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This past weekend I had a “mystery weekend” on my calendar courtesy of Randi, which I figured was probably a trip to somewhere either (a) objectively interesting to visit, or (b) in a new state. On Friday night it turned out we were on our way to Atlanta, which ticks both boxes! What follows is our busy 48 hours in Georgia’s capital. Ignore all the grey skies and raincoats… in comparison to Chicago, it was basically tropical.

Welcome to Atlanta!

Visual metaphor for the rain

So, a couple of things about Atlanta. As its Wikipedia entry notes, the city was burned to the ground during the Civil War, before regrowing to prominence as a well-connected railway hub rather than a classic southern seaport city such as Charleston. Walking around, therefore, it doesn’t feel so different to a typical Midwestern city, aside from the large number of construction signs which begin with the word “pardon”. (“Pardon our progress!”) That said, it was pleasantly and surprisingly walkable, and the city has invested in some dedicated walking/biking routes as well as a rapid transit system. And to Georgia’s credit, Atlanta is the state capital rather than a town in the middle of nowhere as often seems to happen. I suspect, however, that the politics inside the golden-domed Capitol building is quite at odds with the city around it. There are still four large plaques by the entrance, erected by the “Daughters of the Confederacy” in 1920, retelling the capture of the city by the “enemy” Union forces. Travelling in the age of Trump can make you twitchy about such things.

Wouldn’t win any prizes in a Historical Argument & Practice essay, but still

Because fact into doubt won’t go

This was particularly true on the tour of CNN’s global headquarters, which is one of the major tourist attractions in the city. In ordinary times, I wouldn’t exactly be a CNN ‘fan’, but this is 2018 and the world is a strange place, so we went on the tour. At first everything was lighthearted and jovial, our guide cracking a joke at the BBC’s expense in the same way the guide on the BBC Broadcasting House tour will throw shade at CNN. But then a solitary guy in a leather jacket starts asking repeated questions about political bias before launching into an intense monologue about news “propaganda”, while the poor tour guide puts on a neutral listening face and murmurs “fair enough” and I wonder if we’re all about to die. I’m not sure if this guy was expecting to stumble across the top-secret Fake News studio on a public tour, but it was a good microcosm of the era we’re living through.

My “always pleased to see a railway” face

Later I got cocky (and then wet)

Oh, Jimmy…

Atlanta is also home to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, so I was excited to expand my celebrated art series of stupid poses with presidents. Disappointingly, though perhaps in keeping with the humble legacy of the Carter administration, the best I could find was this photo on the wall. (Later I found an actual statue outside the State Capitol, which made up for it.) The most striking thing I learned about Carter was that his Oval Office furniture arrangement was all out of whack, with back-to-back sofas and a desk in the middle of the room. Clearly things were never going to go well with that layout.

The most significant figure from Atlanta, of course, was Martin Luther King. The National Park Service maintain a historic site including a museum, his birth home and the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church where he preached. If you visit you can sit and listen to a recording of one of his sermons, and I like to think it wasn’t a coincidence that they were playing the one where King warns against cynical advertising of cars a week after the very same speech was literally used to sell cars during the Super Bowl.

An actual statue!

Ebenezer Baptist Church

A puffin!

We had planned to see the World of Coca Cola, but there is a limit to how ‘ironically’ you can do such things, so we opted instead to see the cool fish, amazing dolphins and cute puffins at the famous Georgia Aquarium. And while I realise this is an awkward-as-hell transition, it does remind me of the excellent seafood place we ate at on Saturday night too… 😳

Other food highlights this weekend included the obligatory fried chicken with biscuits and gravy [sic] and Mary Mac’s, a giant ‘tea room’ with a home-cooked vibe. I wish we could have stayed longer, because I’m not done with their side plates!

Fish, searching desperately for the plastic they are used to

Choose your own adventure

Atlanta, you were an awesome surprise.

Like Florida, I had Pennsylvania down in my mind as a state left in an untidy state. I had visited the city of Philadelphia before, back when I looked like this…

At the Liberty Bell!

…but another trip was required, so I could make it ‘official’ and take lower-quality pictures of grown-up me with the same underwhelming Liberty Bell like this…

Back at the Liberty Bell!

At the Magic Gardens

…so that is exactly what we did. Together with Mike, Randi’s friend from New York, we enjoyed a whirlwind but quite glorious weekend in Philly. I’d forgotten how much I liked the East Coast! Since we were only there for one night we stayed in a ‘proper’ B&B (the kind with cooked breakfast and free wine in the evenings) as an extra treat, right in the historical centre, which put everything within easy walking distance. We saw the quirky Magic Gardens, took an excellent walking tour, hung out by the harbour, ate lunch at Reading Market, visited Independence Hall (“we don’t really know what the actual layout was, and this isn’t the original furniture, since the British burnt it all”) and were treated to lunch by my something-something-somewhat-removed cousins Roger and Lily Ann. Oh, and before leaving I made sure to eat a proper Philly cheesesteak too. All in the sunshine!

