Heading South

I left Celia and Joyce with a feeling of wonder and sadness because they are also heading off on a journey where the destination is not yet clear.  I want to be with them on their journey and I know they have many friends around them who are also wishing them well.

Joyce drove me over to Crewe to catch the train to Gloucester.  The first part of the trip to Birmingham was fine although I was a bit disturbed at the cost.  But the connecting train from Birmingham was cancelled and I had to wait for the Gloucester/Cardiff line to be cleared of a broken down goods train.  The station at Birmingham was chaotic.  I asked a railwayman on the platform about the train to Cardiff and he said "It's cancelled."  

I asked "What does that mean?".

He dismissed me with "Cancelled"

I went up the escalator and found a queue at an information desk.  I had already spotted that the toilets required coins to get through the turnstiles.  When I finally made it to the head of the queue and made my enquiry, the woman on the desk said "You have to go round to customer services."  I tried to stand my ground and she tried to make a phone call but no-one at the other end was picking up so I went out of the platform area and around the corner to a place called customer reception which turned out to be the same as customer services.  The desk people here were obviously trained to calm other people down and I discovered there was a break-down on the line, there was a lack of information about when it would be cleared and they would make an announcement.  They allowed me to use their phone to contact my brother, Dave, who was sitting at home drinking cups of tea before coming to pick me up in Gloucester.

By this time I was hungry, so I ate my apple in the station hallway and then looked around for somewhere to put my core.  Nothing.  "Sorry" said the railwayman, "we don't have them anymore for security reasons."  He shrugged when I mumbled "So what do I do with this?"  I put the core in my backpack and decided that I could not put off a pee any longer and there would be bound to be bins in the bathroom.  It cost 30 pence to get in and there were no bins.  

So I went for lunch - I could leave my apple core on my plate!  I found quite a good toasted sandwich and latte in a place where I could sit down.  I half listened to the announcements but heard no mention of Gloucester or Cardiff so when I came out it was a shock to find the 1330 to Cardiff was on time and it was now 1332.  (I've just been called for dinner so will publish and finish with photo later)  (I'm back)  I raced down to the platform and my train had just left.

This time, however, the railwayman was quite pleasant and suggested that I "get on this one and change at Cheltenham."  His face didn't change expression as he added "There, that put the smile back on your face."  So I got on the train to Plymouth.  

Coming out of Birmingham, the train ran along a canal and I suddenly caught a glimpse of the clock tower of Birmingham University.  That is the campus where I did my first degree and where I played hockey in the University firsts with Celia playing in goal.  I learnt to play bridge on the coach taking us to away matches and three of us from the team shared a flat in Edgbaston where we made stews using bacon bits and mushroom stalks.  At the time, I had not even realised that the campus ran alongside the canal but I gather from my nephew, Joe, that the canal banks have now been gentrified with smart apartments and he now lives in one of them with his girlfriend, Jo.  Joe and Jo are planning to marry in 2009 in Italy.  The world is very different yet the same!

In my next post, I'll say something about life at the old vicarage where my brother, Dave, lives with my niece, Grace and his blended family.

Making elderflower cordial

Celia and I went walking in Lawton woods and picked elderflowers for making cordial.  We made up the brew on Wednesday and I will take a jar down today when I travel by train back down to my brother's place in Churcham.  Here is the recipe:

25 heads elderflowers

3 sliced oranges

2 sliced lemons

3 pints water

Soak for 24 hours

Strain onto:

2 lbs caster sugar

50 grams tartaric or citric acid

Stir and save in glass bottles or jars

Dilute with ice and 3 parts water for a delicious refreshing summer drink!

Yesterday Celia and I went over to Sale in Manchester where Celia's daughter lives with her musician husband Huw and her two small daughters, Chloe and Megan.  It was very challenging but delightful to be the children's carers for the day including taking Chloe to Dinky Dancing at the local leisure centre.  

Am off now to get the train to Gloucester.

