South Dakota Part 1: The Badlands

Our visas expired in October, so we had to leave Canada and come back in through the International Airport.  We decided to go to see Mt Rushmore in South Dakota for the long weekend (as our visas expired on a Thursday).  To our surprise, there were lots of other things to do in South Dakota as well!

Stephen's Opa told us a story about the Wall Drug Store - it's in the middle of nowhere in a tiny town in South Dakota, and it was a failing business until they put up signs on the highways nearby saying "Free Ice Water at the Wall Drug Store".  It saved the business and became a huge thing - apparently it was such a big thing that troops in World War II were putting Wall Drug Store signs up in Europe.  Nowadays it's a massive tourist trap selling all sorts of crap, of course.

The Badlands National Park.  Apparently 69 million years ago the whole of the middle of North America was an ocean - over time, the water left and various rivers and flood plains left deposits of different minerals there.  In the last 500,000 years, erosion has started to wear away at the deposits, and that's how we can see the distinctive layered patterns.

The strangest part is that the whole plain is completely flat - except for these rock formations.  Completely dead flat.

Look out for the Rattlesnakes!  Luckily it was too cold for us to see any.  At the start of October it was 5 degrees C in the middle of the day.

The coolest thing is that the lines from the different layers show up so clearly that it tricks and confuses your eyes.

We went for a couple of km long walk through some of the rocks, including a climb of about 50m up a ladder made of logs.  The funniest part of America is that the society is so litigious... but then you go to a National Park and you can climb 50m up the side of a cliff and wander around on top of the cliff and there are no railings or warning signs or anything.

Stephen found a hole to hang out in.  We have no idea where this hole came from or why it was there.

So we are pretty sure that South Dakota is where the Windows XP desktop wallpaper came from - doesn't that look exactly the same?  It was really disconcerting - I would turn around and jump because I felt like I was inside the computer.

Us in the Badlands!

There were plenty of animals hanging around in the Badlands as well - these are mountain goats.

That tiny little dot in the middle of the plateau is a bison.  I spotted it from that far away!

Here's a bison from a bit closer.  There were warning signs up everywhere that said not to get out of your car because they will charge you.

This is a prairie dog.  There were heaps of them wandering around in prairie dog villages - foraging near their holes.  They weren't scared of the car, but as soon as we opened the door and got out, they ran away.

There are 5 parts to this series - this is part 1.  Here's part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.

Ottawa

We travelled to Ottawa for a weekend to run the Army Run Half Marathon there.  Stephen clocked his fastest timed run of 87 minutes (for the 21.1km race).  I was struggling with ITBS in my knee and had to walk after the 11km mark, but still made it in under 2:30.

Once again, I don't have great photos - only a few taken with my camera phone.

Ottawa was grey and raining on our first day there - not particularly welcoming.  We went to see the parliament building, which I unfortunately neglected to take a photo of the outside of.

Inside their House of Commons.  They use the same system as Australia and England.  Interestingly, the tour guide told us that the Queen isn't actually allowed into this room at all - she can't go past the entrance door.

Inside the Senate.  That's the Queen and Prince Phillip's chairs up there.

Inside the library.  Apparently at one stage the whole of the Canadian parliament building was finished like this in wood - but there was a huge fire and the whole parliament building burned down except for this room (because someone remembered to shut the huge solid iron safety doors).  The rest of the building is made of stone now.

The Rideau Canal.

Chateau Laurier - it's apparently a hotel.  Love the architecture though.

Stephen with a giant polar bear.

After the run, we needed to refuel with some calories, so we accompanied some local friends to a poutinerie in Gatineau.  Ottawa-Gatineau is a dual town sitting across two provinces (like Albury-Wodonga) - Ottawa on the Ontario side and Gatineau on the Quebec side.  Apparently you can only get good poutine in Quebec.  This was pretty good poutine, although I am pretty sure it was big enough to cause multiple heart attacks.  We manged to finish most of it!

NYC V2

I'm going to be catching up on the last few months of travel of the next couple of days, where I have photos.  Kicking it off is the trip we took to New York City in September, with Stephen's Mum.  The photos are all taken with my camera phone, so please excuse the quality.