There is a lot of history here, but ‘Franklin walked down this alley’ is pushing it

Our walking tour guide outside (surprisingly cheap) historic homes

Ice cream: easy to obtain, harder to eat

Lunch with Roger and Lily Ann

I turned up too late for my constitutional input to be recognised

The most unexpected experience, however, came in the last few hours of afternoon wine at the B&B. In the living room, a cheerful couple from Georgia introduced themselves, explained that Southerners will always start up conversations with strangers, and told us that they were on a trip to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. Things got a little weird when they started to enthuse unironically about the ‘life-sized’ Noah’s ark in Kentucky, and it soon became clear that we were sitting opposite two bona fide creationists.

“Were you brought up in the church…?” asked the man. You have to understand that he had the sweetest, kindest face you can imagine, sounded a little like Bill Clinton, and we were all having a warm and friendly conversation. So we certainly didn’t want to start fighting with them. Randi parried the church question with her Jewish upbringing (which earned warm smiles and much praise for Israel) while I tried to use “I’m English!” as a euphemism for ‘godless heathen’.

I really wanted to gently introduce the a-word at some point, just so they could go home and tell their own stories about meeting out-and-out atheists at a B&B, but sadly I never quite worked up the courage for fear of derailing the vibe. Instead, when Randi and Mike left to catch their bus to New York, the couple asked permission to say a prayer over them for their safe journey. Later, once Randi and Mike had gone, the three of us tiptoed around the topic of healthcare together, and I saw again how the “some people are cheating the system” feeling can be so overpowering of all other rational consideration.

To be clear, I’m not trying to mock them. They were obviously wonderful people, and while I’m sure we were not that far away from reaching more uncomfortable topics, they actually said nothing ‘offensive’ on the Great Culture War issues you can easily think up. But I did feel sad, because creationism always makes me sad, and despite being sat on a sofa opposite them we might as well have been on different planets. No possible way to get through. As a human being, it’s a terrible thing to not know what you are, what you’re made of, and were you came from. (That’s why the moment Buzz Lightyear discovers he’s a toy is so devastating!) And yes, I know they feel exactly the same way in reverse.

At the Kingston Mines with Rhi

Earlier in the week, back in the secular bubble I inhabit, I had a birthday to celebrate! Randi prepared a carefully curated list of restaurants to eat at, and naturally I picked our nearest Indian place because (a) I’m unimaginative, and (b) Cumin is really and truly delicious. For a few days we also hosted Tash’s friend Rhi on the Chicago stop of her around-the-US trip (by train, obviously). We wanted to make sure Chicago made a good impression, so lined up a blues night at Kingston Mines plus Like It, Love It, You’ve Gotta Have It at Improv Shakespeare. (It was a particularly good production, as two dairy farmers sought revenge on the King for murdering their cows.) Rhi is the kind of sophisticated, thoughtful traveller who has already written her own blog post on the visit so you can judge for yourselves how successful we were on Chicago’s behalf.

I had high hopes for New Mexico, officially the 25th state on my travels around the US, and it did not disappoint. The state boasts a distinctive look, great food and for my money the best state flag… so what’s not to like?

Welcome to New Mexico!

In Santa Fe, the buildings really are all this colour

We ate a lot of food like this

We flew in and out of Albuquerque but spent the majority of time in Santa Fe, which is smaller, more touristy and quite lovely to walk around. Thanks to the Spanish, the city is built around a central plaza and (gasp!) is not just a mindless grid of roads, although – in a sign that the tourism thing might have gone a bit far – approximately 95% of the shops are art galleries. We went on an eccentric walking tour with a guide whose train of thought was a little indirect, but he was very personable and took us to the ‘miraculous staircase’ at the Lotto Chapel. (Basically, the idea is that St. Joseph – yes, that Joseph, of Mary & Joseph – returned to Earth in order to finish off some building work in the 1870s.) And as a bonus, the walk back to our AirBnb was dark enough that we could see a fair number of stars at night.

The central plaza in Santa Fe

Note all of the chiles

Poking my head into a Pueblo home

The best part of our trip was our morning at the Bandelier National Monument, combining some light hiking with a bit of ladder climbing to look at Pueblo homes – between 400 and 900 years old! – carved into the side of the canyon.

Afterwards we drove to Los Alamos, home of the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first nuclear bomb, and visited the World’s Worst Museum about the whole thing. OK, maybe not the very worst, but the introductory video is mind-bogglingly badly pitched. One would have thought it would be possible to celebrate the scientific advancement of nuclear technology, acknowledge the obvious horror and devastation of its use on Japan, and then give different points of view on whether it was, on balance, a necessary evil.