Arrochar

I'm writing this is Sandbach in Cheshire, England using the computer of my friends, Celia and Joyce. I can look out of the window at their lovely back garden but I haven't organised access to my photo library yet so I can't post a photo. I'll add one later. Celia and Joyce live in a small cottage right in the centre of the old town of Sandbach with its Celtic cross in the cobbled square. My brother, Dave, dropped me off here yesterday on our drive back down the motorway from our Burden family re-union in Arrochar, Scotland. Dave and Jill and my niece, Grace, all had afternoon tea with Celia in the warm sun at the bottom of the garden. It was achingly English!

Burden family history
Today I want to write something about the family gathering in Arrochar. I'm not quite sure how the Labels function works in a blog but I think I need to start trying that so that it is easier to follow the organisation as I get further into my travels. In one of my previous posts I put up a photo of my great grandparents, Augustus and Minnie, surrounded by their many sons all of whom were in the Royal Navy, and their youngest, their only daughter. My grandfather is the sailor on the left of the photo. James Alexander Burden married Elizabeth Florence Triggs in Portsmouth and they had eleven children. In 1926, when my father was 11 years old the family migrated to Arrochar in Scotland where my grandfather worked as a Navy diver on the torpedo testing range that was built on the NW side of Loch Long opposite the village. The family lived in one of three cottages at The Range as the torpedo testing site was called.

Some of the Burden descendants remain in and around the Arrochar area whilst others are scattered all over the world. The gathering brought together over 100 members of this scattered clan. The Kellys are the family of my aunt Nora and are mostly located in Scotland. Jim Kelly still lives in Arrochar and worked with my own brother, also Jim, who lives on his boat in Ardrossan, to enable the gathering to happen. We gathered in a converted church, the Ben Lomond tea rooms, at Tarbet on Loch Lomond. Tarbet is in easy walking distance from Arrochar and I started my school days at the Tarbet School. I am told my mother walked me over from the basement that we lived in at Greenbank in Arrochar village pushing my younger brother Dave in a stroller. I cried and they sent for my older brother, Jim, who was already established at the school.

The setting
Arrochar is located on a very beautiful sea loch called Loch Long. Looking across the loch from the seaweed strewn beach on the village side, the Cobbler is the dominating feature of the landscape. People rarely use the official name of the mountain, Ben Arthur, but it has always been a popular walking and climbing area. During the industrial depression years of the 1930s when many people were out of work from Clyde shipbuilding and industrial areas of Glasgow, many young men came out to Arrochar and lived on the hillsides, coming into the village every few days for essential supplies. They must have been resourceful men as it is often rainy and cold even in the summer months!

During the war years at the turn of the decade into the 1940s, when several of my uncles and my father were away, my grandfather supplemented the family table with venison shot on the hills and salmon poached from the streams. We always ate well! Several of my aunties also worked in the land army or the munitions factory. Today, there is a community cafe called the Pitstop where there are photos of groups of workers from the war years, including one of a group of children knitting for the troops.

Both my brothers, Jim and Dave, and my sister, Jackie, came to the gathering and we all stayed in the Arrochar hotel or the Loch Long hotel. Jim had one of his sons, Joe, and his girlfriend, Jo, join us but Jim's oldest son, Jimmy, couldn't make it over from Hong Kong where he now lives. Jackie was joined by her daughter, Sholeh, with two of her friends, Aaron, an Australian currently teaching in a London school, and Hootan, a Californian whose background is middle Eastern. I felt warmly supported by the diversity of our extended family.

The Arrochar hotel is large and very white with a stunning view to the Cobbler. We were very comfortable there together with some of the New Zealand Spencers, family of my aunt Doll (Kitty) who is in her 90s and not keen to make the long trip over from the South Island of NZ. My cousins, Linda and John Lionel, were travelling with John's son Peter from NZ, his girlfriend from Scandinavia and John's stepson, Stee, from California.