We stayed in a very expensive and very run-down hotel called the Paramount which was fairly close to Times Square.  What they don't tell you is that their standard room's bed is this size:

And Stephen is a skinny guy.  It's a single bed that they put 2 pillows on and sell as a room for 2 people.  Go somewhere better - the Paramount Hotel is really dodgy and not worth the money.

We spent some time walking on the High Line, which is an old aboveground railway line that has been converted into a walking path and garden.  You can see some pretty cool things from it, like the "High Line Zoo".

Street art from the High Line.

Patriotic cement mixer.

Lawn on the High Line.   It definitely stands out in the rest of NYC.

The Brooklyn Bridge.   Stephen was obsessed with walking over it.

 Walking along the Brooklyn Bridge.

Stephen's Mum had lost a lot of weight living in Vietnam, so we decided to take her to a Southern BBQ restaurant to help her regain her lost pounds.  The restaurant we chose was a BBQ market place and the portions were not small.  This was a small pack and included 100g of brisket, a pork rib, a beef rib and a quarter chicken, plus two sides of collard greens and bourbon sweet potato mash.  It was delicious (but there was no room for dessert).

We took the long subway trip out to Coney Island to check it out.  It was pretty run-down, but we had a nice walk around.

Apparently we had just missed the annual hot dog eating contest - apparently the male winner ate 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes and the female ate 45.  Ah, America.

We went for burgers at the famous Shake Shack, which were pretty tasty although quite small.  Not quite sure it was worth the 45 minute queue.  

NYC as seen from the Staten Island Ferry on the way back to Manhattan.  The tall building in the left third of the photo is the new One World Trade Center, built to replace the Twin Towers.  It's already the tallest building in NYC at the time of this photo, and it's probably got another 30-40% of its height left to be built after this photo was taken.  

Washington DC - Day 3

We started our 3rd day with a big American breakfast from Ted's Bulletin - a prohibition-themed breakfast place.  They make their own poptarts!

In the absence of any embalmed communist dictators to visit in the USA, we caught the subway over to Arlington in Virginia state to visit Arlington National Cemetary, where JFK is buried.  Close enough!

Graves of JFK and his wife.

For Mum.

The Pentagon building is a subway stop away from Arlington Cemetary, so we decided to visit it too.  It was very strange - there's a subway station right outside the building, and it's clear that pre-September 11, you could just walk up to the building.  Now there is a security checkpoint right at the subway exit.  There were big signs up stating that photography of the Pentagon is prohibited.  One of the things that we could visit and photograph there was the memorial for the people who died in the Pentagon crash on September 11.

Names of the victims, all the way down to the 3 year old girl on the plane with her family.

The memorial with the Pentagon building in the background.  The memorial is made of benches as shown in the photo, and the direction of the bench indicates whether the person died in the building or on the plane.  They're arranged by year of birth again.  It was a sad place.

Washington DC - Day 2

Our second day in Washington DC was running training day, so we spent our morning running 10km while clambering over fallen trees in the 40+ degree temperatures.  We followed this by meeting up with a friend from our WoW guild who lived nearby.

We visited U Street, which is a historic district of DC and used to be home to a huge African-American community.  We mainly just walked around for a bit looking around - followed by a trip to Ben's Chili Bowl, which is a famous landmark there and supposedly a favourite eating place of President Obama.  (There was even a sign on the counter that said "People who eat here for free:  President Obama and Family, Bill Cosby, no one else.")  We had the famous "chili half smoke" hot dogs with some chili cheese fries.  It was pretty tasty :)

In the evening we went to see the White House.  From the front...

... and the back.  I'm more used to seeing this view for some reason.  

We spent the afternoon at the Smithsonian Museum of Air and Space, which was amazing.  This is the Apollo 11 Command Module - the one from the moon landing.

This is the Wright Brothers' Flyer - the first heavier than air powered aircraft.  The original one.  The exhibit for this was actually pretty amazing - it was really interesting to learn about the process that they went through in developing it, and crazy to realize that they waited for a few years after the first flight to demonstrate to people, because they had to wait for their patents to be approved (very American).  

