And... did you move around?

First things first: my great ambition of being diligent and writing something here every on a regular basis isn’t quite working. I think it’s going to have to be random, because sometimes, there are too many things going on. So bear with me.

Anyway, I have been away for 3 weeks now, and I have moved quite a lot – New York for a week (of rain…), then New Orleans, Louisiana (sunshine and humid and a lot of fun and nice peole), then on to Texas with Houston (also nice people), then Dallas Texas (kinda boring), then the small ish town of McKinney (where my dad stayed when he came in 1962), then Fort Worth (for all things cowboy, more on that another time), and right now I’m in Austin. So I’ve flown local airlines south in busy LaGuardia to start with and have mostly taken long bus journeys, and I’m tentatively going to say that they’ve been quite good so far (touch wood with both hands and keep all limbs crossed for me it continues…). I definitely don’t blend in in any way, shape or form, but I’m OK with that. I have met interesting people (and some “interesting” ones), I have listened to people telling me how far they had travelled - the record so far is someone doing Seattle to Dallas (3 days!) - or how long they had been stranded for (also about 3 days).

But yesterday I thought I’d try the Amtrak train, because there was one and it was actually cheaper than the bus ($20 for 4h… so I thought)! So let me tell you of my experience of travelling between Fort Worth and Austin: well first of all, we were taken in a small touristy type of train (see what I mean?) from the station to the platform so we didn’t have to walk the 250m or something. Very much loved it. Felt like being in an amusement park. Then going in the train, my name got checked again a list – which shows how very few passengers there were considering the size and the width of the train: ENORMOUS. I could stretch my legs entirely, that’s how much legroom I had! And it did lie down quite a lot. The train manager came in and checked and marked the final destination above every seat and checked after every stop (so you don’t overstay your welcome I guess?). It was super quiet initially and I slept super well we moved across the Texan fields and small towns. We were going somewhere, but not particularly fast at times. And then towards the end, very much as for the bus, there is always at least one person who thinks it’s socially acceptable to watch YouTube videos without headphones so everyone else in the carriage can enjoy them too. In Europe I’d probably be the French bossy cow who would tell them to keep it quiet, but here… not so much… go figure! So, I very much zipped it, but… it’s not nice people! And the interesting thing about the train is the “we’ll get there when we get there” attitude! No announcement to explain about the length of the delay we’d end up with, why we ended up 2h late, or even an apology. No. Instead I was made to feel unreasonable for asking what time we would be reaching Austin. The answer? “About 45 min from now… Unless we stop on the way”.

Now I am also getting a little tired of big cities and I need more desert and open spaces, so I have decided to not do the 20h bus journey between Austin and Albuquerque (with little interesting stops in between) but rent a car instead. Wish me luck, it’s going to be a looooot of driving. More soon.

My father as my tour guide

A couple of years ago I found my late father slide archive stored in the basement. Some were taken in the US, some in Africa, some were taken God knows where. Sometimes there was the date the slide was processed, but most often not. There was family, strangers, birds, landscapes... For me, it was diving into someone else’s memories with little to no information, dates, or context. So I started looking, scanning and thinking.

I then learned that, in 1962, aged 20, and with little to no English, my father took the cargo across the Atlantic to Texas for the first time, which is pretty impressive when you think about it (isn’t it?). Of that trip there are lots of photos, a letter, and (unbelievably) even memories of a few people who met him and that I’ve tracked down. Then there were subsequent trips to Texas, the West, the giant Sequoias, the Grand Canyon, California… I can only guess what this must have been like back then. But I’ve decided to make my own trip and go to some of these places, and make my own memories with my father as the tour guide.

I’ll be documenting what it’s like to travel for me now and how I see things now. And if all goes well, I will be posting here every now and then…