The gathering
At the gathering, people had brought along collections of photos, some in large albums, others on laptops. The daughters of my uncle Tom, who are still in Scotland, brought my grandfather's old diving knife and his naval certificates and documents. As we gathered for brunch, the chaos was wonderful as people who had not seen each other for years or who only knew each other from photos, spotted resemblances and greeted one another. It was very crowded in the old church. My niece, Grace, quickly indentified someone her own height in the milling throng and they hung out together for the rest of the day. Benny was the grandson of Karen, one of the twins of my aunt Nora. They each drew a picture on adjacent pages in the journal that went around during the day inviting everyone to write a page about their relationship to the family and how they felt about the gathering. It is now my role to transcribe all the entries and email the story to those people who have an address. We still have to decide where the original journal will be kept in Arrochar. It was Geraldine, friend of my older brother, Jim who had the idea for the journal and had caught the bus to Helensburgh on the morning of the gathering to find a suitable book.

After brunch, we all circulated and chatted. My uncle Blackie, who is 92, settled by the television to watch Royal Ascot. He had a bet on a horse that was running at 50 to 1, and gradually the tip filtered through to others of us and we put small each way bets on as the odds came down to 37 to 1. The chatter began to centre in the corner where the television gave glimpses of the horses as they were being pushed into the starting boxes. I had a bet on through my cousin Peggy, who is my contemporary, lives in California and is one of the daughters of uncle Blackie. There was an excited buzz as the race started and then everyone started shouting at once. Some of us who knew how to read a race were getting more and more excited and this was infectious. I had no idea what was happening until the huge roar at the end told me that our horse had come in first!

Amazingly quickly, it was time for us to sit down again for our Scottish high tea and afterwards we had the only slightly formal side of the gathering. My cousin, Jim Kelly, and my brother, Jim, both wore kilts and were to give short speeches and my uncle John, who had come over from Australia with my auntie Marjorie, were scheduled to speak and then John Lionel from NZ also said a few words. It was a very emotional part of the gathering and rounded off a remarkable coming together of a caring and diverse group of people from around the world.

Sunday
On the Sunday morning, many of us gathered at the Arrochar church, where there are four Burden family headstones scattered amongst the neat lines of graves that slope down to the loch at the front of the church. My mother and father are buried here together and I recall looking up towards the Cobbler as we lowered their coffins into the grave. The minister who conducted my mother's funeral, some decades after my father's, is still at the church and has facilitated a remarkable renovation of the old church building. My cousins, Jim and Margaret Kelly, played a very significant role in raising funds and co-ordinating all the volunteer work that went in to the re-building when the church was condemned and it looked like it would be closed down. Now the church is a joy to visit, with beautiful stained glass windows set in stone arches and the high ceiling painted in the blue and white crosses of the Scottish national flag.

I left the church with my sister in the rain. People were starting to disperse and I felt a sense of withdrawal. In the afternoon, Jackie was to drive her daughter Sholeh with her two friends to Glasgow airport to catch a plane down to London. I decided to go walking on my own and set off round the head of the loch to find the new path that zigzags up the foothills to the boggy, moorland valley that leads to the Cobbler. I knew that I would not be able to go the full way on such a wet day but wanted to climb the first part. I found that there are now several fairly easy walks that can be done around Arrochar. A common path leads up the hill and then runs along the side of the hill and through the forest to Ardgarten or you can go the other way and loop around to Succoth at the head of the loch. The track that leads on up the Cobbler comes off this path. I decided to set off to Ardgarten where Scottish national parks has an information centre and a campsite that used to be managed by my uncle Tom who had been a forester. The burns (Scottish for streams or creeks) were full and plunging noisily down the side of the hill. The views down to the loch and Arrochar were lovely and the hillside glistened green and grey from the rain. I came to a fork in the forestry road and took the upper track that lead me, after a half hour or so, to a point halfway up the road to the Rest and be Thankful, a famous pass that leads through to Inverary. To reach more directly the information centre at Ardgarten, I should have taken the lower track and it meant I had an uncomfortable walk down the busy road. By this time the rain was coming down heavily but when my brother drove by on his way up the Rest and be Thankful to look for a sandy beach where my niece Grace could make a castle, the traffic was so heavy that it was dangerous for him to stop for me. So I arrived at the information centre in very wet and bedraggled mode! If you ever find yourself in this situation, head straight for the demountable toilet at the back of the building because they have an excellent blow heater in there and in no time I had dried my hair and gone some way to drying my shirt and shoes. I then spent some time in the information centre buying little celtic knot brooches to take to Celia and Joyce and by then it had stopped raining and I could walk along the burn at Ardgarten and then onto the path at the side of the loch road to head back to Arrochar. On the way I sidetracked onto the old road that leads past the cottages where my grandparents used to live by the old torpedo range. Everything is now derelict. The torpedo range is still there but the old pier is falling down and the whole site is covered in rubble. The cottage where my father was raised is overgrown, all the windows are gone and there are trees growing up through the roof.