Washington DC - Day 1

The 1st of July is Canada Day - we chose to celebrate the brilliant country that we live in by visiting somewhere else.  Gotta take advantage of those long weekends when you have them!  We spent the 3 days in Washington DC, which is actually my new favourite American city.  

We arrived on Friday night and went out to grab dinner - and when we stood up to leave and looked out of the window, there were trees down outside and it was pouring down.  When I say pouring down, I mean the kind of weather where it looks like someone is literally tipping a bucket from above.  We waited half an hour for it to stop, and eventually gave up and ran back to our hotel, arriving looking like we'd gone for a swim.  It turns out that the weather was more serious than we knew at the time - the storm killed 22 people and took out power to 3.7 million.  Apparently the type of storm is called a derecho.  The aftereffects that we saw were mostly downed trees - including a bunch of huge ones that we had to clamber over while running on Sunday morning.  It was pretty crazy.

On Saturday morning we headed out to take in the sights, and there was no sign of the storm - blue skies.  The weather was brutal in a different way, however - it was 41 degrees in the shade for most of the time we were there, and there wasn't a whole lot of shade around.  It felt like we were walking around in an oven at times, and I got very sunburned despite copious amounts of sunblock.  That said, the city was beautiful.

We spent the first day walking around the National Mall area, which is the place that you see mostly on TV when they have big rallies in DC.  It contains many of the famous memorials and monuments and is about 3km from one end to the other, with a wider path around the river that houses some of the others.

The Capitol Building.  The architecture in the entire city was just amazing.  Beautiful buildings everywhere.

The Washington Monument, complete with American flag.  If you look halfway up just above the flag, you can see some cracks in the side of it - they're from the 5.8 earthquake in Virginia in 2011 that we felt in Toronto.  Apparently you can normally go up the monument, but those cracks have put an end to that for a while.

Washington is a designed city much like Canberra (only much better), and you can tell.  For example - the Washington Monument is in the middle of the National Mall, and each direction shows one of the city's important building.  This photo is looking west from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.  The view from the east is to the Capitol Building.  To the north, you can see the White House, and to the south you can see the Jefferson Memorial across the water.

The National Mall is also home to war memorials.  The WWII memorial is fairly new.  This wall is called the Freedom Wall (very American), and has 4,048 stars on it - each star represents 100 Americans killed or missing in WWII.

The rest of the WWII memorial.

The Vietnam War memorial is a reflective list of the names of soldiers.  There were a lot of names.

The Lincoln Memorial from the outside.  They really know how to make impressive memorials in America.

The Lincoln Memorial from the inside.  Lincoln was smaller than I thought he'd be.

Looking back down the mall from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial - that's the Washington Monument, and then the Capitol Building at the far end.

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is an engraving showing where Martin Luther King Jr stood to give his famous "I Have A Dream" speech.

The Martin Luther King Jr memorial was only opened a year ago.  Apparently he's the first African-American to have a memorial in the National Mall area.  I really like the design of the memorial - the engraving on the side of the rock containing him says "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope."  One of the really interesting things about visiting Washington DC for me was learning more about slavery, the American Civil War and segregation - it isn't something we ever really learned about in Australia as there was never slavery there (and I grew up in a very very white city).  I still have trouble understanding the concept and how people could ever think that one person was inherently lesser than another.  We didn't get a chance to go out and see the battlefields from the Civil War, so I hope to go and see those another time.

 The Franklin Roosevelt Memorial.

The design of his wheelchair, which he apparently made himself.

I find it really interesting that he is nowadays always shown in a wheelchair, but apparently at the time, it was a great secret, and he was very rarely photographed in a wheelchair or depicted as being anything except normally mobile.  I wonder if a Presidential candidate being in a wheelchair would be a problem today.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the first American delegate to the UN.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial - excerpts from the Declaration of Independence of which he was the principal author are written on the wall behind him.

More to come on Day 2 and Day 3.