle for that all American favourite of mine, the pharmaceutical industry.  

Do I have inexplicable aches and pains? Well yes occasionally something gives an uncomfortable twinge.   
Do I struggle to fall asleep at night?  Not usually - a couple of glasses of wine seems to do the trick. 
Am I suffering from depression? Not until I picked up the magazine….

And so it goes on - pages and pages of the stuff.  I've long suspected that the pharmaceutical industry actually runs America and flicking through one of these magazines just confirms my theory. It's no wonder a lot of Americans you meet are walking medical dictionaries - they are bombarded from dawn until dusk with subliminal messages reinforcing a perceived need for vitamin supplements, anti-aging and cosmetic procedures, as well as all manner of wonder drugs and cure-alls.  It's enough a make even the most fittest and healthiest amongst us to feel totally inadequate and decidedly peaky!

It’s not that American magazines don't carry genuine features and articles - they do, you just have to hunt them out. Cover stories and interviews never begin until at least half way through the magazine, and although there's always an eye catching headline and a glamorous photo shoot, when you turn the page to continue reading you discover the bulk of the story is actually 97 pages of  glossy ads away, right at the very back of the magazine.

Sadly US magazines have succumbed to the same format as US TV – a few lightweight snippets of information that interrupt a great deal of commercial activity.  Give me a nice cup of tea and a copy of Woman’s Own any day of the week. 

Pins and Needles

The best or worst part, depending upon how you look at it, about any road trip is having the opportunity to experience small town America.

For our final overnight stop on the way back from the Grand Canyon I had stuck a pin in the map and found Needles – a border town on the Colorado River.

According to my guidebook, just a few miles from Needles was Arizona’s second most popular tourist attraction after the Grand Canyon - London Bridge.   

Situated in Lake Havasu City, the bridge was bought at vast expense from the city of London and rebuilt, brick by brick, complete with a mock English Village in 1971. Despite popular belief that this bridge was purchased in mistake for Tower Bridge, the town’s publicity machine  is pretty quick to point out that the local entrepreneur who came up with the idea knew exactly what he was doing.   Whilst the bridge is impressive, complete with its gilded gates and tiny fountain, it says a lot for the rest of Arizona that this is it’s second most visited spot. The English Village appeared, like much else in Arizona, to have been abandoned, the pub had closed down and the door was hanging off the red telephone box.

After a brief stop, we continued on to Needles. It was easy enough to find our hotel – it was straight off the freeway exit – in fact it had a view of the freeway despite the words “….on the river…” appearing in its title.

“Let’s hope we’ve got a room around the back” – my husband said wistfully.  We did – twenty yards from the railroad track.

So, how could we spend our evening  in Needles? Did Reception have a map? This obviously wasn’t something they were regularly asked for.  The receptionist hunted around in a drawer and produced a photocopy that was practically illegible. We consulted the hotel room guide in the hope of finding a recommendation for a place to eat – yes, the diner next door, also surprisingly called something on the river, was number one on the list closely followed by Carls Jnr, McDonalds and a Burger King.

We’re used to sleeping next to the busy 210 freeway in Pasadena, so a night next to the comparative quiet of the Interstate 40 would have probably been bliss.  Instead we spent the night next to the main trans-America freight line; mile long trains stacked two containers high, clunking and trundling by all night. Not that it bothered my husband too much; he’s deaf in one ear and when he sleeps with his good ear to the pillow he hears nothing – it’s a trick he mastered when the kids were small.

Awoken bright and early by the 5.00 am cement train to Pheonix, I was desperate to find some redeeming feature about Needles; where was the river? Was there anything else to actually do here apart from eat fast food and attempt to get some sleep?  I wanted to stay and find out but I could sense a mutiny on my hands.  We left straight after breakfast.

We drove to our final stop-off at the Joshua Tree National Park along parts of the original Route 66.  Since the building of the interstate freeway, whole communities along the route have closed down – every few miles there are abandoned motels, diners and broken down homes.  Along one 40 mile stretch of road we only encountered five other cars.  The route isn’t scenic; it’s depressing.

It was with a great sense of relief that we made it safely back to Pasadena.  We’ve promised the teenager she’ll never have to take another road trip with us again and the maps, and the pins, have been firmly locked away out of my reach.

Not Another Dam Road Trip

Despite promising myself not to turn this into a travel-blog, sometimes when we go somewhere, I think oh I’ve just got to share this…..

The teenager had a Monday off school which meant we had an extra long weekend.  What better way to spend it than a road trip.  I got out my map; did a route planner, and worked out that if we left Pasadena straight from school on the Friday afternoon, stopped over night to visit the Hoover Dam, then drove on again the next day we would be at the Grand Canyon for Saturday sunset.

We could then meander back at our leisure and even find time to drive back through the Joshua Tree National Park.  This would then cross off all our remaining  “must-see’s” in one go. 

Our trip started well. We hit the Friday afternoon traffic  but once beyond the LA commuter belt – which stretches for about 30-40 miles east – the road cleared.  Spoilt by the luxury of 5 star Marriot Rewards the teenager was slightly horrified to learn that we would be spending our first night at the comparatively small 1930’s Boulder Dam Hotel in Boulder City.  Built to cater for visiting government officials and dignitaries during the construction of the Dam, the hotel had been lovingly preserved with its original 1930’s name, furniture and at first glance, what looked like the original 1930's staff  until we realised  a few creepy period dressed mannequins had just been strategically placed around the corridors.  

We rose at the crack of dawn and set off for the Dam.  Impressive? Just a tad.  We purchased our tickets for the whole Dam Tour and yes, in an hour’s walkabout you’d been amazed at how many times the guide, and all the visitors, could fit the word dam into a sentence. It was dam good fun.

After following our dam guide up and down the tunnels that run inside the dam and taking a tour of the power plant (which was actually a lot more interesting than it sounds) we then made our way up to the heady heights of the new Colorado River Bridge which gave spectacular views of the whole Dam landscape (it’s actually very hard not to use the word dam when you think about it).

Then we set off for the Grand Canyon.

It’s 240 miles from the Hoover Dam to the Grand Canyon National Park and that’s basically 240 miles of straight road with little sign of civilization. We drove through desserts, over plains and across plateaus.  We drove through Indian reservation country - shanty towns of trailer homes on barren, isolated pockets of land with just a few cactus for company.

As for the Grand Canyon itself, well of course that lived up to all its expectations. The most obvious word to describe it would be “awesome” but awesome is a word that get’s a bit  of over mis-use out here.  I tell someone we’re British, that’s awesome, we regularly visit restaurants where the staff describe  the house special as totally awesome - in fact the hostess at one eatery we visited recently in Pasadena told us her onion rings were so awesome they were going to change our life! (Tasty yes, life changing no!)

A red rock canyon millions of years old, 10 miles wide, one mile deep and 270 miles long, as spectacular as an onion ring?  Probably just slightly more so.  Absolutely  breathtaking.  And ticked off the list too.