Haste ye back
Back at the Arrochar hotel that evening, we had a subdued dinner with two friends of my sister who drove down from Glasgow and afterwards we played with our niece, Grace, and the Human Torso game that Jackie and I had bought her in California. Relatives dropped by for a final dram of whisky and we made our farewells.

On Monday morning, Jackie drove to Glasgow airport to catch a plane back to California and Dave, Jill, Grace and I set off to drive back down the motorway. In my next post, I'll say something about Sandbach where I am now staying for a few days with my friends, Celia and Joyce.

The berries are forming in England at the moment and if you look closely at the photo some are even almost ready for picking.  I'm finding life at my brother's place has too many distractions to be able to write coherently!  And you may have noticed on my last post that my photo of the flowers and herbs that we planted by the kitchen door is up sideways!

The week has shot past with pub lunches, walks through the public right-of-way footpaths through fields of wheat and corn, yesterday a run/walk through country lanes, playing rounders with my niece, Grace, using her rules which are very flexible, and getting phone calls from my brother Jim who lives on his boat in Scotland and is organising a huge Burden family re-union in Arrochar, Scotland this weekend.

I'm once again writing this on the kitchen table.  We're all packed up ready to load up the car for our trip North to join the 150 people who are gathering.  We have photos and family trees.  My sister, Jackie, and my niece, Sholeh will be joining us tomorrow in Arrochar.  I'll take the laptop with me but am not sure if we will be able to link up in Scotland or in Cheshire where I will be staying with my friends, Joyce and Celia during next week.  So not sure when my next post will go up!  Have to go.

At my brother's place

On Monday morning I was woken by my niece, Grace, who was on her way to school (she is nearly seven) and wanted to check out her aunt from Australia.  My brother's household got into it's usual weekly pattern with the older girls from his blended family going off to school in their various cars.  We spent the day at home, pottering, and working out how to get on the wifi.  My niece has just come home from school and wants to see how things can go up onto my blog, so I'm going to add a photo and post this up.

The second leg

The trip from SF to Munich and London Heathrow was delayed.  My brother Dave who was on his way down the motorway from Gloucester to meet me at the airport thought it was because George Bush was scheduled to fly into Europe at about the same time so all other flights from USA were delayed.  That man has a lot to answer for!

Boarding the plane at SF was stressful.  Jackie ran me to the airport and Sholeh had checked me in on my laptop before we got there, but the delay made me nervous so going through the security check I was all fingers and thumbs with getting the laptop out, my see-through toilet gear out of my back-pack and my boots off.  There was an assertive American family behind me so I told them to go through first and in the general scramble I dropped my boarding pass and panicked when I realised it was missing.  In the meantime, I was trying to keep an eye out for Jackie who was waving at me from the departure gate.  I felt quite disorientated leaving her and the welcome I had whilst I sampled a little of California culture.  But eventually I was through the security check and found my boarding gate lounge.  I toyed with the idea of trying to logon to the airport's wi-fi system, but decided that was adding to my stress so passed the time until delayed boarding with my pen and notepad.

One of the things I thought about was how the new mobile technologies are great for providing a support structure and a connection to other parts of my life whilst I am on the move but they also prevent me from slipping into that space of disconnection that enables me to travel with an open and relaxed frame of mind.    So as well as the technical skills that I have to learn in using the technology with a degree of comfort, I also have to master techniques for using the technology to suit myself.