Instead, I’m not even sure it would be obvious to a child that anyone does die when a nuclear bomb is dropped – there’s just a quick cut to US civilians dancing in the streets. To add insult to injury, the narrator bizarrely declares that “all” of the native people cleared off the land to make way for the Manhattan Project were “happy and willing to do so for the war effort”, as if they conducted a survey. I cannot comprehend why you would even bother lying about this. You’re not going to get a 100% approval rating for bringing in cake to work, so why say something so transparently unbelievable? Get a grip, Los Alamos.

At the Bandelier National Monument

Inside the Alcove House after many ladders

The t-shirt was a risk, but it paid off

We returned to Albuquerque from Santa Fe the same way we had came: by train.  That’s right, an actual train slap bang in the middle of the sixth-least densely populated state, with $9 tickets you can buy on your phone, on a railway which has only been operating since 2006. If it can be done here, no one else has any excuse. By our final day we were pretty exhausted, so took a leisurely walk around the Old Town, sat and listened to a fetching rendition of The Winner Takes It All on some wind instruments (no sarcasm, it was pretty good) and sat in a diner watching a muted, subtitled episode of General Hospital. (We were perplexed by this show in so many ways, but most noteworthy is that zero scenes actually took place in or around a hospital of any sort.)

Albuquerque Old Town

The world’s creepiest petrol station

Halfway there! 😉

Last weekend we journeyed to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin with Rudy, Amanda and Melissa – the last of whom I first met in New York two years ago but has studiously avoided me in her subsequent trips to Chicago. No longer! We stayed in a quaint AirBnB, took walks around the lake (though not the full “21 mile perimeter” of which Rudy spoke), swung on swings, played an unwieldy game of giant Uno – shuffling was a challenge – and, most importantly, watched the Eurovision final on Saturday night. Most memorable was Rudy’s description of Portugal as he sung: “he looks, and sounds, like a Pixar animated short”.  Then of course Portugal won, which pleased me in so much as the alternative was Bulgaria, but I still think Moldova were robbed. Again.

Lake Geneva

Celebrating diversity

Rudy, Amanda, Melissa and Randi on a Culver’s stop

Melissa stayed a little longer with us in Chicago afterwards, which was lovely, and then on Wednesday it was Randi’s birthday! Apparently it was terribly gauche of us to eat out and order the same gnocchi with gorgonzola… but we enjoyed it 😀

Toronto! Also, Starfleet Academy!

In the second instalment of my unadvertised ‘visit all of the Canadian provinces and territories’ challenge (note: not actually a thing) I just spent a long weekend with my parents and Randi in Toronto. Canada’s largest city is a self-evidently wonderful place with friendly vibes, a self-confident multiculturalism and lots to see and do.

The only drawback, as everyone there will tell you, is that the weather alternates between hellishly cold winters and stiflingly hot summers… so much so that a chunk of the city is hidden underground within a network of pedestrian tunnels. We obviously hit a sweet spot for weather, however, with snow on Friday complementing our Niagara Falls tour without it getting too freezing, and then increasing sunshine as the weekend progressed!

At the Niagara Falls!

In front of the American (i.e. less exciting) falls

Most people I spoke to were pretty down on Niagara Falls beforehand, so we were pleasantly surprised by our day tour. (Incidentally, Trump really has put rocket boosters on the standard tour guide repertoire of jokes about America: we got to a contrived but accurate slam on the US healthcare system within about 10 minutes of the bus setting off.)

Alongside seeing the Falls themselves, which were smaller than I’d imagined but very cool to get up near in a boat, we also got to sample Canadian ‘ice wine’ which is super sweet, like drinking a tasty dessert. Randi and I drank more later on at the top of the CN Tower, the ‘tallest free-standing structure in the Western Hemisphere’ (as a careful lawyer might write) which really shows off what a metropolis the city is – not just a cluster of skyscrapers in the centre, but spreading far and wide with many different clusters of development.

We didn’t push the boat out in our giant heart photos

Within the Distillery District

Dim Sum in Chinatown

At the top of the CN Tower

We also enjoyed a great dim sum lunch in Chinatown, drank beer in the famous Distillery District, went on a great walking tour (during which the guide claimed that Doctor Who was doing location filming in Toronto that day – sadly we could not verify this by spotting Capaldi anywhere) and had a unique guide to St. Lawrence Market with a thick French accent and a relaxed attitude to trespassing. (This person may or may not have been my mother.)

Finally, a shout out to Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. Imagine an airport which is within walking distance of the city centre – like a train station – with no queues, tiny planes which are quick to board and (best of all) free refreshments in the waiting lounge! If you visit Toronto, such things can be mere imagination no longer. Magical.

The world’s best airport

Two quick pre-Toronto things to squeeze into this post. Firstly, we had a lovely night with Grace and her mother (both visiting from Wyoming) plus other friends in their fancy AirBnb. Grace’s mother is as cool as I would have expected Grace’s mother to me. Secondly, at Toggolyn’s we followed-through on our plan to watch The Godfather Part II together. I’m not sure I take the popular view that the sequel is better than the original, but it was certainly enjoyable to watch. The unanimous consensus is that Part III is not worth it.