I managed to get almost a full night's sleep on the way to Munich.  The plane was full but I had an aisle seat and the young man on the window seat was uncommunicative and did not need to get up at all.  We made up a bit of time but I still missed the connecting flight to Heathrow.  There were no more Lufthansa flights that night so I was transferred to a British Airways flight and was able to phone my brother to let him know about the delay.  When we landed, I made the mistake of using my Australian passport rather than my British passport to enter the country and that meant I was in a very slow moving queue with only two people processing everybody.  In addition, the new baggage handling facilities at Heathrow are a total mess!  The electronic information boards just tell all flights to "Please wait" rather than putting up the carousel number and everyone had to mill around trying to locate where their bags were.  So it probably took as long to get through immigration and baggage claim as the flight over had taken. 

Anyway, I eventually walked out through the arrivals door and found my brother waiting for me.  We just had to negotiate getting out of the car park still left to do and then we were on the motorway for the hour and a half drive to his home in Churcham near Gloucester.  By the time we got there and had a sample of the Glenfiddich I'd brought from Duty Free it was 2.30am.  I'll put this up and say a little bit about my brother's place in my next post once I've taken some photos to put up.      

Moving on

The picture that heads up my last post is of myself, my sister Jackie and my niece Sholeh.  I'll head this post with a picture of Gus, my sister's aging sausage dog.  On our final walk around the block before heading out to SF airport to catch my Lufthansa flight, Gus got doggy asthma.  My sister recognised it straight away and gently put both hands on either side of his chest and he calmed down.  I think he was picking up on my anxiety about the next part of my journey.  He managed to leap a few tall cracks but never got into the scooting pace we had enjoyed on previous walks.  

I'm writing this at my brother Dave's house in Churcham, UK.  He also has wireless and I have amazed myself again at how readily we worked out how to gain access.  I'm now looking out over the green of his back garden that runs down to fields of young wheat.  I'll post more later but for now I want to make sure that everything is working since I gather there have been a few changes to the blogging process.

Mokelumne Hill

Sholeh has shown me how to upload photos now so I will try and add some photos of my sister's house in Hayward.  I also want to write the story of my second week in California before I get on a Lufthansa flight to Heathrow, UK via Munich.

For my second weekend here, Jackie decided we would all go on motorcycles to Mokelumne Hill, an old gold-mining area inland.  Jackie and Shapour each have a bike, and the plan was for me to ride on the back of Shapour's bike.  His bike is very large, has leather fringes on the handlebars and panniers, and shiney blue and white swirls on the fuel tank.  The passenger seat also has a backrest.   Jackie's bike is smaller and neater but her black helmet is covered in white designs that look like they were customised for a bikie gang.  She bought it cheaply in a garage sale.  Jackie found me a plain black helmet and fitted a perspex visor so my head was entirely enclosed.  For my test run around the block a few days before we set off,  the helmet helped me to go into that space in my head that allows me to give over control to another person and relax.  But I still felt very vulnerable on the freeways with so many cars around.  I also had trouble understanding the street signs.  I intuitively read the signs on cross streets as referring to the street we were on and being on the wrong side of the road didn't help. 

One of my friends, Pauline, who rode with a biker for many years, emailed me from Australia to say, "Remember, Jo, if you feel panic, close your eyes and you will automatically lean the right way - with the bike."   Shapour coached me about how to get on, "You wait until I say, I am ready, and then you put one hand on my shoulder, one on the back of the seat, one foot on the pedal and slide the other over the seat."  It sounded like a game of twister, so I stayed with that idea of a fun game and found myself sitting in relaxed mode on the back of the bike.  As soon as we set off, Shapour made the bike do a kind of wiggle and I knew he was testing me out so I resolutely sat like a sack of potatoes.  As we went round the block, I ignored all the cars driving on the wrong side of the road and turning right whenever they felt like it in spite of red traffic lights.  And I passed the test! 

We set off on Saturday.  My nephew, Sharokh, arrived at my sister's house to look after the dogs, cats, bird, goldfish and turtle.  Jackie gave me the instructions she had downloaded and assigned me the navigating role since Shapour was to be the lead rider.  We had planned the route so that we didn't have to go on any freeways which I think would have been beyond my fear threshold at that stage.  I was still having trouble working out what street we were actually on but Shapour said that he knew the first part of the route so off we went.  The first part was through a winding foothills road and I was starting to think I could learn to enjoy this experience.  I started to look at road signs and even read the map and instructions whilst sitting on the back.  That's when I started to realise we were actually on the wrong road in the wrong canyon.  So we decided to stop for coffee and work out where we were.  

Bikers have codes and ways of letting each other know what they are doing.  You casually raise a hand to acknowledge another passing biker.  When we stop at traffic lights, Jackie sometimes comes up alongside and if she wants to say something she raises her visor.  I was starting to understand something of the social pleasure that bikers get from riding in a group.  As soon as we parked the bikes, we were hailed by two more people who rode bikes and were happy to give us directions for getting back onto our route.  After that, I took on the navigating role in earnest and was able to get us through Stockton and onto the right road through to Mokelumne Hill.  We rode through fruit orchards and vineyards and then climbed to our village.  

We stayed at Legers hotel - very old with wide verandahs, sloping wooden floors, some of the original mirrors and baths.  The hotel has a reputation for being haunted and we found a ghostbusters club setting up their equipment next to our rooms.  They called themselves a paranormal society and they had video cameras, computers and miles of cable running along the wide creaking corridors.  They were very keen to show us all their gear and to hear Jackie's ghost experience from her previous visit.

Mokelumne Hill has some substantial buildings on the main street including the old courthouse next to the hotel.  There was also a brothel opposite the hotel and the cellars are linked by tunnels going under the street so that the judges had easy access to their pleasures.

There is also a library and book shop operating on an honour system.  I walked around the back streets in the evening and again in the morning and there is a strange mixture of derelict old buildings and old houses that are occupied and being renovated.  In one overgrown driveway there was an ancient ford ute that obviously hadn't been moved for decades.  I also walked up Mokelumne Hill itself that had a sign saying "Historic Park".  When I got to the top, I found it was a baseball park.

Some local teenagers were having a birthday party at the hotel's pool with karaoke.  We had a swim and a beer before dinner.  At dinner, another family birthday was in full swing, this time the birthday girl was a woman in her 80s with several great grandchildren.  We followed that with a few games of pool and played the juke box.  The bar was crowded for the live rhythm and blues band that came on at 9.00pm but by then we were ready for bed and the ear plugs thoughtfully provided by the hotel.

When I got back from my walk on Sunday morning, Shapour was deep in conversation with three Harley-Davidson bikers who were on a trip from New Mexico where they ran a bike shop.  When they were ready to go, they threw their luggage down from the top verandah and loaded up with swags.  They were talking about a bicycle helmet that had been sitting all night in the bar and they were worried about the rider who had disappeared and left it there.  With profound embarrassment, I realised it was mine and I had completely forgotten it.

On the trip home we rode along beside a lake and into Lockeford where there is a famous sausage shop that we had to visit to stock up with a massive range of sausages.  After that we rode straight through including some distance on the freeway.  At my sister's house, Sharokh, my nephew, had acquired an additional huge dog to look after for his girlfriend and three tiny black kittens that he was finding homes for.  

I am running out of time before my flight to Heathrow and want to add some photos here so will stop rather abruptly and do some reflecting in my next post from England.

Last day in California

This is my last day at my sister's house and my niece, Sholeh is showing me how to upload photos so here is a picture of Brisbane Combined Unions Choir.

At my sister's place

Today at breakfast there was an email from one of our cousins in Perth, Australia forwarding an email from a more distant relative in Sussex, England with a picture of our grandfather and her great-grandfather who were brothers in the Royal Navy.  I am awed at how the new technologies enable us to know more about our past than we have ever known.  Tomorrow when my niece, Sholeh, comes over to teach me some blogging techniques I will upload that photo plus others to my blog.

I want to tell the story of my visit to my sister's house in Hayward, California.  Jackie lives with her husband, Shapur and four cats, two geriatric sausage dogs, one bird in a cage, (also mocking birds in the garden who dive-bomb the cats) lots of small and large goldfish in a tank and in a pond in the garden, and a turtle that is rarely seen.  All of these animals, except for the goldfish and the turtle I think, found Jackie and Shapur rather than the other way around.  One of the dogs, Gus, is deaf, blind and demented but when we take the two dogs for their evening walk around the block he remembers the speed of his young days and scoots along the pavement, jumping cracks in a single bound.  Sometimes the uneven ridges between paving stones defeat his little legs and he tips forward onto his face but he's always up straight away and off again.  It has become my role to run with Gus and keep the lead short enough so that he doesn't fall off the edge of the footpath.

My niece, Sholeh, and my nephew, Sharokh, have left home now but visit often, mostly to bring their laundry around.  Sholeh helps me with technological stuff like setting up this blog.  When I arrived at SF airport three weeks ago today, my sister took me to meet Sholeh for lunch.  She works in a small, establishing company that designs and makes great bags.  She might be able to do something fancy like link from my blog to the company's blog.  

On my first weekend in California, I saw Sholeh a lot.  On Saturday afternoon, Jackie and I had our nails manicured in downtown Hayward.  Neither of us ever do that when we are on our own, but it's a great social thing to do!  The three Vietnamese women who worked in the shop chatted to each other in Chinese and smiled at us and Jackie and I chatted in English and smiled at them.  We selected a purplish-red nail varnish for our toes and fingers.  I will post up a picture of our four feet taken in the swimming pool at Mokelumne Hill the following weekend.

Thanks to the wonders of mobile technology, Sholeh met up with us in the nail shop and we went for an ice-cream and then shopping for some trousers for me.  They make great trousers in US - they fit and flatter women's shapes but you have to understand the different sizing systems.  Sholeh has two degrees, one of them in fashion design, so she's good at picking things out.  I hate shopping and get frustrated after two seconds in a US store, but Sholeh makes it a pleasant experience.

On Sunday, Jackie and I got up early and went on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport) to the SF Ferry terminal and caught a ferry to Angel Island.  The weather was lovely.  Angel Island is the next island out from Alcatraz and has an interesting history as California's first defensive base against infectious diseases, migrants, confederate and foreign invasion.  You can walk, ride a bicycle or a motorised scooter all round the island and explore the various settlements along the way.  We walked all around and also went through the middle and climbed the mountain.  

At one settlement, we were invited in to the old bakery by a volunteer who told us about the history of the island and also took us into the restored building next door.  I found the history of the renovation as interesting as the more distant story of military training.  It seems that the buildings were restored by a husband and wife team who retired from their jobs and decided to devote two years of their lives to living on Angel Island and restoring the bakery.  It must have been a huge job and they camped out until they had made the building habitable for themselves and safe for future generations to explore.  School groups now visit and make bread in the old ovens.

There are small islands all over the world that have similar histories to Angel Island.  In Australia where I live there is Maria Island off the East Coast of Tasmania and in Moreton Bay off Brisbane, Queensland, there is St Helena Island.  The history of the place is shaped by its geographic location and in turn the history shapes the way we experience the place from our own time.  I am deeply grateful to those people who devote time and energy into representing the stories of the past to help us make sense of the present.

When we got back from Angel Island on the ferry, Sholeh met us at the terminal and took us to her shared house in SF.  She has a room in a large old terrace house.  The set-up reminded me of student houses that I have shared when I was at University in Birmingham, UK in the 1960s.  It seemed to me that it was a nightmare to find a parking spot but for Sholeh it was just something that you did.  We walked round the corner and had Mexican food for dinner in a very busy restaurant where a Mariachi band walked in off the street.  Sholeh is sure-footed in navigating this frantic SF world and I basked in the security of her experience.

So that was my first weekend in California.  During the week when Jackie and Shapur go to work in their shop, I have slipped into a routine that gives my life structure whilst I am traveling.  In the mornings I read my emails and write.  In the afternoons I do the grocery shopping and household things.  At 5.00 my sister comes home and we both go to the local community school where they have a gym and then we walk the dogs around the block.  As I write, I love looking out through their sun room to the greenery of their back garden.  In my next post I'll tell the story of our motor bike trip to Mokelumne Hill.

The first leg

Well I worried about the blog overnight and decided it would be better to write plenty of short bits rather than one long account of the first few weeks of my year of travel.  I also need to work out how to put up photos but that can wait until next time.

On the Friday morning that I left Australia, there was rain!  I just had a rainwater tank installed and dramatically it started raining as soon as it was in.  The whole process of setting up the tank was a drama.  In the chaos of moving all my furniture and packing my bags, I had to grind out some tree roots so the concreter could put down the base pad.  Then I had to worry about the plumber arriving in time to install the tank which sat at the front of the house for a week or two.  In the meantime there were frantic phone calls to the man in the office who was trying to coordinate his over-stretched sub-contractors with declining rates of success.  When the plumber appeared at 7.30 on the Wednesday before I was due to fly out, he took one look at the location of the base pad and said it was impossible to put the tank there because he couldn't move it into position.  To my despair, he looked like he was just going to walk away from it so I raced next door to my neighbour, Tony, woke him up and begged for help.  Tony used to be a formwork carpenter on building sites so he knows about foul-ups and how to get things done.  He came over.  

"G,day mate," he said to the young Sicilian plumber, who was already heading towards his ute.  They studied the problem without saying much.  Tony used his tape measure here and there around the tank and down the side of his house.  Then they decided what had to be done.  We had to take down the fence between Tony's house and mine,  destroy Tony's washing line, clear up the side of his house which has the kind of clutter accumulated around most houses that have been lived in for a while, and slide the tank down the side of his house and into position.  Tony took charge and within an hour the tank was in place and bits of Tony's house and our shared fence were scattered all over my back garden.  It then took several hours for the plumber to locate and install the required pipes and pumps and declare that I now needed an electrician to wire up the pump!

More frantic phone calls to the man in the office and the electrician arrived the next day - a young woman who did the job quietly and efficiently.  Tony also fixed up the fence the next day so that when my tenants moved in one hour after I left on Friday morning, he would be protected from their two primary schoolchildren.  It takes a big effort from a lot of people to do one small thing for climate change!

It started raining that Thursday and carried on all through the night so that in my last minute scramble to empty my house, I was tramping mud in and out of the kitchen door.  When my friend, Carol, called early on Friday morning to wish me safe journey, I was literally on my knees next to the phone washing the floor.  I had spent the night at another friends house because by that stage I had no beds at home.  He dropped me back at 5.00 in the morning on his way to work.  When my other neighbour, Kerry, called at 9.00 to take me to the train station to catch the train to the airport I was still putting my boots on and trying to get my heavy case down the stairs.  It wasn't until I was on the train and felt that delicious sense of weightlessness that comes when you are on the way and know that there is nothing else you can do, that I thought about my friends.  They put me on the road and will be travelling with me through this blog.

So the flight to San Francisco via Auckland with Air New Zealand was very relaxing.  Air NZ still allow a bit of space to shift your legs occasionally on their planes and they still serve free alcohol with meals.  I watched 'The Bucket List' and '27 Dresses' and got almost a full night's sleep.  

When we were descending into SF, I made the required mistake on the immigration form and had to get another one.  When you have to fill in boxes, it is useful if the form is designed so the appropriate box is clear!  Even on the form I handed to the immigration officer, I had respectfully left the section that said government use only and was told that I needed to fill in my details there.  I mumbled about there being a different relationship between government and the individual in USA and he agreed with a smile and sent me down the nothing to declare lane.  My sister was waiting for me as I trundled my case out into the arrivals area and I just felt that life was very easy!  That will be the next installment.

Starting out

This blog is about linking a new way of living my life with the sustainable strengths of the life I have created over 64 years.  Friends and family are my most sustainable strength and this blog will help me to link with you all while I am on the road.  

The paid work phase of my past life is no longer sustainable and I have set off on a year of travel from my home in Australia.  A new family is living in my house in Thorneside, Redlandshire and I am grateful that they enable me to put that part of my old life on hold while I set up temporary homes in other parts of the world.  Moving on from my home by the mangroves of Moreton Bay was hard because I love living there and I acknowledge the Quandamooka people of that area whose land I am privileged to share.

I am now two weeks into my travels and am staying with my sister in Hayward in California. Tomorrow I will post the story of the journey here and the wonders of living in this part of USA.  But for now I just want to see how my first post looks on my new blog!